What are you missing? AIX

Happy February Readers,

I didn't want to miss last week's posting, but I also didn't have the time to make a quality post before leaving on a trip. So quality over quantity will hopefully gain favor with you. I'm taking a break in the What was wiped series to give myself some more time to gather what I need and instead I am continuing the What are you missing series in this post.

Doing forensics on specialized servers, which I will define as anything non wintel and whose file systems have no parsers supported in forensic tools, is an interesting challenge. You have to:

1. Research where the system log files exist

2. Determine what format the logs are in

3. Capture the metadata of the file system

4. Determine if the file system can be parsed by anything but the running OS

5. Determine if it's feasible to image the server via DD

6. Determine if here is any hardware specific evidence that exists

A good example of this would be an older AIX system as detailed below

Read more »

yea, yea

i know, i said i would show y'all this week but it's taking a lot longer then anticipated to get my kitchen back in order.  painting is done and my kitchen is no long bright green, and i think, i kind of like her :)  hope your week is going peachy!

John Nash's Thesis

You know those games where you pick the street you grew up on and add on your cousin's middle name and your first pet's name and then you have the name for a band?

This post isn't actually about that. (Though I do think "John Nash's Thesis" would be a great name for a band). This post is about those myths and legends you hear as a nascent researcher. Probably the first of these I ever heard was: "John Nash's dissertation was only four pages long."

This really is one of those legends that seems to have suffered a whisper-down-the-lane effect. Wikipedia claims it weighs in at 28 pages, on Princeton's website it is 32. Some forum contributor on degreeinfo.com claims it was only 23 pages long.

In any case, it was short, sweet, and revolutionary.

I really respect that. I've slogged through CS dissertations that were approaching 250 pages in length. By the middle you start pulling your hair out and wishing they had the brevity of John Nash.

My dissertation will not be 23 pages long. Why, the table of contents alone is pushing 30! (Just kidding!) (mostly).

Gluten-free January Participants: Take the Survey!

Matt Lentzner, Janine Jagger and I have designed a survey for participants of Gluten-free January, using the online application StatCrunch. Janine is an epidemiologist who studies healthcare worker safety at the University of Virginia; she has experience designing surveys for data collection so we're glad to have her on board. The survey will allow us to systematically gather and analyze data on the results of Gluten-free January. It will be 100 percent anonymous-- none of your answers will be connected to your identity in any way.

This survey has the potential to be really informative, but it will only work if you respond! The more people who take the survey, the more informative it will be, even if you didn't avoid gluten for a single day. If not very many people respond, it will be highly susceptible to "selection bias", where perhaps the only people who responded are people who improved the most, skewing the results.

Matt will be sending the survey out to everyone on his mailing list. Please complete it, even if you didn't end up avoiding gluten at all! There's no shame in it. The survey has responses built in for people who didn't avoid gluten. Your survey will still be useful!

We have potential data from over 500 people. After we crunch the numbers, I'll share them on the blog.

if you need me....

i'll be hanging out here.  not b/c it's cool but b/c i have no where else to sit in my house due to the fact that all of my kitchen drawers and doors are currently scattered throughout the house.  as for the rest of the family, they're going to have to fend for themselves!  

and i'll be listening to this on repeat (did you see garden and gun this month?!).  happy weekend!  

tune in next week to see what color i picked!  *i already know*