GM Onstar Stolen Vehicle System – ARGH
As many of you know, I'm a car guy just as much as I am a technology guy. Back in 98 I had a full pc in my car playing Mp3s with a 20x2 LCD touch screen and I've already proven I ran replace my keys with RFID, so needless to say I love the convergence of technology and automobiles. But this one actually scares me. This week OnStar (the GM in vehicle cell service) announced that they've paired with law enforcement to slow down your vehicle if it's stolen or involved in a high speed chase.
http://jalopnik.com/cars/gadgets/onstar-unveils-new-stolen-vehicle-slowdown-system-308640.php
While initially it sounds cool and helps to ensure your car doesn't end up upside down or in a guard rail during a chase, what worries me is the system itself. Every OnStar vehicle is essentially equipped with a cell phone that has access to the onboard ECM, PCM, etc. The last gen GM vehicles were supposed to be highly secured so that no one except GM could tune them. Well the codes were cracked within a couple months and the aftermarket tuners are off and running. I can just envision this system being cracked and having thousands of GM vehicles disabled on our freeways during rush hour. I'm sure OnStar has spent millions on their design to make sure this doesn't happen, but as we know, don't tell a geek he can't do something because he'll throw your millions in code out the window with a simple embarrassing back door.
If anyone at GM is listening I'd be more than happy spending a weekend looking through the code making sure there aren't any issues 
Leave it to Dan to spill the beans…side project in Alpha
Well, as many of you know, Dan Norris and I used to work together at ITC. He decided to go join some company known for handing out mints that tend to appear in peculiar places. In his post today he linked to the new site I've been working on. It's obviously not live, but I linked in the blog section tonight. I still have some work to do on the templates in both the blog and wiki sections, some organization of the wiki, a couple entries in the FAQ, and a digg style rating system for users. I've worked out all my kinks with Amazon's S3 service for the torrent downloads, now I'm in the process of uploading the initial VMs.
The first ones to be released will be a generic Oracle Enterprise Linux Update 5 VM with all the pre-configuration completed for database and application server installs. Next up will be a Portal 10.1.4 / BI 10.1.2.2.0 vm, an 11g database vm, and then hopefully Dan's RAC vms. The IdM VMs will come after that. I've also had offers from Mark and John @ Rittmanmead.com for some of their BI and Data Warehousing VMs, hopefully I can catch up with them for dinner before the BIWA summit.
I've been busy with a whole bunch of client stuff lately, when Dan left ITC he also left me with a pretty healthy pipeline to deliver to, and I had already been booked for a client through the end of the year. (BTW, any Fusion Middleware guys need a job?) Needless to say, I've been a little busy lately and the horrible hotel upload speeds haven't helped the situation in pushing things to Amazon.
So for now, go ahead, start using it. Tell me whats good, whats bad, what works, what doesn't work, and I'll do my best to keep on top of things. The OracleVMs.com project forum (http://www.oraclevms.com/forums/project.php?projectid=8) is the best place to log bugs, issues and feature requests. Feel free to start putting them there and I'll slot them into the release cycle.
Oracle World Community Disappointment
Is anyone else disappointed that there is a two way password hash for the Oracle Community from Leveragesoft (http://oracleopenworldconnect07.leveragesoftware.com)? I would tend to bet that there is actually no hash at all and its just plain text in a database somewhere.
It kills me how many companies still run the risk of plain text passwords in the database. How many times have you had your credit card company read you your personalized pin back to you. That should never happen, they should have to put it into an application and it matches the one was hash in the database or LDAP server. I'd be happy to help them encryption or federation or any of the billions of solutions to the problem.
BTW- Whatever Dan Norris posts on this, it was my point first that brought this up.
The 2 Minute Job That Always Takes Me Too Long
I'm just going to post this up here because this is something I do all the time and for some reason it will never stick in my head. The idea is that I have a server root that I want to forward to another URL with mod_rewrite. Yeah, I know, I could just write it in mod_alias or a quick meta tag or JavaScript or whatever, but I live the clean mod_rewrite solution that I can bake right into a httpd.conf or .htaccess file. So here is it, whenever you want to forward something like: http:///www.mywebsite.com to http://www.mywebsite.com/pls/portal here it is:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.mywebsite.com/pls/portal [R,L]
OK, enough, done...night.
PS- As you can tell I'm a bit frustrated with myself over this one. It's only about the 100th time I've done something like this and I can never remember the syntax.
Just a quick update…
Wow, just wow has its been incredibly busy lately. Over the next few weeks I'll be bouncing coast to coast every weekend. This week I'm at Redwood Shores working with the new 11g FMW Beta. I seriously underestimated the size of this release, just about everything is getting turned on its head for the better. Thats about all I can say about it...
I got word on Friday that my info has finally been added to the list of Oracle Regional Directors (http://www.oracle.com/technology/community/ofm_directors/index.html#Topper). I feel honored to be part of the group and can't wait to start fulfilling all the requirements around it.
Next week I'm in Daytona for the Kaleidescope Conference speaking on IDM, AJAX and WS-Security. These are the same presentations I did at Collaborate last month and got some decent reviews (also the same ones posted on this site if you can't make it to the conference). On a side note, in the spirit of Daytona Dan Norris and myself are planning on renting motorcycles one of the nights we are there. If anyone else wants to join in the fun let me know, I think the cost for the day was between $100 - $150.
Lastly, I've been thinking about starting a website that would link technical people together. There are a lot of great traveling consultants that are in a different city every week with a lot of Oracle product knowledge that you might not even know are working at the place next door. Does anyone think building a site around linking technical people up for dinner in an area would be a good idea? It would be something along with the lines of LinkedIn and It's Just Lunch. I'm just thinking out loud, its been something thats been in the back of my head for a while and keeps popping up as I've been flying around lately.
Today’s Dilbert
Working with the new BIEE suite lately, everyone is so geeked by the ease of creating dashboards instead of the old Discoverer route. When I saw today's Dilbert I just had to laugh at how funny the statement is. Enjoy!
Link to the strip: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20070516.html
Blank VMware Guest on Server When Moving to Linux from Windows?
I've had a lot of people ask me about this lately, so I figured I'd write a quicky on how to fix this problem.
Problem Behavior:
A virtual machine was built in VMware Workstation on Microsoft Windows. The person then FTP'd the machine to a Linux based VMware Server instance so that the image could be run in a central location. After logging into the VMware Console for the server box, they boot the newly transferred virtual machine, but there is nothing on the interface. The box boots fine, they can see it come up on the network, the MUI shows the box up and running and serving requests but each time the machine is connected to through the console it just displays a blank screen.
Solution:
The problem comes with permissions error on the Linux OS. In order to see the machine through the console the vmx file must be executable for the user you're starting it as. The machine has no problem being bootable because it is readable, but in order to view it it must also be executable.
How to fix it:
Log into your Linux based VMware Server machine and find the directory where the virtual machine you are starting is located at. Find the .vmx file and chmod it so that it's executable i.e. chmod 755 myvm.vmx
Thats it. Reboot the machine, reconnect through the VMware Console and you're good to go. This one stumped me for a while the fix time I came across it.
Collaborate Papers
I've had a lot of inquiries since Collaborate to get copies of my papers and presentations I gave. So I figured I'd put them up for everyone to download directly. If you click the "Papers and Presentations" link in the banner they are all listed there, or you can just click on the URL below:
http://www.matttopper.com/index.php?page_id=17
If you want any additional info on the topics feel free to call or email me. My contact info is on the right.
Collaborate Plans
I finally got a chance to sit down and figure out which sessions I want to attend at next week's Collaborate conference. I've been busy working on some proof of concepts and Oracle BIEE training material for the last couple weeks, as well as taking over the lead on a project from one of our developers. With giving 5 presentations and client meetings it really didn't leave much room for going other presentations. So without further ado, here's my planned schedule, more of a reference for me than anyone else.
| START DATE | START TIME | END TIME | ROOM | TITLE |
| Sunday, Apr 15 | 10:00 AM | 4:00 PM | airport | Travel to LAS |
| Monday, Apr 16 | 8:15 AM | 9:00 AM | Open 10 | Ken Jacobs keynote |
| Monday, Apr 16 | 9:15 AM | 10:15 AM | Surf E | PRESENTING: Oracle Identity Management - The Total Identity Solution |
| Monday, Apr 16 | 10:30 AM | 11:30 AM | Breakers D | Using BIEE with Oracle eBusiness Suite |
| Monday, Apr 16 | 3:30 PM | 4:30 PM | Mandalay Bay C | PRESENTING: Virtualizing Your Development and Test Environment with VMware |
| Tuesday, Apr 17 | 9:45 AM | 12:00 PM | Palm D | PRESENTING: Oracle RAC load balancing and failover options |
| Tuesday, Apr 17 | 3:30 PM | 4:30 PM | Reef C | Oracle's BI Roadmap |
| Tuesday, Apr 17 | 4:45 PM | 5:45 PM | Palm D | PRESENTING: Developing Speedy Applications with AJAX |
| Wednesday, Apr 18 | 8:30 AM | 9:30 AM | Surf C | PRESENTING: Securing Web Services |
| Wednesday, Apr 18 | 9:45 AM | 10:45 AM | Surf C | Defining Customer Approach for Master Data Management |
| Wednesday, Apr 18 | 11:00 AM | 12:00 AM | Breakers H | CRM Analytics Overview |
| Wednesday, Apr 18 | 3:15 PM | 5:30 PM | Reef B | Fusion Middlware SIG |
| Wednesday, Apr 18 | 7:30 PM | 10:30 PM | Beach | Collaborate 07 Beach Party |
| Thursday, Apr 19 | 8:30 AM | 9:30 AM | Lagoon D | Oracle 11g Database: Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence |
| Thursday, Apr 19 | 1:00 PM | 11:00 PM | airport | Flying Home |
I'm glad to be heading out next week, I work out of my home office most of the time when I'm not at a client site so this is going to give me a chance to meet face to face a lot of the people I talk to on a daily basis. Along with a bunch of friends who I don't get to see very often.If I'm not presenting and you want to try and catch me around, either give me a call or stop by the IT Convergence booth in the vendor hall. I should have all my presentations and papers up here by the end of next week (as soon as I finish them up).
Count Down to Collaborate
Sixteen days until Collaborate and I just realized I'm actually doing five presentations instead of 4 like I had originally thought. Dan Norris mentioned he needed a pretty face on stage to help him out and I guess he meant it. Hopefully I can make some time to spend at the tables instead of in a session
I'm really happy to be presenting again this year, I've had the opportunities to work with some challenging clients and project over the last year. It 's nice to be able to share some first hand experience with the technology and tools instead of the typical marketing fluff from the other conferences.
Heres a list of the sessions I'll be presenting in:
| Day | Time | Paper Number | Session Title | Track | Room |
| Monday - April 16 | 9:15 AM-10:15 AM | 502 | Oracle Identity Management - The Total Identity Solution | Middleware | Surf E |
| Monday - April 16 | 3:30 PM-4:30 PM | 141 | Virtualizing Your Development and Test Environments with VMWare | Architecture | Mandalay Bay C |
| Tuesday - April 17 | 9:45 AM-12:00 PM | 327 | Oracle Real Application Clusters Load Balancing and Failover Options | Database | Palm D |
| Tuesday - April 17 | 4:45 PM-5:45 PM | 441 | Developing Speedy Applications with AJAX | Development | Palm D |
| Wednesday - April 18 | 8:30 AM-9:30 AM | 531 | Securing Web Services | Middleware | Surf C |
I should have all the presentations and papers online shortly after the conference if anyone can't make it and have interest in the topics. It's going to be good to see a bunch of people that I rarely get to see in person. If anyone wants to meet up feel free to give me a call, as always my cell number is in the top right corner of the page.
See everyone there!
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