iBlog: Nishit Shah

Spent a wonderful Sunday afternoon, installed Fedora Core 8 on my system. So, now its triple boots with Ubuntu 7.10, Open Solaris 10 and Fedora Core 8. Also, the 10th anniversary version of nmap is out now. The latest version 4.50 include the Zenmap GUI, 2nd generation OS detection techniques, advanced TCP / IP traceroute functionality among others. Will upgrade to the latest version and try it out today.

Had been to Bangalore between 4th to 8th December for foss.in/2007 and boy what an event that was! As I had mentioned in my earlier post that I will be attending this. I was at foss.in/2007 only for the first 4 days ( 2 project days and 2 main conference days ) as I changed my plans for the last day and went for Yahoo! India’s year end party @ Club Cabana.

day 1 @ foss.in
Reached Bangalore around 11 am as my flight got delayed by around 20 minutes and headed straight to my colleague’s hotel room to keep my belongings and then to IISc. The very first day was the project day and by the time I reached the venue, sessions were already going on it full swing. day1 had project days on Debian/Ubuntu , Open Solaris, Mozilla & Gnome and each of them were allotted a hall were sessions were going on. After jumping around from one hall to another to get a gist of whats going on I finally settled at the Mozilla Project. After the event I spent the rest of the evening with my friends at the 13th floor.

day 2 @ foss.in
Day 2 had project days of Fedora, Open Office, KDE and IndLinux. And I ended up sitting for almost all sessions of the Fedora Project day. It was drizzling whole day and the atmosphere around the JN Tata Auditorium was damn chill. Got introduced to quiet a few Bangalore LUGGers. Also, met Kartik Mistry. After the Foss we got invites to the amazing Mozilla Party @ Opus. They party was too good and it was the first time that I was partying with such amazing hip techie crowd. Its not everyday that you get invited to a Mozilla party and get an opportunity to chat with Mitchell Baker (CEO of Mozilla aka Chief Lizard Wrangler) and Mary Colvig (Marketing Manager) among others . Reached home pretty late at around 1am as the place where I was staying was at the other part of the town. It was damn chill..had a feeling that I would freeze to death by the time I reach home.

day 3 @ foss.in
The Main conference started on day 3. With many interesting talks lined up, it was difficult to choose which talk to sit when both were at the same time. Day 3 started with the inauguration of the main conference by Atul Chitnis and Kishore Bhargava which was pretty good. Then sat for couple of very interesting sessions by James Morris and (Why you should be a kernel hacker) and Rusty Russell (lguest: Hacking the Little Linux Hypervisor). After the event headed off to MG Road with friends.

day 4 @ foss.in
Day 4 was my last day @ Foss.in. Attended few sessions, had lunch, took loads of snaps, was fooling around on my Team Lead’s lappy most of the time. Made loadsa new friends. The main reason to attend such events is networking. You get to know and meet soo many like minded people and get an opportunity to discuss techie stuff.

As mentioned earlier, I didn’t attend the day 5 of foss.in as I was with my friends @ Club Cabana. for Yahoo! year end bash and boy what an event that was.

All in all it was a gr8 event. Very much worth taking a much needed break from work for 5 days and flying all the way to Bangalore for it. If folks can come from abroad to talk or to attend this event as delegates.. so can I !

Meet you @ foss.in/2008

Missed the foss.in/2006 and this time around I am gonna be there for all 5 days from 4th to 8th December ‘07. To be on a safe side, I have applied for a leave from work way in advance and booked the round trip flight tickets too !

After FOSS I am planning to go to Pune on 9th for ClubHACK India’s first International Hackers’ Convention @ International Convention Center, Pune. With impressive line of speakers , I bet its gonna be a damn interesting event and since its an invitation only event, I hope to hear a positive reply from the organizers by next month.

My return flight is on 8th late evening to Bombay. So, probably I need to get up early in the morning and catch a Volvo to Pune.

click on the image to enlarge.

open_basedir is a PHP directive that limits the files that can be opened by PHP to the specified directory-tree, including the file itself. This directive is NOT affected by whether Safe Mode is turned On or Off. When we check the phpnifo.php page, there are two values for each directive, the local and the master. I came across an issue where someone wanted to change the local value. I was aware that the Master value came from the php.ini file but was not sure of the local value. On googling a bit, I came to know that the local value is taken from the vhost configuration file for each of the host.

Switched over from Fedora core 5 to CentOS 4.4. Yeah I know FC 6 is out and has more features and eye candy than Core 5 but few things ain’t working like my Sify Dialer. Also, I had done a ‘Everything’ install of Fedora Core 5 and it was too cumbersome to work on it to first uninstall the server application that I wanted to work on and then install the new latest version and then work on the dependences. So finally I did a very basic installation of Centos 4.4 with X Windows and Gnome. Could have done with minimal install but need X for net.
Next week will welcome the new year by setting up a Quad boot system for Win XP Media Center, CentOS 4.4, FreeBSD 6.1 and Ubuntu 6.10. Lets see how far it goes.