Introduction

Seagate’s 10,000 RPM enterprise drive lineup hasn’t quite received the attention that their 15,000 RPM line has, but Seagate is still churning out 3.5" 10,000 RPM Cheetahs via their Cheetah NS line. The latest offering, the Cheetah NS.2, is the focus of this latest hardware review. The Cheetah NS.2, like its faster counterpart the Cheetah 15K.7, is a welcome advance in that it is the highest capacity 10,000 RPM drive currently available on the market. At 600GB, the Cheetah NS.2 offers a solid mixture of speed and value for those who aren’t willing to pony up the dough for faster 15K series drives.

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As I’ve stated in previous articles, inexperienced developers will often overlook critical security measures. When it comes to web applications that allow users to log in with a username and password of their choice, how does one go about ensuring that a user’s password is not compromised? It’s a broad question with a large grey area. The first thing I want to point out is that this article is about formulating a solid way to store passwords. Formulating a good way to store a password ensures that even if your database of users is somehow acquired by an unwanted third party, your user’s passwords won’t be found out. This aspect alone has many ins and outs and is only one part of good session management. Even if you employ all of the advice in this article, you’ll still be vulnerable to attacks like packet sniffing, which can only be negated with the addition of SSL to your web host’s configuration. However, the bright side is that if you do employ this advice with good session management practices, the practical risk of user passwords being uncovered is virtually eliminated.

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At the risk of making an understatement, the Rx Bandits are a band of many facets. Starting out as a ska band in the late 90s, their first two albums "Those Damn Bandits" and "Halfway Between Here and There" are typical of the period’s ska sound, with the second of the two albums showing more progress toward a more diverse and captivating sound.

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Introduction

Seagate has been refining their 15,000 RPM Cheetah line since their introduction of the Cheetah X15 so long ago. As a young reviewer, I had the pleasure to review this remarkable achievement in its heyday. It would make me a little nostalgic if it weren’t for the fact that rotational storage at the 15,000 RPM tier has come so far since the X15.

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There’s something about The Infidels that inspire a very special kind of aggression that makes you want to seize life by the throat. Good music should move you, be it emotionally, physically or both, and The Infidels understand what it takes to write music that makes you want to give life a black eye. Knowing these guys, I’ve had the opportunity to get a close look at their musical evolution. Their statement is that they’re a punk band trying real hard to be a rock band. Their punk roots are evident, but the feel is more that of a solid hard rock band than anything else.

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Introduction

Like any form of computer technology, hard disk drives have seen constant improvements in form factor, speed, and efficiency. Whether it be improvements in size or interfaces, consumer and enterprise level storage has come a long way since the introduction of the ST-506, Seagate’s (and the market’s) first 5.25" hard drive. This size was relatively short lived when it was usurped in 1984 by the 3.5" form factor when it was first used by a hard drive introduced by the now defunct Rodime company. For quite some time, this drive size has been the industry standard for consumer and enterprise storage solutions. Even though the first 2.5" drive was introduced quite some time ago to satisfy demand for laptops, the first enterprise grade 2.5" didn’t come along until much later.

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Any experienced web developer is aware that practically any version of Internet Explorer is exceedingly annoying in the way that it is inconsistent from other browsers in terms of behavior. This isn’t anything new, but today I came across a weird JavaScript bug that was stumping one of our JSP developers on an application we were working on. For a time, I thought it was a back-end related issue, but it was soon apparent that the issue was coming from front-end code that I wrote.

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One element of PHP security (and web application security in general) that can be overlooked is how file uploads are handled. While vulnerabilities like SQL injection have more potential for being targeted, it is equally foolish to overlook the security problems that can be caused by not keeping a good watch on the files that users try to upload via the scripts in your web applications.

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There was a time when I was not a very security-conscious developer, and in fact, almost every developer starts out that way. It’s not because of some intentional oversight, it’s because when you’re beginning web development you are just not aware that vulnerabilities do exist. I didn’t learn the hard way by having one of my neophyte web applications slammed by a malicious user who manipulated one of the numerous vulnerabilities that did exist. I learned when a co-worker who was very PHP savvy made a very clear demonstration to me of how vulnerable my applications were. This was at a point in my career when I was just a front end developer, so luckily I hadn’t put insecure code into a production level application. It was at this point that I looked through O’Reilly Publishing’s catalog and found a book by Chris Shiflett entitled Essential PHP Security. The book opened up a whole world of concepts I had overlooked for so long. I had maintained some of the practices the book espoused before I purchased it, but I became much more vigilant in identifying everything I could to make my applications as bulletproof as possible.

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Some time ago I ran into a problem where I needed to access the contents of a URL, but the allow_url_fopen directive was turned off in the PHP configuration that was on the server. Of course, the first thing I tried to do was to use the ini_set function to override the configuration setting, but that obviously failed. And rightly so. Most shared hosting providers will almost always disable this setting because it can be a security issue. While having this behavior of PHP enabled by itself isn’t a security problem, it can become problematic if a developer who lacks a concern for security creates an application where this behavior can be leveraged by malicious users. But developers who have relied on functions that make use of allow_url_fopen can find themselves running into a wall when they need to access data from remote URLs such as RSS feeds. The answer to this minor obstacle is in PHP’s client URL library functions, better known as cURL.

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