Marian Marinov/HackMan

World Hosting Days 2011

HackMan — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:13:33 +0000

Last week I was in Rust, Germany at the WorldHostingDays conference & expo. The biggest problem we had, was that there was almost no Internet

The organizers made a very poor design of their network and so, most of the time there was no connection at all.

We were exhibitor there and as such the expo was a great success for us. We met a lot of clients and I was amazed to talk with so many great technical figures. I wasn’t expecting that. It was nice to see what these people will think about our products. And the biggest thrill for me was, that everyone that I talked with really liked what we offered. Even thou a lot of people call our software ‘just a bunch of scripts’, after a few minutes talk with me they were convinced that the product is much more then that.

The next thing was that I collected a few really good ideas that our future clients wanted. And the strangest and maybe most disturbing one was that there was at least 4 people that requested monitoring for Windows.
No one actually requested monitoring of network devices which was something that I wanted to add to our software.

On the VIP dinner I set next to Roger Nolan(the founder of Symbian), that was a talk I really liked. And on the next day I had a dinner with Mario and Daivid from cPanel. Even thou I don’t really like their software, they were really cool to talk to. I learned a lot for their way of working and it was a really fun dinner. Because of guys like these it is sometimes very nice to visit such business conferences.

Perl Workshop aftermath

HackMan — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 22:01:33 +0000

Today’s event was a real success. We had more then 40 people in the morning and something around 30 after the lunch break.

The talks were really interesting and inspiring. Alexey’s talk about ThinPacker was really inspiring and it captured my attention, so we will work together on that.

We made a really good discussion about the Frameworks and I hope that everyone that were listening and talking learned a lot of it.

I have to say that I’m surprised from my self since I finally made a presentation that I like I hope that all visitors also found it useful.

And finally I have to add that my company(1H) sponsored the travel of Alexis which proved to be quite a good idea. So next year we will consider sponsoring again.

Bulgarian Perl Workshop 2011

HackMan — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 22:21:38 +0000

Next Saturday I’m organizing the annual Bulgarian Perl Workshop. One of the biggest challenges for this event is making people come and talk at the conference. And I’m not talking about international guests. I’m talking about Bulgarian speakers.

We have a lot of people working with Perl every day and it is strange to me that only one or two of them is actually coming to speak to the event.

But enough about this… I’m preparing a talk about embedding Perl in C and the other way around. The ugly true of scattered documentation and half working modules.

No Packaging courses in the Universities

HackMan — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 06:11:10 +0000

Yesterday we(Me, Vasil Kolev and Peter Pentchev) were examining the last students from the NetSec course and while we were waiting for the last student to come we started talking about the need of courses explaining software packaging in general.

We discussed that one can find really good documentation on RPM and DEB packaging systems, even you can find quite decent information for *BSD and Gentoo. However these are system build to address specific distribution problems and does not teach their user the basic ideas of package maintainership.

So, the issue is that at some point in time a developer is tasked with the job of creating a package, deciding what release cycles to have and how to approach the upgrades and maintenance of the packages he creates.

So what happens is that in most cases a really simple problems such as backward/forward compatibility are not addressed because the developer believes that this is the job of the package maintainer and the software that is packaged has nothing to do with that.

This started me thinking about next year.. Maybe it will be a good idea to start working on a course which will cover the general packaging problems and the possible ways that one can take to address them. Such a course should not be focused on a particular packaging system but instead teach the students what they should consider when they are tasked with the maintaining of packages.

Bulgarian Perl Workshop is comming

HackMan — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 08:51:21 +0000

So on 26th of February the Bulgarian Perl Workshop will take place.

This year I decided that I’ll cover something I consider very nasty, Embedding Perl into C and using C from Perl. Two really annoying things with a lot of horrible solutions and half written documentation.

Lightning fast suexec

HackMan — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:57:27 +0000

While I was reordering the code of our suexec I unintentionally optimized it by removing a pace of redundant code.
In the end the result is that on benchmarks the suexec executes phps 20% faster then FastCGI(4 childs, 1000 requests per child).

I’m still doing benchmarks but the numbers that ab is showing until now are pretty conclusive.

The first time I saw the numbers I was pretty convinced that I have done something horribly wrong to mod_fcgid. So I decided to do some more precise benchmarks. In the end, after more then 18h of testing I’m really convinced that the suexec can be made to work faster then anything else currently available.

I’m really really happy with the results!

More projects on GitHub

HackMan — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:48:56 +0000

Since my last post I managed to upload Hawk on GitHub and also started a new project called ‘Hosting Automations‘. I hope that the work we have done will help others.

I haven’t got the time to add the Licensing and fix the more important files for Digits. But I hope that in the next few weeks I will be ready.

Going OpenSource

HackMan — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:29:55 +0000

Recently I started a new company called 1H. From the start of the company I talked with my partners that we should go Open Source. Maybe not with all of our products from the beginning but at least with a few of them.

So we started with 2 entirely commercial products(Hive and Guardian) and 2 Open Source (Hawk and Digits).

Here is what I found very interesting:

We had to develop a licensing system. It took us 2 months of development.
We had to develop a way of protecting/obfuscating vital parts of our software. This also took us 2 months.
Then we had to develop online verification of the licenses. This took us 1 month.
And finally we had to rewrite vital parts of our software just to make it possible to be obfuscated. Also 1 month.

So in the end we have spent 6 months in development of software that is completely useless to our clients. In comparison, with our Open Source projects, we have spent time only to enhance them and add features requested by our clients. If we have spent those 6 months on developing new features of the software we would be far ahead, instead we started developing new features after a pause of almost 6 months. And the whole team has forgotten what were the projects we were working 6 months back.

I hated what was happening, and mostly because during those 6 months we didn’t had the time to begin the ‘opening’ of our Open Source projects. We always pushed that back, because it was considered hard work.
So in the past few days I decided to search for easier way of ‘opening’ our Open Source projects. In the end, instead of publishing our own hosted git repositories, I decided that it will be best to use community driven repositories like SourceForge and GitHub. And today it is a very good day for me, since I published our first open source project in github (mod_limits). By the end of next week I’ll try to upload both Hawk and Digits to github.

My goal is to have at least 5-6 Open Source projects published on github by the end of this year. I want to support the community and contribute all of our work back to the community. All of our Open Source projects are licensed under GPLv2 and at least for now, this will be the license of choice for the new projects.

I’ll try to cover my future plans for our Open Source strategy here. I hope, one day it will become interesting

I broke Maznio (again)

HackMan — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:05:00 +0000

This time I managed to crack the engine head on 5 from the 6 cylinders with total of 8 cracks… I’m quite good at destroying my car

Last Friday I left it with the mechanic. I hope that by tomorrow it will be fully functional again. Here are some pictures of the disassembled engine.

After that I’m going to fix some body problems with. One from a small offroad trip near Sofia and one from a 3 year old collision.

Network Security II - Secure codding

HackMan — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:01:02 +0000

Next semester we will start teaching Network Security II - Secure codding.

This will be my second time helping for this course, however this will be my first time as the main lecturer for the course Since we will teach this course for a second time it will be a little bit easier as we already have a plan and some pointers for part of the talks.

I’m planning to introduce some more recent information about the attack vectors and the new prevention techniques from the past two years.

I hope it will become a quite nice course.