And today`s photoblog picture is: Bosphorus, Istanbul. Click to see different sizes!

Here, I read an Intel whitepaper about how one can improve the performance of Snort (or an IDS system) using Intel multi-core architecture. I recommend you to read that whitepaper, it`s full of nice ideas about distributing the packet capture and the other steps like decoding, pattern matching, etc over different CPU cores and taking advantage of large L2 cache for expensive pattern matching operations.

Now the part that I cannot understand: Snort does not have multi-core, multi-thread support… In the whitepaper Intel says that they modified the code so that it runs multi threads.

The Snort application was modified to run multiple threads and to pin flows to execution cores.

My questions are: Does Intel care to share this code with snort community? So that we can improve our snort sensors, and tend to buy more Intel CPUs? Is sourcefire aware of this (I`m sure they are) and were they involved on “modifying snort to run multi threads”? I want to know this cause my snort box is choking under the load of a gigabit traffic!

It looks like snort will have multi thread support in the next major version 3.0. But I couldn`t see much in snort cvs about this. Either the new version is developed somewhere behind the doors (the code is not ready for public yet!), or it`s still is an idea.

Snort being day after day “commercialized”, the dirty nessus example, not having a similar product in the market as good as snort and nessus, makes me worry everyday about the future of free security products…

The new Pardus is out. (I`m late to announce here 🙂 )

I`m seeding the distro through p2p (torrent). So if you want to grab it using your favourite p2p client here is the torrent URL. Do not get it and go away! Please seed some 😉

Update: Here is the official torrent. I`m seeding this one also 😛

I`m changing my photoblog postings from now on. I decided to try Flickr and see how it goes with that.  First posting is the maiden tower in Istanbul. (Kızkulesi the original name)

If you are following these lines, you already know that I use gentoo as my favorite Linux distro. Last week I wanted to find out why my master volume was not controlling the sound output. Instead the headphone volume control was. 😛

So I followed some advices that I found on the Gentoo forums. But suddenly I screwed up all my sound system. The dmesg is complaining about Unknow symbols, recompiling the kernel and the alsa-driver package didn`t solve the problem, etc.. etc… (So if something is working, don`t touch it. But gentoo is all about touching right? )

Anyway I looked a bit my kernel environment and I realized that actually there was a directory called alsa-driver under /usr/lib/$(uname -r)/ also I had drivers under /usr/lib/$(uname -r)/kernel/sound

I think I never went and “disabled” sound modules in my kernel config! DUH! 😛 In Gentoo there is an alsa-drivers package that you compile if you want latest alsa. So I guess the two drivers didn`t like each other and they were not cooperating.

While writing these lines, I was recompiling my kernel without alsa support and I will also try reemerging the alsa-driver package.  Let`s see if my post will be full of foul mouth or smileys…

For the record: Here is Alsa howto on gentoo wiki. 

Check out IMINURWEBSITE.COM full of cute animal doing weird stuff Sample picture below

So after the release of IE7, Mozilla firefox 2.0 is now out! Although it is not shown at the welcome page of the Mozilla site at this moment, it is being spread to firefox mirrors all accross the world. I downloaded mine from here.

Go ahead, spread the word, use it, abuse it, love it.

Lately I`ve been using amarok as a music player and I was quite happy with it. It all started as one day I realized that the amarok icon looked like 1 pixel size at the gnome notification area. I was trying to find a solution to that problem. Then in one forum I saw someone mentioning a player called Listen.

As a person who is eager to test new stuff, I wanted to give it a try. After all, it would be nice to have a similar program as amarok, with gnome integration. Listen is fully written in GTK, thus gnome look and feel is there.

After using extensively for the last few weeks, I realized that Listen is pretty powerful, somewhat “lightweight”, and can perform many things that amarok can. (and more) It has a simpler interface than amarok, and less buttons to click. CDburner, mp3 player integration, podcast (i hate this word…) management, interface to shoutcast internet radio, lyrics, wikipedia searches, last.fm assisted dynamic playlists, etc….

Here are some screenshots. (Click to zoom!)

Oh wait,

It`s already done! 

Apple shipped some video ipods with virus in it! Don`t you guys believe me? See their website.

And I`m still not sleepy! Fuck! I hate this… Sleeping is such a waste of time!

And you, the blog comment spammer! Fuck you too! Don`t you see that I put a CAPTCHA there?! Stop spamming me. You cannot fill out my comment forms correctly anyway…

Correction: I got reddited… Those visitors were real. Sorry I never got reddited before. I got angry when I saw my log.

This is the article that went to reddit.