October 2007 Volume 32 Number 5
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OCTOBER 2007 VOLUME 32 NUMBER 5 THE USENIX MAGAZINE OPINION Musings RIK FARROW OSES Why Some Dead OSes Still Matter ANDREY MIRTCHOVSKI AND LATCHESAR IONKOV SECURITY (Digital) Identity 2.0 CAT OKITA LAW Hardening Your Systems Against Litigation ALEXANDER MUENTZ SYSADMIN An Introduction to Logical Domains, Part 2 OCTAVE ORGERON VOIP IP Telephony HEMANT SENGAR COLUMNS Practical Perl Tools: Let Me Draw You a Picture DAVID BLANK-EDELMAN iVoyeur: Opaque Brews DAVID JOSEPHSEN /dev/random ROBERT G. FERRELL STANDARDS Whither C++? NICHOLAS M. STOUGHTON BOOK REVIEWS Book Reviews ELIZABETH ZWICKY ET AL. USENIX NOTES Creating the EVT Workshop DAN WALLACH 2008 USENIX Nominating Committee ELLIE YOUNG Letters to the Editor CONFERENCES 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Linux Symposium 2007 The Advanced Computing Systems Association Upcoming Events INTERNET MEASUREMENT CONFERENCE 2007 1ST USENIX W ORKSHOP ON LARGE -S CALE (IMC 2007 ) EXPLOITS AND EMERGENT THREATS (LEET ’08) Sponsored by ACM SIGCOMM in cooperation with USENIX Co-located with NSDI ’08 OCTOBER 24–26 , 2007, SAN DIEGO , CA, USA APRIL 15, 2008, SAN FRANCISCO , CA, USA http://www.imconf.net/imc-2007/ 5TH USENIX S YMPOSIUM ON NETWORKED 21 ST LARGE INSTALLATION SYSTEM SYSTEMS DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION ADMINISTRATION CONFERENCE (LISA ’07 ) (NSDI ’08) Sponsored by USENIX and SAGE Sponsored by USENIX in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM and ACM SIGOPS NOVEMBER 11–16 , 2007, DALLAS , TX , USA http://www.usenix.org/lisa07 APRIL 16–18, 2008, SAN FRANCISCO , CA, USA http://www.usenix.org/nsdi08 ACM/IFIP/USENIX 8 TH INTERNATIONAL Paper titles and abstracts due: October 2, 2007 MIDDLEWARE CONFERENCE (MIDDLEWARE 2007 ) 2008 USENIX A NNUAL TECHNICAL CONFERENCE NOVEMBER 26 –30 , 2007, NEWPORT BEACH , CA, USA JUNE 22–27 , 2008, BOSTON, MA , USA http://middleware2007.ics.uci.edu/ http://www.usenix.org/usenix08 Paper submissions due: January 7, 2008 2008 L INUX STORAGE & F ILESYSTEM WORKSHOP (LSF ’08) 2008 USENIX/ACCURATE E LECTRONIC Co-located with FAST ’08 VOTING TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP (EVT ’08) FEBRUARY 25–26 , 2008, SAN JOSE , CA, USA Co-located with USENIX Security ’08 JULY 28 –29, 2008, SAN JOSE, CA , USA 6TH USENIX C ONFERENCE ON FILE AND STORAGE TECHNOLOGIES (FAST ’08) 3RD USENIX W ORKSHOP ON HOT TOPICS IN Sponsored by USENIX in cooperation with ACM SIGOPS, IEEE SECURITY (H OT SEC ’08) Mass Storage Systems Technical Committee (MSSTC), and IEEE TCOS Co-located with USENIX Security ’08 FEBRUARY 26–29 , 2008, SAN JOSE , CA, USA JULY 29, 2008, SAN JOSE, CA , USA http://www.usenix.org/fast08 17 TH USENIX S ECURITY S YMPOSIUM (USENIX 2008 ACM I NTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SECURITY ’08) VIRTUAL EXECUTION ENVIRONMENTS (VEE ’08) JULY 28 –AUGUST 1, 2008, SAN JOSE, CA , USA Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN in cooperation with USENIX 8TH USENIX S YMPOSIUM ON OPERATING SYS - MARCH 5–7 , 2008, SEATTLE , WA, USA http://vee08.cs.tcd.ie TEMS DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION (OSDI ’08) DECEMBER 8–10 , 2008, SAN DIEGO , CA , USA USABLE SECURITY 2008 (USEC ’08) Co-located with NSDI ’08 APRIL 14, 2008, SAN FRANCISCO , CA, USA For a complete list of all USENIX & USENIX co-sponsored events, see http://www.usenix.org/events. OPINION 2 Musings RIK FARROW OPERATING SYSTEMS 5 Why Some Dead OSes Still Matter ANDREY MIRTCHOVSKI AND LATCHESAR IONKOV SECURITY 13 (Digital) Identity 2.0 contents CAT OKITA LAW 21 Hardening Your Systems Against Litigation ALEXANDER MUENTZ SYSADMIN 26 An Introduction to Logical Domains, Part 2 OCTAVE ORGERON VOIP 35 IP Telephony HEMANT SENGAR COLUMNS 43 Practical Perl Tools: Let Me Draw You a Picture DAVID BLANK-EDELMAN 50 iVoyeur: Opaque Brews DAVID JOSEPHSEN VOL. 32, #5, OCTOBER 2007 55 /dev/random EDITOR ;login: is the official ROBERT G. FERRELL Rik Farrow magazine of the [email protected] USENIX Association. STANDARDS MANAGING EDITOR ;login: (ISSN 1044-6397) is 58 Whither C++? Jane-Ellen Long published bi-monthly by the [email protected] USENIX Association, 2560 NICHOLAS M. STOUGHTON COPY EDITOR Ninth Street, Suite 215, David Couzens Berkeley, CA 94710. BOOK REVIEWS [email protected] $85 of each member’s annual 63 Book Reviews dues is for an annual sub - PRODUCTION ELIZABETH ZWICKY ET AL. Casey Henderson scription to ;login: . Subscrip - Jane-Ellen Long tions for nonmembers are $120 per year. USENIX NOTES TYPESETTER Star Type Periodicals postage paid at 67 Creating the EVT Workshop [email protected] Berkeley, CA, and additional DAN WALLACH offices. USENIX ASSOCIATION 68 2008 USENIX Nominating Committee 2560 Ninth Street, POSTMASTER: Send address ELLIE YOUNG Suite 215, Berkeley, changes to ;login: , California 94710 USENIX Association, 68 Letters to the Editor Phone: (510) 528-8649 2560 Ninth Street, FAX: (510) 548-5738 Suite 215, Berkeley, CA 94710. CONFERENCE REPORTS http://www.usenix.org http://www.sage.org ©2007 USENIX Association 70 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference USENIX is a registered trade - 93 Linux Symposium 2007 mark of the USENIX Associa - tion. Many of the designa - tions used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trade - marks. USENIX acknowl - edges all trademarks herein. Where those designations ap - pear in this publication and USENIX is aware of a trade - mark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. WHEN I FIRST READ ONE OF THIS issue’s articles, I found myself suggesting to RIK FARROW the author that he not use the term IT. I wrote back to him, saying that many of the readers of ;login: are system administrators and that they don’t consider themselves part of IT. musings Having said that, I wondered how true that is. I also pondered over my own aversion to being con - [email protected] sidered part of IT. The definition of IT appears be - nign (see sidebar). It even appears to match, in very broad terms, what it is that system, network, and security professionals do. The Priesthood Information technology, IT—the branch of engineering that deals with the use of computers My earliest vision of IT came with my first visit to a and telecommunications to retrieve and store and transmit information. computer room, sometime about 1961. I had vol - —wordnet.princeton.edu unteered to work with some “computer” people (no “IT” people back then) and write a program in assembly language that would run on a mainframe. The mainframe itself, in Rockville, MD, was tremendously impressive, with its many large, humming cabinets, the washing machine –sized disks with the intriguingly labeled (in red) “Write Protect” push buttons, and the CPU itself. I liked the flashing lights that showed memory addresses and data values, and it was sort of cool when the IT guy got the mainframe to play a song through the console speaker (poorly). But I was just as im - pressed by the spectacular air conditioning system, as the air inside the computer room was mar - velously filtered, cool, and dry. In 1969, I spent a summer working as an intern for GE in Bethesda, MD. I was the “software librarian,” and the only really cool part of my job is that I got total use of the mainframe, during lunchtime, about once a week. I learned to boot the main - frame, starting with binary cards, then a larger deck of Hollerith-encoded punch cards, then boot - strapped the terminal concentrator, and finally got the tape drive, which contained the master copy of the OS and utilities, going. Once the system was up, I installed patches, from other nine-track tapes or from paper tapes, then dumped the patches to new nine-track tapes for shipment to the other 18 mainframes like this one around the world. I took every CS course I could at the University of Maryland, which didn’t even have a CS degree in those days. Using punch cards, and submitting jobs that you would not see the results of for at least 4 hours, and sometimes 20, really helped with 2 ;LOGIN: VOL. 32, NO. 5 typing discipline, as a single typo was tremendously painful. You would hand your card deck over to the priesthood who managed the CS depart - ment’s mainframe, and they would load your deck into the card reader and then write it to nine-track tapes. The tapes, containing card images, got loaded on the mainframe, and the jobs would run one at a time. I later learned that there was some time-sharing going on, but most students were forced to run batch jobs. (With some 25,000 students and a single computer, we were fortunate that most were not doing anything with the computer.) None of these experiences should have left me with negative feelings toward being part of IT. I did not work with computers my first several years out of college, because most jobs went to people with experience, and the Vietnam War had provided large groups of people with real experience, seriously im - pacting the market for those, like myself, who got college degrees instead of traumatizing experiences. When I did get back into computers, it was because the microprocessor had started appearing in small systems. During the intervening years, DEC had been producing minicomputers, smaller, cheaper, and much less complex systems than their mainframe relatives, but even these were scarce. Micro - computers promised to change all that, making real computers available to everyone. I could see this clearly in 1978, and I quickly became a part of the early PC boom in the Bay Area. Perhaps my aversion to IT came later, when I was working as a sysadmin consultant. I would have experiences where I would learn about some prob - lem an IT staff was having and offer to take a look at it. For example, one company needed to migrate its database from a homebrew version to In - formix.