Gaveen's Blog - Archive (2005 - 2017)

Most people who know me personally know that I'm an Open Source enthusiast. And they probably know that I'm more of a SysAdmin than a developer. Well, thats quite true. Eventhough I enjoyed programming, my main interest was always System (especially Linux) administration. However in the last 6-8 months aor so I've started getting more and more into Open Source development. A major breakthrough for me was getting selected for Google Summer of Code 2007, to participate in Nmap! (Nmap is much like a grail among SysAdmins :) Unfortunately my persoanl circumstances didn't allow me to finish the work with them. Family matters and other things piled up and I have to give up. Nmap people has been very supportive though and the same was true about the Google people. So after some weeks here I was trying to look more into Nmap, Metasploit and other things. Then I realized that I could give sometime to this Ruby thing which I heard was on Rails or something. Here I am now, after a...

The two premier Open Source Database Management Systems were officially launched recently in Sri Lanka. While MySQL itself was launched, PostgreSQL availability was in the form of EnterpriseDB, which is not exactly PostgreSQL. EnterpriseDB Corporation , the maker of EnterpriseDB DBMS (a commercial DBMS based on the advanced Open Source DBMS PostgreSQL) , together with a new IT firm called Fossmart announced their partnership on 10th, May to provide EnterpriseDB Advanced Server to Fossmart customers. EnerpriseDB is well know for it's Oracle compatibly, which means applications written to work with Oracle DBMS (worlds leading DBMS) can be used with EnterpriseDB usually with no or little modifications. MySQL , the popular Open Source DBMS was launched 31st, July in Sri Lanka by hSenid Software International . hSenid will provide MySQL Enterprise Server in Sri Lanka. MySQL, provided by MySQL AB is probably the more popular of PostgreSQL and MySQL. I personally believe this express...

Nmap , the popular Open Source security scanner turns ten years old today (1st September)! Ten years ago, i.e. in 1997, Fyodor released first release of Nmap as an article with the Phrack Magazine . It has since come a long way from that humble beginning into one of the foremost network/security tools on the planet, and also was featured in a couple of movies, including "The Matrix: Reloaded". Current Nmap stable release is 4.20 and it was released some months ago. However the Nmap developers have been very busy. Nmaps development branch includes quite a few hot and wonderful features including the NSE (Nmap Scripting Engine) , a new GUI frontend (UMIT) , and many more. You can download both the stable and development releases from the Nmap download page . For cutting edge development the Nmap SVN repository is recommended. The improvements made in the development include development contributions from the Google Summer of Code students (5 Nmap students and 7 UMIT students...