Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Mar 12, 2010
This is the 182nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Make sure to read the whole edition so you do not miss where to submit your SQL limerick!
This week started out with me posting about International Women’s Day, and has me personally attending Confoo (Montreal) which is an excellent conference I hope to return to next year. I learned a lot from confoo, especially the blending nosql and sql session I attended.
This week was also the Hotsos Symposium. Doug’s Oracle Blog has a series of posts about Hotsos. If all this talk about conferences has gotten you excited, Joshua Drake notes that 14 days and the hotel is almost full for postgresql conference east which is March 25th-28th in Philadelphia. And the Oracle database insider notes that the Oracle OpenWorld call for papers is now open.
According to Susan Visser this week (ending tomorrow) is also read an e-book week. So if you have not already done so, read an e-book! She links a coupon for an e-book in the post.
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Posted by Singer Wang on Mar 1, 2010
I recently granted ALTER access in MySQL so a user could run the ALTER TABLE command . However after I granted the necessary privileges, the user was still not able to perform the tasks needed. Reproducing the issue using a test instance, I granted a test user the required privileges and MySQL reported no errors or warnings when the ALTER TABLE was run:
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Posted by Tim Inkpen on Feb 12, 2010
Welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This has been an interesting week in the IT world, with Microsoft security issues being the major focus of attention.
Security
Once again, security flaws in Microsoft Operating Systems caused major problems for system administrators this past week. It began with Microsoft’s Security Response Center’s posting of February’s security bulletin.
Microsoft’s attempt’s to fix a 17-year-old bug resulted in a large number of computers having problems restarting. More information can be found here Restart issues after installing MS10-015 and Security patch results in BSOD, stops Windows from booting. It appear that this issue may have been caused by machines being previously infected by a rootkit
Another patch from Microsoft, the reliability update for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, turned out to be not so… reliable.
But what was of most concern to many system administrators was Microsoft’s security advisory concerning a vulnerability in the TLS and SSL protocols, since this affects not only the Microsoft Windows operating system but as TLS/SSL are an Internet standard, multiple vendors. Emil Protalinski at Ars Technica provides full coverage of the TLS/SSL flaw in Windows.
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Posted by Tim Inkpen on Feb 5, 2010
On Thursday, January 21, Pythian hosted the Ottawa Valley System Administration Guild (OVSAGE) Ottawa Valley System Administration Guild (OVSAGE).
The highlight of the meeting was an interesting presentation on security by the founder of OVSAGE, Scott Murphy. The focus was on the fact that security is a mindset, not a product. Scott’s presentation looked at a large number of security issues and explained in detail while technology alone cannot fix security issues. The presentation was a response to the Amrit Williams Blog post Top 10 Reasons Your Security Program Sucks and Why You Can’t Do Anything About It.
Scott’s presentation can be viewed here: security-quagmire-pdf. I hope you find it useful.
Posted by Tim Inkpen on Jan 15, 2010
Welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This has been a busy week in the IT world. Here are some of the most interesting highlights.
Security
Without a doubt, the topic of the week is security. The revelation that China has been hacking into Google and over 30 other US companies sent shock waves through the IT World and beyond. There were a huge number of articles generated about this in the last week. Ironically, the best source for articles on this issue turned out to be Google’s own news aggregator: see China Google hack.
In another China-related security issue, The Money Times reports that Iranians hack China’s Baidu; Chinese hack back.
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Posted by Marc Fielding on Jan 12, 2010
Oracle has just released their January installment of their critical patch update (CPU). Vulnerability CVE-2010-0071 is particularly critical, with a CVSS score of 10, the highest possible. It’s a remotely-exploitable listener vulnerability that’s particularly severe on Windows platforms.
Full details are on Oracle’s security site.
Posted by Brad Hudson on Oct 30, 2009
Welcome to the all hallowed eve eve edition of Blogrotate. It was a relatively quiet week this week but the 2 standouts are from the OS department with more reviews of the just released Windows 7 and the release of Ubuntu 9.10. Here’s some of the stories that we took note of this week.
Operating Systems
Ubuntu 9.10 is released. Anyone who reads my blogs knows by now that I am a Kubuntu user and I think that it’s the best desktop Linux available right now. They’ve put a lot of work into this one and it’s the best version of Ubuntu yet, easy to install and use with all the features you could ask for. Ryan Paul at Ars Technica has his own review called Ubuntu 9.10 brings web sync, faster bootup, GNOME 2.28, check it out.
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Posted by Brad Hudson on Oct 16, 2009
Welcome to week 2 of Blogrotate. It was a short week due to Thanksgiving (Canada) and Columbus Day (US), but the world of IT is always buzzing. So as they say at the race track, pitter-patter, let’s get at ‘er.
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Posted by Brad Hudson on Oct 9, 2009
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Blogrotate. This blog is weekly filter of some of the most interesting news items as it applies to system administrators. We’ll be tackling such topics as operating systems, hardware, software and utilities and even some humorous items. The SA team here at Pythian all love of crawling through RSS feeds and tech blogs, and we’ll bring the best to you every week.
Operating Systems
Ubuntu 9.10 beta 1 released for both Gnome and KDE desktops. The newest version of Ubuntu, code named “Karmic Koala”, is coming out in 20 days, but the first beta release was released this week. The adventurous can download the install images from the Ubuntu site (or Kubuntu if you prefer). Your editor reports on his first look at installing and running the newest version.
Microsoft licensing is complicated? Steve Ballmer has come out and stated point blank that the Microsoft licensing is too complex, but “I don’t anticipate a big round of simplifying our licensing”. We all knew it, check out Ballmer: Don’t expect simpler licensing soon for more.
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Posted by Don Seiler on Jul 24, 2009
Having recently performed a test upgrade for a client from Oracle RDBMS 10g to 11g, I can tell you that one of the big changes that will likely require action on your part as DBA is the new fine-grained access control for the packages UTL_SMTP, UTL_TCP, UTL_MAIL, UTL_HTTP and UTL_INADDR. Part of the Oracle 11g pre-upgrade tool will notify you of users that will require new privileges.
Of course, Oracle’s post-upgrade network ACL setup documentation is much more confusing than it needs to be, at least for simple minds like me. A colleague stepped forward with a simple set of commands for a basic setup that even the tired and stressed can understand.
I’ll share that here, with some basic explanation:
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