Skip to main content

Fast Kernel Debugging for VMware

Geez, they've made a scientific study out of this. Excellent series!

One of the interesting talks at Blue Hat was one about virtualization and security. There’s a lot of good stuff that was touched on (such as the fact that VMware still implements a hub, meaning that VMs on the same VMnet can still sniff eachother’s traffic).

Anyways, watching the talk got me thinking again about how much kernel debugging VMs is a slow and painful experience today, especially if you’ve used 1394 debugging frequently.

While kd-over-1394 is quite fast (as is local kd), you can’t do that in any virtualization software that I’m aware of today (none of them virtualize 1394, and furthermore, as far as I know none of them even support USB2 debugging either, even VMware Workstation 6).


Check it out here:
Part1
Part2
Part3
Part4
Part5
Part6

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus

Splunk that!

Saw this advert on Slashdot and went on to look for it and found the tour pretty neat to look at. Check out the demo too! So why would I need it? WHY NOT? I'd say. As an organization grows , new services, new data comes by, new logs start accumulating on the servers and it becomes increasingly difficult to look at all those logs, leave alone that you'd have time to read them and who cares about analysis as the time to look for those log files already makes your day, isn't it? Well a solution like this is a cool option to have your sysadmins/operators look at ONE PLACE and thus you don't have your administrators lurking around in your physical servers and *accidentally* messing up things there. Go ahead and give it a shot by downloading it and testing it. I'll give it a shot myself! Ok so I went ahead and installed it. Do this... [root@tarrydev Software]# ./splunk-Server-1.0.1-linux-installer.bin to install and this (if you screw up) [root@tarrydev Software]# /op

Virtualization is hot and sexy!

If this does not convince you to virtualize, believe me, nothing will :-) As you will hear these gorgeous women mention VMware, Akkori, Pano Logic, Microsoft and VKernel. They forgot to mention rackspace ;-) virtualization girl video I'm convinced, aren't you? Check out their site as well!