Linux Community Magazine

The computer has become a part and parcel of everyday life. It is extremely difficult to imagine a world without computers. Today, we use it for performing the simplest of tasks. It has become a tool of entertainment as well as development. Therefore, job openings related to computers, hardware or software has increased tremendously. However, compared to hardware, demand in software is much more. As such, the IT industry is one of the fastest growing industries at present. It employs millions of people every year. Software development has become one of the most sought after jobs.

Linux, like Windows is an operating system. However, the advantage of using Linux is that it is user-programmable. Thus, Linux is an open source operating system. This enables developers to customize it to their needs and perform a myriad of tasks with it. Professionals who can work with Linux are in great demand within the industry. Usually preference is given to applicants with some experience under their belt. Therefore, it would be a good option to have the latest knowledge and some previous experience of developing software on Linux. However, there might be companies that might be willing to hire candidates with no experience but a drive to excel.

Now, there are a number of possibilities while looking for a job. It all boils down to whether you want to work on a freelance basis or as a permanent employee. Freelancing gives you the freedom of working from home and completing the tasks at your leisure as long as you meet deadlines. As a permanent employee, you would be required to report to office everyday and also maintain all workplace ethics.

The best and easiest way of going about looking for Linux jobs would be to browse the Internet. Linux jobs can also be found by browsing through Linux specific portals and posting rsums on the jobs boards. One can also look in the classifieds sections of the newspapers. There are plenty of job requirements for people with Linux experience published in newspapers daily. By doing a thorough research it would be easy to get any kind of Linux opening in your area. Once you have narrowed down the options, you can start contacting potential employers. They might organize an interview with you, and once they are satisfied with your qualification and experience they will be more than willing to hire you. You can negotiate your basic salary and other perks at this stage.

Classic Editions

Essential Edition

In addition to the book-like design, the My Book Essential Edition drives have an Intelligent Power Management feature that stops the drive platters after ten minutes of inactivity, rather than the usual expedient of slowing them down. The unit also turns on and off with the computer it is attached to.

Essential Edition My Book drives are almost entirely black, with the exception of a single blue light, used to indicate power and activity, that is located on the front of the drive.

Premium Edition

Premium Edition drives are similar to the Essential Edition model but also include Firewire 400 ports, an integrated visual capacity gauge and Western Digital backup software.

Premium Edition My Book drives have the same black case as Essential Edition drives, however, the light surrounding the power button is blue. Also, inside the standard blue light is another blue ring light that contains 8 individual segments which indicate the remaining space on the drive.

Premium ES Edition

My Book Premium ES Edition drives are nearly identical to their Premium Edition counterparts, the only difference being that the ES line features a single eSATA connection instead of the dual Firewire 400 ports present on the Premium Edition, allowing computers with available eSATA ports to transfer data at speeds of up to 3 Gbit/s.

Pro Edition

The Pro Edition My Books contain all of the features of the Premium Edition ones, but with added Firewire 800 connectivity for fast data transfer. In addition, the Pro Edition My Books replace the Western Digital backup software found on the Premium Editions with EMC Retrospect Express backup and recovery software.

Pro Edition My Book drives have the same basic case design as Premium Edition drives; however, the case is silver rather than black. In addition, it includes a circular blue capacity gauge LED divided into six segments (representing 17% of usage per segment) and an outer ring that represents drive activity.

The "Pro Edition MyBook" is marketed as a RAID solution that can be used a backup device.

Studio Edition

The 'MyBook Studio Edition' comes with quad interface: USB 2.0 / Firewire 400 / Firewire 800 and eSATA. It is marketed for use with Macintosh.

The 'MyBook Studio Edition II' contains two drives and is designed to be used as a RAID system for increased performance.

The two drives can be replaced by the user, but the documentation states that "Only WD Caviar GP hard drive assemblies can be inserted into the My Book Studio Edition II or Mirror Edition enclosure."

The LED gauge has a design issue on these disks. Several[weaselwords] users reported that some of the LEDs were burning out after 3 to 4 months of normal usage.

World Edition

The World Edition My Books function as Network-attached storage (NAS), by way of an Ethernet interface. They also feature an extra USB host port to allow an additional USB drive to be daisychained. They are accessed as CIFS/SMB shared folders, via NFS or FTP and also feature UPnP, iTunes server functionality and a Twonky media server.

In addition, the World Edition uses WD Anywhere Access to gain remote access to the drive via the internet - although this limits the file types that can be accessed.

It has the same basic case design as the Premium Edition drives, including the capacity gauge, except the color of the World Edition is white. It also has the same Morse code ventilation as the other editions.

Network speed

Although MyBook Ethernet-capable disks come with a Gigabit Ethernet interface, the network speed is significantly slower, especially in older models, where it varies between 36MByte/s, with an average of 4.5MByte/s because of the limited 200MHz clock frequency speed of the ARM processor within. The CPU capacity to handle data is low, as WD Support seems to have answered a customer.. Newer Models compare to USB drive speed at between 10 and 25 MByte/s.

Internals

Controller board for My Book World Edition

This drive runs BusyBox on Linux on an Oxford Semiconductor 0XE800 ARM chip which has the ARM926EJ-S core. In addition it uses a VIA Cicada Simpliphy vt6122 Gigabit Ethernet chipset, and a Hynix 32 Mbit DDR Synchronous DRAM chip. The webserver is the mini_httpd server, although thought to be Lighttpd. The drives of the World Edition are xfs formatted, which means that the drive can be mounted as a standard drive from within Linux if removed from the casing and installed in a normal PC.

The disk filesystems are also known to exist in a format created by linux multiple devices driver (Mdadm) which ultimately wraps an ext3 partition with some metadata that allows the inquiry of the position of the drive in a RAID set. Unfortunately, this makes mounting the drives outside of the enclosure a bit more complicated, it also requires a machine with a flavor of the Linux operating system. For example, the best way to mount the drives on a Linux flavored operating system after they have been removed from the enclosure is to use the following set of commands for mirrored RAID 1 disks.

$ sudo modprobe md

$ sudo mknod /dev/md4 b 9 4

$ sudo apt-get install mdadm

$ sudo mdadm --assemble /dev/md4 /dev/sdb4

$ sudo mkdir /media/xyz

$ sudo mount /dev/md4 /media/xyz

$ sudo chmod -R 777 /media/xyz

Note that the above set of commands assume that your drives appear as /dev/sdb to linux. You can use a utility like gparted to determine which paths are relevant for your setup.

And alternately you can use this command set for mounting a multidisk spanning RAID 0 set in linux:

$ sudo modprobe md

$ sudo mknod /dev/md4 b 9 4

$ sudo apt-get install mdadm

$ mdadm -Cv /dev/md4 -l0 -n2 -c64 /dev/sdb4 /dev/sdc4

$ sudo mkdir /media/xyz

$ sudo mount /dev/md4 /media/xyz

$ sudo chmod -R 777 /media/xyz

Note that the above set of commands assume that your drives appear as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb to linux. Again, you can use a utility like gparted to determine which paths are relevant for your setup.

Further details and support are available at the following My Worldbook wiki.

Extending capabilities

The device can be 'unlocked' and accessed via SSH terminal (newer versions of WDH1NC10000 do not need to be "unlocked": MBWE SSH Access), meaning that the WD MioNet java-based software can be disabled so the device can be run with an unrestricted Linux OS, at the cost of voiding the warranty. The unlocking makes it possible to install other software on MyBook (i.e. run a different webserver or an ftp server (such as vsftpd) on it, use NFS for mounting shared directories natively from Unix, or even install a bitTorrent client such as rTorrent, etc.) Further information on unlocking the device and downloads you are going to need can be found here.

Edition II My Books

In addition to the regular My Book drives, Western Digital has also released special high-capacity "Edition II" versions of the Premium, Pro, and World Edition My Books. In addition to the features present in the respective My Book edition, these drives feature two 500 GB RAID configured hard disks which can be selected by the end user as RAID 0 (Data striping), or RAID 1 (Data mirroring), depending on personal preference. If selected as RAID 0, the end user has 1Tb of available storage. Either way, if one of the internal drives of the Edition II My Books fails, it can be easily removed and replaced by the user without voiding the warranty. Western Digital uses this feature to their advantage, claiming that their drives needn't be returned for costly service in the case of a drive failure.

New Editions

In Late 2007, Western Digital introduced a new line of My Book drives. These included the Essential Edition 2.0, Home Edition, Office Edition, and Studio Editions, and ranged in capacity from 320GB to 2TB. As some dealers offer the new edition My Book encased HD for a lower price than that of the plain HD it contains, customers have been known to purchase My Book drives, dismantle them, and use them in an internal bay in a PC or media device. The Home Edition features an Oxford 934 chipset.

WD MyBook World Edition shipping at the beginning of 2010 ("white light", e.g. Model WD10000H1NC with 1TB) come with single 3.5" hard disk from the Western Digital Green Power Series (claiming 30% more energy efficiency for the box), ox810 chipset (ARM926EJ-S cpu) and 128 MBytes of RAM. SSH root access can be enabled through the regular Web configuration UI. The hard disk contains a 2 GB System partition of which only 100 MBytes are used by the OS, and a separate 256MB swap partition. Data transfer speed (WinXP client with CIFS) is roughly 10 MByte/s writing and 16 MByte/s reading on a Gigabit Ethernet link.

Morse code

Morse code on a My Book Pro Edition drive case

The Morse code message written into the drive case is made up of a selection of the words "personal", "reliable", "innovative", "simple", and "design". The first occurrence of "innovative" on the My Book Pro and My Book World Edition features a misspelling and reads "innovateve".

References

^ wdc.com: My Book Studio Edition II 1 TB Hard Drives

^ wdc.custhelp.com: How to dismantle a My Book Studio Edition II or Mirror Edition to replace a hard drive.

^ Anywhere Access FAQ

^ WD Support answer about Network Speed slowness

^

^ MyBook World Edition Community of Wikidot

^ Hacking Western Digital MyBook World Edition

^ How to install rtorrent on a mybookworld

^ My Book Premium Edition II

^ My Book Pro Edition II

^ My Book World Edition II

^ .Western Digital Service and Support - How to dismantle a My Book Pro Edition II, My Book Premium Edition II, or My Book World Edition II to replace a hard drive.

^ How to open the case and remove the hard drive from a Western Digital My Book external enclosure CarltonBale.com

^ Morse Code explanation on official Western Digital My Book Webpage.

^ vnunet.com Review - Western Digital My Book Essential Edition

External links

Western Digital My Book

Western Digital My Book Editions

Community driven wiki on how to hack the My Book World Edition

Website on how to hack the My Book World Edition

Wiki on how to hack the My Book World Edition for Linux newbies, plus automated installations (FTP server, emule client, torrent client)

Guide How to integrate the external USB-Harddrive into Standard Mediaserver on My Book World Edition (German)

v d e

Linux-based devices

Computers

Components

Nettops

Aleutia Eee Box fit-PC Lemote Linutop ThinCan WE Appliance Zonbu

Netbooks

Aspire One Averatec Buddy Classmate PC CloudBook ECS G10IL Eee PC Elonex ONE/ONEt Gigabyte M912 HP Mini 1000/2133 Inspiron Mini MSI Wind Nanobook Noahpad OLPC One A110 OpenBook Skytone Alpha-400 Tianhua GX-1C

Tablet PCs

Adam JooJoo

Networking

Actiontec MI424WR Asus Routers BT Home Hub Buffalo AirStation Junxion Box Linksys WRT54G series Netgear FVS336G Picotux Killer NIC

Storage

Buffalo LinkStation / TeraStation Linksys NSLU2 Synology WD My Book

Other

Chumby Gumstix Palm Foleo Beagle Board Stanley SheevaPlug



Accessories

Multimedia

DBox2 Dreambox Hauppauge MediaMVP Neuros OSD TiVo Wizpy

Handhelds

Amazon Kindle Archos PMA400 ILiad Nokia 770/ N800/ N810 N900 Pepper Pad Zaurus Sony Reader Zipit

Phones

HTC Dream HTC Magic HTC Hero HTC Tattoo Motorola ROKR Z6/ RAZR2 V8 Neo 1973/ FreeRunner Nokia N900 Palm Pre Samsung I7500

Consoles

GP2X (Wiz) mylo Pandora Dingoo

Defunct/Historical

CherryPal

List of Linux-based devices

Categories: Computer storage devices | Linux based devicesHidden categories: Articles lacking reliable references from August 2008 | All articles lacking reliable references | All articles with specifically-marked weasel-worded phrases | Articles with specifically-marked weasel-worded phrases from August 2009



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The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS, is still confusing for card payment merchants in 2010.

A recent survey of PCI DSS knowledge and understanding revealed the following facts

* 35% of retail/hospitality/entertainment organisations surveyed still do not understand compliance requirements* Whilst there is a strong understanding within Tier 1 merchants (6 million transactions per year), 44% of Tier 2 and Tier 3 merchants do not understand the PCI DSS requirements* 90% are either still working on implementing PCI DSS compliance measures identified in pre-audit surveys, or are not compliant and doing nothing about it, or are leaving it to the last minute

What do you need to do as an IT Service Provider to your Organization?

A number of automated 'compliance auditing' solutions for PCI DSS are available that typically provide the following functions

Compliance Auditing (aka Device Hardening) - typically, 'out of the box' PCI DSS as well as 'made to order' reports allow you quickly test critical security settings for windows servers and desktops, unix servers, linux servers and network devices, including wireless devices, and firewalls. The best solutions will provide details on your administrative procedures, technical data security services, and technical security mechanisms. Generally, these reports will probably identify some security vulnerabilities within the configuration settings to begin with. Once repaired though, you can generate these reports again to prove to auditors that your servers are compliant. Using inbuilt change tracking you can ensure systems remain compliant.

Change Tracking - once your firewalls, servers, workstations, switches, routers etc are all in a compliant state for PCI DSS you need to ensure they remain so. The only way to do this is to routinely verify the configuration settings have not changed because unplanned, undocumented changes will always be made while somebody has the admin rights to do so! The PCI DSS compliance software solution will alert when any unplanned changes are detected for server software using file-integrity monitoring, or firewalls and intrusion protection systems, and any other network device within your 'Compliant Infrastructure'.

Planned Change Audit Trail - when changes do need to be made to a PCI DSS server, firewall or network device, you need to ensure that changes are approved and documented. An automated software solution for PCI DSS makes this easy and straightforward, reconciling all changes made with the RFC or Change Approval record

Device Hardening must be enforced and audited. A good PCI DSS compliance auditing solution will provide automated templates for a hardened (secured & compliant) configuration for servers and desktops and network devices to show where work is needed to get compliant, and thereafter, will track all planned and unplanned changes that affect the hardened status of your infrastructure. The state of the art in compliance auditing software covers registry keys and values, file integrity monitoring, host integrity monitoring, service and process whitelisting/blacklisting, user accounts, installed software, patches, access rights, password ageing and much more.

Audit Log Management - All audit and event logs from all windows servers, Unix servers, Linux servers, firewalls and intrusion protection devices must be analyzed, filtered, correlated and escalated appropriately. Audit Log and Event log messages must be stored in a secure, integrity-assured, repository for the required retention period which for PCI DSS is 12 months.

Correlation of Security Information and Audit Logs - in addition you should implement Audit Log and Event Log Gathering from all devices with correlation capabilities for security event signature identification and powerful 'mining' and analysis capabilities. This provides a complete PCI DSS compliance safety net to ensure, for example to name just a few, virus updates complete successfully, host intrusion protection is enabled at all times, firewall rules are not changed, user accounts, rights and permissions are not changed without permission and patches are implemented.

The process of switching your computer to Ubuntu will be daunting yet that is the best thing that you can give your own computer, there is no doubt that Ubuntu Linux is one of the globally acclaimed operating systems that have essential features. The ideal nature of the OS is actually based on the fact that it provides an interactive user friendly OS method, a fact that makes Linux very popular. As much as the debate of whether Linux is prepared for desktops continues to trend on, the fact of the matter is the fact that indeed that takes nothing through the Linux Ubuntu in fact; this is arguably the best and simplest operating systems that can be comprehended by the majority of computer users.

The actual way one uses Ubuntu inside user interface makes it very when switching to Ubuntu, with immediate effect. The point and click will be the easiest user interface that can ever be developed. As much as this attribute may not rub well to the so called hardcore Linux users, it is obvious that the Linux Ubuntu is primarily concentrated on making OS easy to use and operate on. The fact Ubuntu allows users to launch application from icons makes the whole process very easy in learning about this.

Another distinct feature in which separates Ubuntu from Windows is the fact that it arrives with a set of variety of pre-loaded applications. Furthermore, your OS is graced by an incredible text editor and graphics manager that work automatically with the computer. The OS is open and extremely suitable for a variety of Hardware and external products. The compatibility options offered are extremely important and by the way, in the Ubuntu Linux you will not need any device owners as it is the case with Windows. Your adaptive nature of the Linux Ubuntu helps it be even more ideal to thOSe who will be after personalization of their personal computers since this process is very effortless.

One of the possible short comings in the Linux Ubuntu is actually the games it comes with. To be fair the video games provision cannot be compared to windows however even so, there is a very reasonable option for this which of course involves the use free software that allows entry to a variety of games called wine beverage. Furthermore the software provides updates so that you not stuck enjoying the same games for an era. Switching to Linux is extremely easy in fact, the process of installation is quite easy not to mention quite rapidly relative to windows. The easy designed add emove application does the job and the main process of this app is to present easy installation and removal of programs. With all this features, change to Linux Ubuntu is as reasonable as it could possibly get.

As of this current age, there are a number of web hosting solutions to meet the requirements brought upon by varying website owners. A number of factors determine the right web hosting platform for one's needs which includes:

As stated beforehand, there are indeed a number of different solutions for web hosting. Some examples of which are:

The Linux Web Hosting Platform

The Linux web hosting platform is popular and widely recognized for it is a stable and a secure solution. Linux based server hosting solution uses more technical, yet highly stable programming languages. Such programming languages that are used include PHP, MySQL, and Perl. With these languages along with the server package, the developer of the website can customize on a wide variety of open source programs for their website. These customizations are either free or at a very low cost which is a big advantage for Linux users. In addition, the Linux platform enables many of its users to set password protected directories and permissions easily.

The Windows Hosting Platform

When compared to Linux, Windows is the most widely used and well-known operating system of today. It is used not only on these server platforms but in many computers, laptops, and other digital devices that can accommodate this operating system. This high level of popularity exhibits a more user-friendly approach to this hosting solution. Hence, maintaining the stability and security of a website using this platform can be done speedily to anyone that is familiar with the various applications run by Microsoft. An example of which is Microsoft's SQL Scripting Language or more commonly known as MS SQL. Additionally, the Windows hosting platform can offer full support for the ASP.NET programming language.

Between these two hosting solutions, many seekers of dedicated servers for their websites ask themselves, "Which is better, Linux or Windows?"

Truth be told, there are a number of factors that may determine which of these two is beneficial for a website owner. For instance, let us take a gander at the price range of these two hosting solutions. If the website owner wants a cheap yet effective hosting solution then they can go for Linux. Nonetheless, if they want ease of access but at a slightly higher price range then they can opt for the Windows server.

If the website owner is also a business owner, then they need to choose the right hosting service for their companies. An e-commerce hosting provider may be just the ticket for their needs. Their services can offer real time transaction processing over the Internet while still maintaining the quality of the website because of their hosting servers.

Website owners need to pool their knowledge on what they know and understand to determine which of these is the right server for them. They can also ask the hosting provider on which is the better one for their needs.