I finally added blog-posting (sort of) on VBHistory.com. It wasn’t nearly as cumbersome as I’d expected. Not nearly as slow in displaying records either. I was prepared for horrors. I should have known better. And now I do.

My first major PHP/mySQL project is finally walking. http://www.vblife.net

It’s intended for collecting everything I can think of about Virginia Beach into one place. I don’t have everything working yet, but most of it is. I could have held off longer but I felt it was close enough to unwrap it. I still need to work on the photo library, which is pathetic at this point, but it works. The registration process is working, and most of the other features are working. The discussion forums are 101 level, even for my past efforts in ASP, but they “work”. Anyhow, i have more work to do yet. Gives me something to look forward to.

I started my web development life with ColdFusion and CFML, then moved to ASP. I tried ASP.NET but one thing after another seemed to prevent me from jumping with both feet. Timing mostly. I had all the tools and a decent amount of training to make the jump, but the timing was always horrible. I still work with ASP daily, in between scripting and kissing massive amounts of ass to stay employed. However, a new project on my (personal) plate is giving me a great opportunity to revisit something I only briefly touched on back in college: PHP. Boy, has it progressed since then. This project is also combining mySQL into the mix. I’ve not only been totally immersed in ASP, but MS-SQL as well. So this is really making my brain sweat. PHP is nice. Sort of like a mix of CFML and ASP. The syntax (to me) looks like javascript, still, but the libraries and function collections have grown immensely. After learning the translation of < % %> to < ? ?> and how form posts work, then I figured out session and server variables, and then all the issues with using preg_quote() to wrap sql content calls. I’m still poking around, but it’s really cool to be learning something new again. Especially at age 43, when IT considers me a dinosaur.

This article by Tom Liston is an HTML rendering of what was actually a PDF presentation on the topic of inside-out VM probing.  If you search Google using “vmware guest machine registry” it’s the top hit.  Basically, it describes the use of various techniques to probe from within a guest VM to determine if it is in fact a VM and not a “physical” host.  It’s not at all hard, as anyone that’s looked at WMI or the registry from within a VM can vouch for.  The issue is why you’d want to cloak this to fool the guest into thinking it’s not a guest at all.  The reasons given are valid, one in particular:  There is indeed a popular technique in most malware today that probes for VM guest environments and either causes the malware to sleep or run in restricted function mode.  The goal being to fool the person inspecting the malware into only seeing some (if any) of the malware’s capability or behavior.  It makes perfect sense and is borderline genius (if I may invoke that term).

I ran across this while searching for information on how to effectively inventory guest vm’s on a given physical host for reporting and auditing purposes.  The inventory system we use is one I developed entirely on KixTart (www.kixtart.org) which works extremely well, extremely fast and extremely reliable.  That’s pretty much, well, extreme.  I’m kidding of course, it’s not really extreme in the sense of general technique, many people use the same approach with Kix or other tools.  Regardless, I can detect VMware, VirtualPC or Parallels on Windows clients, but I’m having a tough time querying for the guest VM’s on the client.  Still researching this.