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 I wanted to test some software vulnerabilities on a different platform. One that I've yet to bring into the lab is the famous Intel "Itanic" Itanium architecture. So, I bought a used Dell PowerEdge 3250 with dual 1.5Ghz Intanium2 CPUs. What a flaming pile of crap. It's no wonder that the only companies still distributing this failure is HP and SGI (intellectually bankrupt and financially bankrupt, respectively). Dell won't even sell them anymore, and Dell sells the worst hardware out there.
But, since I love shining turds, I will probably repeat with this as I did with my old SGI equipment... play with them until I get completely disgusted and then sell them off at a loss. I love technology.
 This weekend I ended up spending an obscene amount of money on new computer stuff for the lab. One major item(s) was a rack chassis with an AMD Phenom 9850 CPU (quad core) and 8GB OCZ RAM to make a nice x32-64 Citrix XenServer. I must be a real nerd, because I got very excited when I opened the RAM box. The shiny heat spreaders made me all gushy. Behold, an image to the left.
It was also time to replace the dozen or so, often unusable inkjet and laser printers laying about. Coming to my door tomorrow is the "Brother MFC-9450CDN Color Laser Multi-Function Center with Networking and Duplex Printing." Nom nom nom...
Finally, I'm working on Solaris 10 / SPARC packages for the collection of OpenVAS releases. Once the process is down, they will be kept current and probably posted here somewhere. IBM AIX will be the next target platform.
 So I have this IBM eServer xSeries 325 laying around. It is the IDE version, which means I can't stuff it with >1TB hard drives to use as a backup server. It has two bays for IDE drives. Time to get crafty.
I found an IDE to CompactFlash converter at newegg.com. I have a 4GB CF card. This could work.
The CF card was detected as an IDE drive, and I was able to install Slackware Linux 12.2 on it! It really isn't much slower than a standard hard disk. I tossed in a PCI to SATA card, and put two 1.5TB SATA drives in the IDE bays. Thanks to the venerable rsync utility, I now have a ~3TB backup server.
First, version 1.4.1 of BASE was released this week. Go get it!
 Second, I'm flying out to Defcon 16 at 10:30am. I'll be there until late Monday night. Right now I'm eating left over pork fried rice, drinking too much orange soda and rushing to finish some coding before I leave. Bommie is dying - I'm also trying to squeeze more life out of it. This may well be her last trip out. This laptop has seen LOTS of travel for work and pleasure trips. EVERY time, she gets swabbed for traces of bomb material at the airport. You can see why.
Sadly, it is time to consolidate technologies. I'm selling off my prized collection of SGI hardware, and thus am no longer developing on the IRIX platform. Since they stopped the MIPS processor line, they are no longer interesting. I sent a note to the Developer Program manager stating that reason for leaving the program. A sad time indeed.
Because of my overwhelming dissatisfaction with currently available analysis tools for Snort, specifically ones that can correlate with other products, I've started my own. More news to follow, but for now I can say it will be written in JSP and will support a whole bunch of features. It will be called Astraeus, and it will be good.
Version 1.4.0 of BASE was released yesterday. Go get it! This may well be the last 1.x release. We're working on 2.0 but don't have a date yet.
Needed a new file server - moved from SCSI to SATA. AMD64 system with Supermicro 3U case, x6 500MB drives, RAID5 and CentOS5 Linux.
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