And I'm giving them away!!! The Contest If you haven't read the book yet, you're really in for a treat!

What do you get if William Gibson and Neal Stephenson had a love affair and decided to merge equal portions of their DNA in some not yet heard of pregnancy between two men type of experiment? You'd get Daniel Suarez writing the sci-fi, cyber-thriller, Daemon and following it up with Freedom, making a two part novel. This Pin was discovered by HuntingtonBay. Discover (and save) your own Pins on Pinterest.

I'm presenting 3 challenges, something like of a crypto-scavenger hunt, reminiscent of the Daemon itself. The Prize s • A total of 3 hardback copies of Daemon will be awarded as Grand Prizes to the winner of each challenge. No more than one book will be awarded per person. • The first person to successfully complete a particular challenge will be named the winner of that challenge. • Any additional successful submissions before March 1, 2009 will earn fame and notoriety by being mentioned here in my blog, with your name and a timestamp of your completion date;-) • And hopefully everyone who competes will learn at least something about Daemon, Ubuntu, eCryptfs, free and open source software, and cryptography.

• has independently solved each of these challenges and has graciously volunteered to serve as an independent judge in the event of any tie or controversy. His decision is final. The Schedule The challenges (increasing in difficulty) will be published here in my blog as follows: • • • Challenge 3: Tuesday, January 20, 2009, Noon UTC-6 In the meantime, you might want to brush up on: • Ubuntu, livecd's, virtual machines, encryption, encrypted private directories, eCryptfs, gnupg, md5, sha, john, shell scripting Cheers!:-Dustin. On my last flight between Paris and Houston on Continent, I had the privilege of seeing one of the Linux Inflight Entertainment systems in action. At first, I didn't get to see it boot up, but I did have fun playing with the music and movies on demand. It's something roughly akin to the MythTV I've grown to know and love at home.

A couple of hours into the flight, the lady in front of me rang the flight attendant and complained that her system wasn't functioning properly. The flight attendant said that she'd just 'reboot' the system. I jumped up and yelled, 'Oh, mine's not working either.can you reboot mine too?!?' My wife knew what was going on, and she rolled her eyes:-) I grabbed my camera and videoed the whole boot process. I uploaded all 450MB to YouTube in high quality (while I was onsite at Google for UDS last week): * Your impressions?

Seeing that this is a 4 minute long boot process, I'd say they have some room for improvement! On the other hand, my sarcastic side sees this befitting of all things related to the airline industry and flying.hurry up and wait for arbitrary and no good reasons. Sorry for the bumps.:-Dustin. The Ubuntu Server has always had a command-line only interface, and has never included a graphical desktop, such as Gnome, KDE, or XFCE.

We differ quite a bit from other Linux distributions in this respect. But did you know that the default Ubuntu Server installation, as of Intrepid Ibex, does include a by default? Expand your mind a bit and check out the venerable GNU utility! Screen is simply an incredible program--dare I say that any good Linux/UNIX system administrator really must get to know screen. You can multiplex several tasks, send them to the background, and bring them to the foreground later, and customize task bars with all sorts of interesting information.

I've never considered myself a screen expert, but I know enough to know that there's a lot I don't know:-) The default configuration of screen in Ubuntu is quite functional, but it's lacking, um, pizazz. It's capable of a lot more. The following is the result of several hallway conversations at last week's Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View, California. Aleks Program Cheats more. And I decided that the Ubuntu Server could, and should include some more useful profiles for screen, that take advantage of its more advanced features.

Helped with some early prototyping, adding some code that detects when updates are available and a reboot is required. We kicked around the idea a bit more with, Jamie Strandboge, and Steve Langasek.

So I created a new package this morning,. This package currently includes two screenrc profiles that I created, one for Ubuntu, and one for Debian. It also contains a binary, select-screen-profiles, which provides an interactive method for quickly switching among the available profiles on the system. I have uploaded packages for Hardy, Intrepid, and Jaunty. To install, add my to your /etc/apt/sources.list. And then: $ sudo apt-get install screen-profiles $ select-screen-profile Here's a sample screen shot.

Notice that the first status bar across the bottom actually contains 'tabs' of the open screen sessions. You can use ctrl-a-c to create a new tab, and ctrl-a-0.

Ctrl-a-4 to swtich among the available tabs. The highlighted tab is the currently active one, 1 source. The second status bar I've reserved for system state information. Currently, this includes the current LSB release and version, Ubuntu 8.10.

The blue @ indicates that a system restart is required (it's supposed to look like the Ubuntu restart icon). Indicates that there are 28 updates available.

And, of course the system time follows. Note that an Ubuntu circle-of-friends logo is pretty much impossible with a standard character set, but hopefully the 3-colored o/ logo approximates the 'spirit' of Ubuntu;-) And for good measure, I tested this on a Debian and a Fedora system, each with their own logo approximations in the lower left. Debian: Fedora (on a black console, just to show that look too): So I think I'm just scratching the surface of the possibilities of screen for the Ubuntu Server. I'm really interested your favorite ~/.screenrc profile! If you're doing something interesting or cool with your screen configuration, please post your ~/.screenrc (with a GPLv3 header) and screenshots in your blog, and add a URL here as a comment. I'm hoping to ship this package in the Ubuntu Jaunty Server with a number of interesting profiles.

If you're looking for more information on customizing these screenrc files and the various commands, take an hour and read the manpage. It's a long one;-):-Dustin.

That's right. I bootlegged the Ubuntu Allstars Jam at UDS Jaunty! I mean, we recorded everything else this time, so why not? Using -- an excellent open source sound editor in Ubuntu Universe -- I recorded the gig, carved it up into tracks (with fade ins and fade outs), and then exported to both MP3 and OGG formats. While we had a hell of a lot of fun jamming, I think we'll be keeping our day jobs hacking on Ubuntu;-) Available for download at: * The set-list: • Blues Jam • Wonderwall • Brown Sugar • Knocking on Heaven's Door • Whisky in the Jar • Dead Flowers • Hey Joe • Wish You Were Here • You Shook Me • Sweet Home Alabama • Tangled Up in Blue • American Pie Rock on,:-Dustin.

We spent an hour yesterday at the Ubuntu Developer Summit discussing the potential of suspending, hibernating, and resuming an Ubuntu server. The Ubuntu Desktop has gotten really good at suspend/hibernate/resume. I think I've suspended/resumed my laptop 30 times already at UDS. Bradley University Nurse Anesthesia Program Rankings on this page. With Ubuntu virtual machines, we have a couple of ways to 'suspend' or 'hibernate' at the hypervisor level, with pausing, and snapshotting. I'm suggesting that we close the gap and attempt to support hibernate and/or suspend in the Ubuntu Server OS. A number of people noted that, 'No one hibernates or suspends a server.'

But that's what's so attractive about it to me. On the positive side, the frameworks have been established already on the Desktop side. The pm-utils package provides command-line utilities to enter into the lower power states.

Most i386 and amd64 server hardware is remarkably similar to laptop/desktop hardware from an ACPI perspective. On the negative side, much server hardware (think PCI devices) have never been tested for suspend/hibernate and resume. We would additionally need something like wake-on-lan, open-ipmi, or nut to remotely send the 'wake up' signal.

Okay so the use cases. We came up for a couple, but I'm certainly looking for more. Server hibernation might be useful for offline hardware maintenance, migration of installations from real hardware to virtual machines, and migration from virtual machines to real hardware.

Server suspend might be useful for faster power-on and hot spare backup servers. Either way, such a feature would allow an administrator to bring Ubuntu servers running on real hardware down to low-power states, and resume back to a running system and restore the previous context. We discussed build servers and DNS servers as potential candidates, in that these systems build a cache of valuable data into memory over time--to reboot or shutdown is to clear memory and loose the 'optimal performance' state. I suspect you might have some other server scenarios that could potentially benefit from hibernate/suspend/resume. If so, I would love to hear from you in the comments below. Or, if you would rather, you can join the ranks that are calling me crazy for even proposing this;-):-Dustin.

Thanks very much to Michael Larabel of Phoronix. He picked up the instructions from my last blog post, and ran the Phoronix performance suites. These are very early results, on a nascent Jaunty distribution still undergoing heavy development.

But I must say that I'm rather pleased with the performance hit to the majority of the workloads they tested. There was roughly a 1% hit in most tests (compilation, compression, audio/video encoding, image processing). The hit was a bit more significant when encrypting a file in userspace, on top of eCryptfs (which is really asking the kernel to encrypt already encrypted data, and compress), as well as the huge-file write. We're looking into some optimizations we might be able to make at the kernel level to improve this. Without further adieu.:-Dustin.

One of the biggest features (in my not-so-objective opinion) of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is rapidly coming together.! I have two packages available for beta testing in: • adduser • ecryptfs-utils To test this functionality on a Jaunty system, install these two packages and then, as the root user, create a 'foo' user with an encrypted home: • adduser --encrypt-home foo This will create the user, generate a mount passphrase, copy the /etc/skel default data into a mounted/encrypted home directory, take the new user password, wrap the mount passphrase, and then unmount the home directory. Subsequent logins by the 'foo' user will mount the home directory accordingly. I've tested this pretty thoroughly with both command-line, server logins, as well as graphical desktop logins. It's working really well, and I'm quite excited about it!

This is going to be far easier and more secure than moving bits and pieces of data in ~/Private, and manually symlinking files and directories around. •; but they're not in the Ubuntu Jaunty kernel yet. I think they should make in time for the Jaunty release. • Migrating an existing, non-encrypted home directory to an encrypted one is not something that we can do automatically--there's quite simply too much that can go wrong. I will, however, provide a wiki page describing how to do it as the root user, in a recovery shell. Basically, bad things can happen if any other processes running as the user try to read or write data in their home directory during the migration. I've released the code necessary to setup the encrypted home directory in ecryptfs-utils-67.

As soon as Debian pulls that release into unstable, I'll merge it into Jaunty (and then you can skip the PPA step). After that, I hope to add 'Encrypt Home' as an option to both the graphical and server installers, when creating the administrator user. We should be able to do this in the Server Installer easily by Alpha-2, and the Desktop Installer by Alpha-3. Also, we need to modify the graphical 'User Settings' program as provided in system-tools-backends to support the --encrypt-home option. Miscellaneous Separate, but related to this work item are two other blueprints for Jaunty: • •:-Dustin.

Is the VP of Product Development at, leading the amazing team that delivers, from the to commercial offerings. Dustin is an active maintainer and contributor to, including and. At IBM, Dustin produced, including (the technology behind 'Swype' keyboards), and created (10-node portable cloud hardware). Formerly the CTO of, a start-up acquired by, Dustin designed and implemented a key management system for cloud applications, called, and delivered comprehensive security for cloud and big data platforms with and other encryption technologies. A Fightin' Class of 2001 graduate, Dustin lives in, with his, daughters, and his Australian Shepherds,. Dustin is also an avid and wine maker.

Daniel Suarez is not only on Facebook but also on Twitter, Google+, and Medium. Yes, it's true, and I’m on each of these social media platforms for different reasons.

I started on GOOGLE+ in 2011. That's still where I tend to share a lot of tech-centric articles and my thoughts. It gives me the space I need to write about the things that interest me. Throughout the years I've built a very nice community over there. I joined TWITTER. In 2012 and find that useful too. It's a broader audience which is nice -- I meet people (ok and bots too) which I wouldn't otherwise.

In early 2017 I first published on MEDIUM-- though, I haven't used Medium much (due to my recent CHANGE AGENT book launch), but I was surprised how much I enjoyed this platform -- both as a reader and a writer. It's designed to share long form writing, which I think I will use more going forward. Most recently, I joined FACEBOOK in 2017, creating a place that’s more like a 'fan' page. So Facebook is where I will share all things related to my books and author events. These posts are indeed published by me.

For this reason, you may find delays to replies. *I look forward to engaging with this new community and sharing news and updates with you. Thank you for joining me here on Facebook.* And of course, you can always visit my website for more information.