I’ve made some more recommendations for a couple of clients. I had to research rack-mountable managed gigabit switches and an 8-port rack-mountable kvm switch. For the details read on.

New kernel releases have been released by both the Ubuntu and Debian teams. Both address CVE-2008-0600 which could allow an attacker to escalate their privileges. The Debian vserver kernels have also been updated to address CVE-2008-0163 which allows users in one vserver to access information in another. For Ubuntu this comes just a week after the last Linux kernel security update.

• DSA-1494-1 linux-2.6 — missing access checks
• USN-577-1: Linux kernel vulnerability
• USN-574-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities
• Patching CVE-2008-0600, Local Root Exploit

I was reading up on Xen cpu schedulers, which is not easy information to find. My interest is due to a xen domain that has a high load. The credit scheduler is clearly fair as this domain is doing far more work than others on the system. However, the work it is doing is important and I’d like to allocate more cpu to that domain even at the expense of some others. For Xen 3 I can only find information about 3 schedulers: credit, sedf, and bvt. According to the documentation credit is favored over both sedf and bvt. While setting parameters for credit might solve my high load issue I’m not sure it addresses latency issues. Further research is needed.

• Credit-Based CPU Scheduler
• Xen CPU Scheduling
• Xen interface manual