Meeting notes: Oct 5 2009

Summary: The meeting theme for Monday Oct 5th 2009 was file-systems. During this meeting Ted gave a presentations on how to recover files that were deleted from an EXT2 file system. Since file pointers are moved with a delete, he used debugfs to dump the file contents directly from the inode. Journaled files systems have a journal layer that makes recovery using this technique hit and miss. However, EXT2 is not a journaled file-system, when a file is deleted the inode can easily be found using debugfs.

After the presentation, we talked a little about various subjects:

Dave D. is eagerly awaiting for the new release of Ubuntu 9. A new version is to be out soon. Currently, version 9 is beta.

Leon mentioned he had wireless issues in a Hotel in Cambodia that he had not had in the past. We were not sure how to address this question, but surmised it might be a budget issue or a power issue.

There was a short talk about mail clients. Dave D. and Ted both like mutt as a email client.

Camera file-systems and permissions were discussed. It appears most camera manufactures use the vfat file-system. Additionally, the permissions are inconsistent. Some have permissions of read,write,execute by all but others do not.

Skype was discussed. It appears may organization label Skype as banned application in their organization. Leon said he meet a peace corp person who was told they could not use skype. Skype seems to be misunderstood by many large institutions. There does not seem to be any definitive documentation that is a security risk. But, it does suck up bandwidth.

Category: Info