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New Two-Headed Hard Drive Intended To Secure Web Sites

dlur writes: "This article states that Scarabs (In Japanese), a Japanese company, is developing a hard drive with two heads, one read-only and another that is read/write. With this comes two cables, the read-only side going to the external web server, and the r/w cable going to an internal protected server. While this should make it quite a bit tougher for script kiddies to place their mark on a page, I doubt it will stop any real hackers from getting to a site's DB as that would still need to be r/w."

137 of 354 comments (clear)

  1. slashdot freak show by tps12 · · Score: 4, Funny

    First a 60-foot squid, now a mutant two-headed hard drive. What next, the announcement of the Bearded Lady Linux distro?

    --

    Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
    1. Re:slashdot freak show by The_Guv'na · · Score: 4, Funny

      Nope, no bearded lady as yet. You'll just have to make do with Lesbian Linux.

      Ali

    2. Re:slashdot freak show by Phrogman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's odd. You would think that any Distro calling itself "Lesbian Linux" would not have "man" pages. I would think they would be called "womyn" pages or something :D

      --
      "The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
  2. Snake Oil by Carnage4Life · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Two hard drives heads, one OS, one root/administrator account. If your box is r00ted, it doesn't matter how many hard drives or hard drive heads you have you have still been 0wn3d.

    1. Re:Snake Oil by SlamMan · · Score: 2

      Seems like it would work better as one of the cables goes to your web server box, and the other goes to your dev box.

      --
      Mod point free since 2001
    2. Re:Snake Oil by Xaoswolf · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Actually since the drive has two cables. One for the webserver, and another to go to another machine, that wouldn't need to have the same password. The computer that has the read/write capabilities doesn't even have to be on the network, so they would have to actually break physical security of the company to hack the web page.

      Instead of saying that the sun can burn you, he told someone sitting in a dark closet that they are going to get burnt if they stay there. Still maybe not flamebait, but if you are going to type in l33t to look cool, at least read the article.

    3. Re:Snake Oil by schon · · Score: 2

      another to go to another machine, that wouldn't need to have the same password. The computer that has the read/write capabilities doesn't even have to be on the network, so they would have to actually break physical security of the company

      Have they thought this through? It sounds like a good idea, but in reality, it would be painfully slow. Say goodbye to OS disc caching - unless you rewrite the driver to make the OS flush it's buffers when the "secure" box updates the content (which may or may not be as easy as it sounds - does Linux or BSD even have a callback for that?)

      If you require this kind of security, why not just burn the data to a CDRW? You'll get better speeds (once the server has the data cached)... or how about run the system over NFS or Samba? (I'm sure that a code audit of NFS would take less time/money than engineering something like this) You allow read-only access on the "secure" box, and filter everything else.

      While not necessarily snake oil, I'm inclined to be as sceptical as the original poster... I have to wonder where the designer's thoughts were when he came up with this. It seems to me that there are much better ways of doing the same thing.

    4. Re:Snake Oil by John_Booty · · Score: 2

      Say goodbye to OS disc caching

      That doesn't necessarily have to be the case. You would have two drives on the webserver... one for your swap partition and other stuff, and this read-only monster the article describes.

      Like you, however, I'm still having a hard time understanding the real benefits of this contraption!

      --

      OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
    5. Re:Snake Oil by Tony-A · · Score: 2

      I can think of a case where it would be useful.
      The read-only monster has data you want/need to make public in something resembling real-time, but you can't or don't want to trust the public server that is serving that information to preserve the integrity of the data.
      Whenever somebody get a corrupted file, they'll just try again so a corrupted cache is not that much of a problem. Not a real good solution, since a compromised server can serve bogus data even if the disk it's reading from is not bogus.

    6. Re:Snake Oil by schon · · Score: 2

      That doesn't necessarily have to be the case. You would have two drives on the webserver... one for your swap partition and other stuff, and this read-only monster the article describes.

      You misunderstood what I meant by disc caching..

      On any modern system, the OS buffers drive data in the computer's RAM.. this gives a huge performance benefit.. (Try timing a grep of a large file, then do it again.. second time will be MUCH faster.)

      The only reason this works is because the system knows that it's the only machine accessing the drive (so therefore the data read from the disk only changes if the OS changes it..) If the drive is connected to another system, then the OS can't cache anything read from the drive, because it might change between the time of reading, and when it's passed to the application.

      The read/write status of the drive doesn't affect this (boot your favorute Linux distro's CD, and run the 'free' command - you'll see that buffers/cache are still used, even though the only drive is read-only.)

  3. Pfttt, old news by Dirtside · · Score: 2, Funny

    Zaphod's been using this kind of drive for years to store his porn collection.

    --
    "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
  4. More Speed? by 1010011010 · · Score: 4, Interesting


    This sounds like a nice drive to use in TiVo-type units as well, so that the read head can return data as the r/w head updates the media, rather than flopping the only head back and forth.

    --
    Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
    1. Re:More Speed? by thing12 · · Score: 2

      or... Option 4: heads on own arm/servo and on opposite ends of the platter.

      Why not just have the heads on the left and right side of the platter. it might make for a slightly larger drive, but you can absolutely have several arms/servos at different points on the disk. Based on the size of arms I'd say you could have up to 6 with quite a bit of breathing room.
      It's not hard to imagine what a nightmare the controller design would be though...

    2. Re:More Speed? by Krellan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I thought of this as well, back when I interviewed at ReplayTV (I didn't get in, but that's neither here nor there).

      Why not make a hard drive with two arms? They would be located 180 degrees apart from each other, so they would never bump into each other.

      Each arm would be able to access the entire range of the hard drive.

      One would be read-write and the other would be read-only, or both of them could be read-write if there would be no significant increase in cost.

      This would be great for TiVo and ReplayTV units, which need to read large continuous amounts of data while writing large continuous amounts of different data! And it would be much quieter than the current one-arm drives, that have to thrash, making the units more appealing in a residential environment (one of the main complaints about the units is that the drives are too loud).

      Considering the large quantities of drives that TiVo or ReplayTV use, is a special order out of the question? I'm sure this has been thought of before, and with a large enough order, anything is possible within reason. Western Digital made a custom drive for a large order, and found it to have such a good idea that it was officially added to their product line! (It's the larger 8MB cache in a "special edition" of their 100GB drive.)

      Unfortunately this kind of drive would not work well with IDE. IDE is designed to wait for one command to complete before executing another command. So this means that the gain of being able to execute read-write commands in parallel would be neutered by this protocol. A solution is to use a SCSI drive that supports Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)! This drive, if the controller and OS software support it, can stack up multiple commands that can be resolved in any order, as fast as the drive allows. This means that multiple outstanding commands could be sent to the drive, and the drive firmware would be free to execute them in the optimal order.

      This would be a great advantage, as it could allow a slower drive to be used (less power consumption, less heat, less chance of failure). The slowness of the drive would be offset by the two arm design, making the drive effectively twice as fast. It might be even faster than that, as seek time would be reduced to almost nothing when reading or writing simultaneously from two different places!

      The only disadvantage would be increased cost of having to use a SCSI drive (including controller) versus an IDE drive, and a one-time cost of having to add support for TCQ to whatever OS that is being used.

      I wonder if a two-arm drive is being planned for use in ReplayTV or TiVo units? It seems like too good of an idea to pass up....

    3. Re:More Speed? by Callamon · · Score: 2, Informative
      It would need to use option 2 for a performance gain.. Otherwise you'll actually incur a performance hit due to contention for the armature between the 2 machines.

      It shouldn't be too difficult to add a second arm, that wouldn't interfere with the primry R/W head. Of course it does double the chances of a head-crash... This is the way that it appears to be being done according to the web site

    4. Re:More Speed? by nerdbert · · Score: 2, Informative

      Nice in theory, but it won't fly. Two arms means replicating some of the most expesive parts of the drive all over again. Double electronics (servo, preamp, channel) because you wouldn't get reaonable SNR trying to share them, more flex cables, more of those nasty suspension systems, arm motors, etc. You could share the backend of the uprocessor (although it'd require a serious upgrade of the processors we use now since none of them have the umph to do a read and servo calcs at the same time), buffer RAM (although you'd need an increase in that, too, to handle two streams), motor driver, platter, motor, and the controller, but other than that you need to replicate many very expensive parts again. I'd guess you'd increase the cost by 50% or more. The idea's floated around the industry before and prototypes have been built, but in the end the performance boost for the cost wasn't there and no such drive had made it into production.

      WD made the bigger buffer because it was cheap. Adding RAM isn't hard and with RAM prices its cheap. Doubling the front end is a nasty, expensive business.

    5. Re:More Speed? by Sloppy · · Score: 2
      While this sounds like a good idea for performance, I can't imagine it being developed for stuff like Tivo. The development cost and non-comodity price-per unit would exceed the cost of simpy putting two (or more) drives in the Tivo. (Granted, that's not quite the same as a single drive with two heads, but close enough if you're clever with how you allocate new storage.)

      BTW, I have never heard my Tivo headthrash. Maybe it's just really quiet, but I always just assumed it use some sort of interleaving trick. (Since that's what I came up with when I tried to figure out how they might have done it. If you store things non-contiguously, and you can write to free space while reading from allocated space, all on the same tracks/cylinders.) No?

      --
      As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
    6. Re:More Speed? by |<amikaze · · Score: 2

      Why not just hook it up to BOTH ide controllers?

    7. Re:More Speed? by PapaZit · · Score: 2

      I doubt that current drives are too slow to allow the simultaneous reading and writing of an mpeg stream, especially with a decent buffer on the driver. Write a few megs, read a few megs, repeat. Given the type of data (large compressed streamed files), you can do really effective readahead.

      I know that I can read and write mpeg2 streams to an NFS mounted disk over 100MB/s ethernet without problems. Over IDE hardly even seems like a challenge, and it's hardly the sort of thing that'd justify expensive proprietary hardware.

      --
      Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
    8. Re:More Speed? by SCHecklerX · · Score: 2

      You can do this using raid striping if you have 2 or more drives. Put them on separate controllers and watch them scream.

  5. Still exploitable? by Erasmus+Darwin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It seems a malicious user could still attempt to serve defaced pages off of a ram disk on the compromised machine. Yes, a reboot will fix the problem, but that's only slightly more convenient than restoring a compromised system from backups. Furthermore, I suspect that the read-only harddrive would encourage admins to become lazier with regard to applying server patches, since the system would be perceived as "secure".

    1. Re:Still exploitable? by yiantsbro · · Score: 2, Funny

      A reboot is "only slightly more convenient" than a system restore? Exactly what is your reboot procedure? Does it involve chants, incantations, burning of incense, animal sacrifice, etc? Kind of like saying repainting my car is only slightly more convenient than simply going through a carwash. :)

    2. Re:Still exploitable? by Erasmus+Darwin · · Score: 2
      "A reboot is "only slightly more convenient" than a system restore?"

      Assuming that you've good a nice, current filesystem backup that you can send over the network to reimage the machine, sure. I think the same people who would jump through the hoops of setting up this dual-access harddrive are the same people who would have an existing, easy solution on hand, anyway.

    3. Re:Still exploitable? by karnal · · Score: 2

      Well, then you get 2 memory controllers.....

      Ahh, never mind.

      --
      Karnal
    4. Re:Still exploitable? by Florian+Weimer · · Score: 2

      You are right. Guess what? One of the Code Red variants never made its way to the disk of a compromised system.

  6. Write protect switch.... by hughk · · Score: 2
    I could stick a write protect switch on my drive, at least then I could synchronise the readers with the modifiers.

    Having a read and a read-write cable doesn't really solve anything. You really have to take the web-site down while you are updating, otherwise you need a very interesting combo of web site and file system.

    --
    See my journal, I write things there
    1. Re:Write protect switch.... by jarodss · · Score: 2
      Actually you don't need to take the site offline when updating.

      The r/w cable is connected to the other head in the drive, the r/w head is controlled by the secure server, one that is not accessable by anyone outside the internal network (thou I'd prefer it to be the physical server).

      That way there is no need to take down the site to do updates, just access the correct location from the internal network.

    2. Re:Write protect switch.... by hughk · · Score: 2

      Um AFAIK, it wouldn't work, because you would have no locking across the file system. You would have the problem of trying to read incomplete files and directories. The system with read-only access will always need to fsck the file system before it can complete a clean mount unless the r/w system does a full umount.

      --
      See my journal, I write things there
  7. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  8. But.... But.....! by The_Shadows · · Score: 5, Funny

    Too easy... Must resist!
    Nah, forget it.

    "I mean, two heads are better than one."

  9. Protection from defacement only, and then iffy. by Cutriss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As Timothy points out, this only prevents script kiddies from being able to modify existing content using a backdoor or whatnot. However, it won't do anything about denial of service attacks, since the server software and its modules/plugins are all in RAM, and will still be receiving inputs. Buffer overflows and whatnot are still possible. However, defacements will at least go away, and those are the second-most high-profile types of attacks, as they're visible to the general public. Database attacks would be the worst, though, since, as Timothy again points out, they must be writeable.

    --
    "Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
    1. Re:Protection from defacement only, and then iffy. by Dalroth · · Score: 3, Interesting
      However, it won't do anything about denial of service attacks, since the server software and its modules/plugins are all in RAM, and will still be receiving inputs.

      That's a nice point, however, I don't think this should have any impact on your decision wether to use this product/strategy or not.

      DOS attacks are a problem that are near impossible to solve no matter what hardware you may have (even your 10's of thousands of dollars worth of Cisco routers). This product isn't targetted at DOS attacks.

      Buffer overflows and whatnot are still possible.

      BUT BUT BUT! They are FAR less effective. One of the problems with overflows are that they give you access to the machine. The danger is when they can login to the machine, install all their hacking tools, packet sniffers, and what not. That's where the real damage is done.

      Now, if the ENTIRE hard disk on the web server is read only, and the machine that they use to make changes to the partition is on a complete seperate network (perhaps not even connected to the internet at all) this could be a VERY effective way of limiting damage done (especially if you are carefull about what applications are installed on your server to begin with).

      Database attacks would be the worst, though, since, as Timothy again points out, they must be writeable.

      Finally, this is not necessarilly true as well. If you run a website that provides the user with realtime information (such as stock quotes, or mortgage rates), most of the data is coming from some source internal to your company. You can easily make that database readonly for the web server, and seperate any minimal user info database into it's own read/write database thus further limiting the damage they can do. In fact, if you aren't doing this already you're probably doing something wrong. Here at work we have two seperate copies of our database (replicated in realtime). One is linked directly to our internal accounting system and updated frequently. The other is 100% read only and ALL reports are run from that.

      I'm not nitpicking you, or anybody in particular. This is a GREAT option. It's not perfect yes, but if you really think about it, you can use this thing in many very very powerfull ways (and as mentioned above you can do some similar things by tweaking IDE cables and useing CD roms). Same thing can be said for Linux router distributions running off of read only 3¼ floppies or CD-Roms! :)

      Bryan

    2. Re:Protection from defacement only, and then iffy. by skinfitz · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Whats to stop someone creating a RAM disk, placing a defacement page in there along with httpd and httpd.conf to point to the defaced page?

  10. Huh? by Tom7 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You don't need to write to the disk to make a compromised server serve up bogus content.

    Furthermore, we can already do this same thing by mounting a network file system (say) in read-only mode. Other than being funky, what's the point?

    1. Re:Huh? by Mark+Bainter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The point is that it would be impossible to override this in software. I mean, following your logic you can also just make the files 444. But if someone gains access to that webserver at a high enough level they can change all that. With this scenario they can't.

      --
      "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
      --James Madison
    2. Re:Huh? by Jeppe+Salvesen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This device would make it physically impossible to write. When you mount read-only, there is still at some level a possibility that someone might bypass the read-only lock.

      I actually think this device has limited, but good applications. Anyone serving up static content would be a bit safer with this technology. Of course, logging traffic and such would be a bitch, but the server would only need a reboot if someone broke in.

      --

      Stop the brainwash

    3. Re:Huh? by Junta · · Score: 2

      I think his point is valid. Even if a cracker roots a server, he can't change stuff if a separate system dictates permission. Given proper firewalling rules and/or login configuration, the second system is just as untouchable as the host system in this multi-hard dirve configuration. The key difference would be performance (the two systems don't care what the other is doing), but with the typical bandwidth bottleneck, hard drive IO is the least of your concerns, particularly with static content.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    4. Re:Huh? by Diamon · · Score: 2

      I had the same question but I'd assume the answer would be lower latency on your reads. But assuming you had a high bandwidth network and there was no way to write tto a drive shared as read-only then all this gives you is a proprietary piece of hardware to replace if it goes down. Also now you would have concerned of what to do if one of the paired servers went down.

    5. Re:Huh? by Sc00ter · · Score: 2
      But if that system isn't connected to a network, how would they get in?

    6. Re:Huh? by Dalroth · · Score: 2

      At my previous employer we had a machine running nothing but syslogd (it was an old 386 machine no less!). All our other servers broadcasted their log entries to the syslog server. It ran NOTHING else, and in fact, if you wanted to connect to it you had to physically walk over to the machine and login at the console.

      Without a syslog exploit, that machine is near impossible to break into and a great way to protect your log files. Personally I think any company doing any serious linux server work should be doing something similar! ;)

      Bryan

    7. Re:Huh? by Mark+Bainter · · Score: 2
      I don't think anyone said you couldn't serve bad content. Just that you couldn't physically replace existing content. Granted, that shouldn't be a HUGE gain, as you should be able to easily replace that data anyway. (Via backups, versioning, whatever)

      I don't get your issue with rebooting. Why would you have to reboot to update static content? The other server still has write access, only the webserver has read only access.

      --
      "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
      --James Madison
    8. Re:Huh? by Mark+Bainter · · Score: 2
      Well, sure, if the admin is an idiot. But no system in the world is going to protect you from that.

      But if he has a clue, and the read server is in the dmz, and the write server is on the internal network, and no access is allowed from dmz -> internal then how exactly is he going to get there?

      And even if he did, hacking root doesn't guarantee you a hack on other machines unless the other machines have the same password(s), or have a trust relationship with that machine that can be exploited.

      --
      "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
      --James Madison
    9. Re:Huh? by Mark+Bainter · · Score: 2
      IF a seperate system dictates permission. But all he stated was it wasn't any different from mounting a remote filesystem readonly. If the remote fs is dictating that, and your scenario is in effect then yes, the only difference will be in performance. (Direct IO to the drive is a fair bit faster than a hop through a router/firewall to another server). However, if all he did is "mount it readonly" then someone gaining root could remount it r/w if the other system were not locked down. Perhaps I am guilty of surface reading and not looking for what he was really saying, but even w/out the security gains you do gain a fair bit on performance.

      --
      "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
      --James Madison
    10. Re:Huh? by Xerithane · · Score: 2

      The difference between a network file system being mounted with server dictated permissions and the two-headed hard drive is you don't need the write-server to be on the network. Or at least on an external network.

      The first thing I thought while reading this was, "Damn that's a good idea.. I can't believe I've never thought of anything close to that."

      There are a lot of details, but I think as a basic block to build on for security this is a very good thing.

      --
      Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
    11. Re:Huh? by Tom7 · · Score: 2

      Obviously the point is to make the file system server dictate permissions; otherwise, the file system might as well be local. It's true that talking directly to the drive will probably be faster (though you will also no doubt need kernel mods so it can notice that the drive's contents is changing underneath it, and this can be a mess and impact performance), but it's unlikely that this speed will be a bottleneck since after all you're limited by how fast you can send that data out over another network connection. Of course, the money you save not buying weird proprietary hardware could sure make a difference elsewhere...

    12. Re:Huh? by Tom7 · · Score: 2

      Callamon, you are asserting lots of things that are just wrong. Most of the things you're claiming will solve the problem are easily circumvented.

      It is a simple matter, once a computer has been compromised, to run any binary of the hacker's choice *without* even needing to write to disk. The point of most buffer overflow (for instance) attacks is that they allow the execution of *arbitrary* code. You can use that to set up a network connection, listen for a binary and write it into memory, and then jump into the code.

      You also can't 'disable' commands (without perhaps modifying the kernel, which seems pretty sketchy), because the system calls will still be available and can be called from the code that the hacker uploads.

    13. Re:Huh? by aralin · · Score: 2

      No, it does not have any use. If you can remount from ro to rw, you have to be root. If the filesystem is NFS with root_squash, you won't write to it anyway. If you are root, you can make a new filesystem on ramdisk and serve files anyway. This new hardrive provides absolutely no new protection in this case.

      --
      If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
    14. Re:Huh? by Jeppe+Salvesen · · Score: 2

      With all due respect, I don't think you quite get it. Making a ramdisk file system presupposes that you have the module available or compiled in.

      If you mount a file system over a network, the person that hacked the NFS client can attack the NFS server. NFS has been vulnerable before.

      If you have this solution, you will need absolutely no network connection to your inner networks. The more I think of it, the more it seems a rather elegant way of implementing a DMZ.

      --

      Stop the brainwash

  11. No use for RDBMS-sites by MattRog · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As the article poster touched on, this won't do anything if you're concerned with RDBMS integrity (and have a site which requires write access to your RDBMS).

    For static content, it sounds like a cool idea, even if they get root all they can do is view things and not touch. Of course, if that compromised boxen is attached to an internal network to your RDBMS, then they can go to hax0ring the heck out of your DB, they just have to use whatever tools you have installed on the web server.

    --

    Thanks,
    --
    Matt
  12. Fundamental problems here by mblase · · Score: 2

    Every e-commerce Web site I can think of requires writing data to the server based on user-entered data using the Web site itself. If I want the site to store my credit card number, or even an account profile with my shipping address, the Web server needs to be able to write to a hard drive somewhere.

    Now, the sites that are the greatest/most significant targets for hackers are the ones that store personal data on the site's users, credit card data being the most valuable. So this hard drive would be useless for the servers that need it most.

    Besides, even if the above weren't the case -- for instance, a banking site that (for some reason) only allowed you to read your account data, not make any transactions online -- does read-only really prevent hacking? All it means is that the hackers can't make changes to the server data; it doesn't mean that they can't steal passwords to access that data. So this might be good for the companies that use it, but it also gives a false sense of security by providing no additional protection to me, the user.

  13. Re:What would be the input route? by Deosyne · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't know the technical particulars to the drive, but I'd guess that they'd have to make a way for all static data to be stored on the read-only head and have only dynamic data on the read-write head. Of course, they'd have to make both accessible to the web server in order to receive info from users, but it would help reduce the amount of damage that skript kiddies could do by ensuring that the entire site can't be taken out. Of course, regular backups and a decent admin provide the same level of security for a site. So this only really looks good for reducing the size of backups and for static websites that are only updated by the server admins.

    But then, of course, I'm no expert with these drives and there may be other factors which I am overlooking.

  14. NFS? by Micah · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well an external web server could be set up to mount everything NFS read only. Seems like that would be a bit simpler.... ...but since 99% of sites are dynamic it seems to be an impossibility anyway...

  15. Hey before you go out and buy one by t0qer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Remember you can do the SAME thing with the hard drive you currently own and a CD drive. Here are some simple instructions...

    A create your website
    B burn it to CD
    C modify httpd.conf, document root, set to /mnt/cdrom

    Voila! and I didn't need to hire a team of japanese researchers to figure it out either.

    1. Re:Hey before you go out and buy one by doughnuthole · · Score: 5, Informative

      Or you could put a switch on IDE pin 23, the write line. Flipping the switch to disconnect the line would prevent any data from being written, while still having the higher speeds and lower seek times of a hard drive.

      It would be simple to just flip the switch, modify your files and then switch it back when you are done so no changes can be made later.

      Even better, put it on an electronic keyswitch mounted on the front of the box, and you have an effective security system for things like demo stations and kiosks.

    2. Re:Hey before you go out and buy one by siphoncolder · · Score: 2, Funny

      Not exactly a good solution for a high-volume site, though. Can you imagine /. being served from a CD-ROM ?

      --
      i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
    3. Re:Hey before you go out and buy one by t0qer · · Score: 2

      Well what about storing a site on some eproms? That would work for high volume site. It could work something like this...

      A. Create website.
      B. Attatch big box of eproms to burning device and burn website.(parrelel port, whatever) Unplug when done.
      C. Attatch big box of eproms to webserver via ide/scsi interface
      D. Very fast, and probably going to be fairly cheap to do soon.

    4. Re:Hey before you go out and buy one by Neon+Spiral+Injector · · Score: 2

      Well since Slashdot.org it pretty much a dynamic site, there wouldn't be much on the CD-ROM. So it would be just about perfect for the static parts of a site like Slashdot to be stored on a RO medium.

      You just `grep -r null /mnt/cdrom` on boot, and have enough RAM to hold the site.

    5. Re:Hey before you go out and buy one by Jonny+290 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yeah, and some dumb overclocker kid at the colo puts a UV cold cathode in there cause it 'looks cool' and erases the whole fuckin thing. :)

      Neat idea, in all seriousness.

      --
      Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
    6. Re:Hey before you go out and buy one by Jonny+290 · · Score: 2

      *Jonny 290 sets mode: +senseofhumor t0qer*

      There ya go. Now read it again. ;)

      --
      Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
    7. Re:Hey before you go out and buy one by t0qer · · Score: 2

      chmod -smartass Johnny 290
      Yeah you were so funny I had shits and giggles :P

    8. Re:Hey before you go out and buy one by Christopher+Biggs · · Score: 2, Informative
      That (disconnecting the ATA write line) won't work, because you won't be able to send commands to the drive.

      --
      -- veni vidi nuclei deceri --- I came, I saw, I dumped core.
  16. Do it for SPEED, not SECURITY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've often wondered why slower RPM drives don't do dual read-write heads for faster access times and transfer speeds. I'd rather buy a dual-headed 7200 RPM drive with a single Serial-ATA rather than some 15000 RPM drive. The slower dual-headed drive should be able to keep up with the faster RPM drive, yet be quieter (the platter motor -- two head positioning motors would be a bit louder, but not much so), utilize a higher on-disk bit density, and with a good control system, give me better overall speed with a random access usage pattern.

    1. Re:Do it for SPEED, not SECURITY by bedessen · · Score: 2
      I've often wondered why slower RPM drives don't do dual read-write heads for faster access times and transfer speeds.

      The reason is that you can achieve the same speedup with RAID without having to create custom hardware. There are a number of problems with doing multiple heads, and the truth is that the HD industry is cutthroat. You must sell millions to recoop R&D costs, and the vast majority of users would not want to pay for the considerable extra expense of multiple heads. You would be duplicating a significant amount of hardware without gaining any extra storage--for the same price you could buy two of the "standard" model and have the speedup AND twice the capacity.

      And yes, this has been tried before a long time ago (the Connor Peripherals Chinook model) and it was a failure.

      Read more here.

  17. Re:What would be the input route? by brsmith4 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Seeing as most large web sites don't serve their database off of their web server, I don't think this would be a problem. The code for the web page is served off of the server with that funky two-headed drive. Its read only to the internet, but the dynamic content, for instance user posts here on slashdot, are retreived and stored on a separate, secure db server. Your PHP, ASP, whatever, will call SQL queries to that server and not 'localhost' like (un)usual. Read the original posting. It pretty much states this already with the script kiddes vs. real hackers statement.

  18. What about the admin box? by teamhasnoi · · Score: 2
    ...a read-only head that is connected via one cable to a Web server for people to browse content on the disk file and a read/write head that is connected by another cable to a PC for administrators who renew the data.

    The admins most likely have a network connection on their machine, and if so, that could be hacked.

    Why not a hack that resides in RAM?

    It doesn't seem that this would stop a determined attacker; they'd just do an end run around the tech. It does seem that this would be an excellent way to speed up harddrives in general..audio and video... ohhhh.

  19. NFS can do the same for you by BobaFett · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I can already do this setup for my web server:
    NFS server exports directories with web pages to web server read-only and does not allow logins from the web server (and firewall does its best to block even attempts of such). So even if the web server is fully compromized, the web page cannot be changed.
    Of course, if the web server has writeable disks of its own the cracker could make it serve a page from there instead of the real page; but the two-headed disks will have the same problem, you can only solve it by not giving the web server any writeable disks, boot it from CDROM or from the network.

  20. What a lame-brained idea by Mad+Quacker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Of course none of the R/W computers will be in any way attached to the internet.... in the best possible setup a machine that has access to both networks can be compromised, etc. If it's not, updating will be a major pain, so much so they might as well flip the read-only jumper on the drives between updates rather than use this system.

    Aside from the obvious, there are much better uses for more than one head in a drive. Multiple simultaneous seeks, faster seeks, and twice the raw read rate. The market for this should be huge. Hard drive transfer rate is the bottleneck for most tasks, including boot time. All the while with less heat, power, and noise of the 7200+rpm drives.

    --
    "I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
  21. Nasty thing to do to buffer cache by wowbagger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This would completely screw up any modern OS (or Windows).

    The OS assumes that it, and it alone, modifies the disk, and that the disk won't change state without the OS making that change. This is one of the reasons you don't want to allow raw disk access from a VMWare or DOSemu session to a mounted file system - the emulated OS will access the disk, and the host OS's file system won't know about it. Boom! Instant corrupted file system.

    In the case of this double-ended drive, the web server will assume that, since it has read the disk once, it needn't read that sector again. Then the write side computer modifies the disk, and the web server won't pick it up.

    I'd rather see a disk with dual heads, and the logic to allow the system to read different sectors at the same time, all kept coherent by the drives controller as a way to increase throughput.

    But to use this as a protection on a web server is just plain dumb.

    1. Re:Nasty thing to do to buffer cache by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      What a party pooper. Here we are having a perfectly
      good time talking about something we know absolutely
      nothing about and along comes an educated person that
      decides to spoil the party with a little knowledge.
      Damn you and all of your technology. ;.)

    2. Re:Nasty thing to do to buffer cache by Hard_Code · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Uh, if one OS is completely unaware of another OS's access to hardware, there IS a rather large potential for corruption. Just imagine: web server starts reading file through read-only head, internal machine modifies said file, web server continues to read said file. What happens in this case? What happens if the file is deleted without the web server being notified?

      It has nothing to do with drivers. Drivers live in an island called the operating system, and if those two islands are not connected, a driver on one machine will have no clue what a driver on the other is doing - they will both think they are accessing two completely different disks. Your argument might hold against VMWare if VMWare is really juggling and managing interrupts intelligently (so the operating systems don't step on each other) - but you didn't mention anything about this, and this certainly wouldn't hold for two entirely independent machines with no shared communication mechanism (the whole point of having an insecure web server use the read-only head, while the secure internal server uses the read/write head).

      "Oh, and god forbid, what about NFS and Samba? Are the machines that host the NFS/Samba shares NOT allowed to change the contents of those systems?"

      I'm not sure what your point is. NFS, Samba, and virtually any other network-based sharing system uses cumbersome slow-ass large-grained locking protocols. The article was about two completely seperate machines (no shared communication mechanism like NFS/Samba/sockets/shared mem - nothing).

      --

      It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
    3. Re:Nasty thing to do to buffer cache by Salamander · · Score: 2
      I'm not trying to be an asshole, but my point is this happens all the time and it's rather easy with the proper drivers installed.

      If you're not trying to be an asshole, what's with all the sarcasm? While it would be tempting to say that you can be an asshole without even trying, the more likely conclusion is that you really are trying and just want to leave yourself some wiggle room.

      The problem is that caching occurs above the disk-driver level. Depending on the system, this might occur in the buffer cache, page cache, or within the filesystem itself, and that's just for data; there are usually things like inode/directory caches present as well. Writes directly through the driver or below - in this case directly to storage from another machine entirely - will result in those cached copies being stale without the filesystem knowing it.

      If you still think drivers will save the day, it's easy enough to do an experiment and see how wrong you are. Write one program to access a file through the filesystem and all of the usual caches, while another figures out the actual on-disk location of that file's data and modifies it through the raw disk interface (bypassing everything above the disk driver). It shouldn't take you too long to see some stale data. For extra credit, try having the raw-disk program modify something other than a data block and see what happens.

      As for your point about network filesystems, note that the ones you mention all funnel I/O through one machine. Usually, this means that the right cache interactions do occur on that machine, but I have actually seen implementations of NFS in particular where the server could not safely access the served volume for precisely these reasons. True shared-storage filesystems are very rare because it's such a pain, and I should know because I was co-architect for one of the few that ever made it to market. Believe me, I've wished that drivers solved these problems, but they simply don't.

      --
      Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
    4. Re:Nasty thing to do to buffer cache by Fulcrum+of+Evil · · Score: 2

      It has nothing to do with drivers. Drivers live in an island called the operating system, and if those two islands are not connected, a driver on one machine will have no clue what a driver on the other is doing - they will both think they are accessing two completely different disks.

      A filesystem has already been written that is able to cope with multiple writers - it's called GFS and it's intended for a SAN, with multiple machines accessing multiple disks. This situation, however, is considerably simpler - since only one machine can write (this one requires no changes), all the other one needs is some way to determine when something should be flushed from its cache.

      --
      "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
    5. Re:Nasty thing to do to buffer cache by Tony-A · · Score: 2

      All those drivers make assumptions about the disk they are reading NOT changing in the middle of reading them.
      Easiest way to visualise. Read something from a floppy. In the middle of the read, remove the floppy, take it to another machine. Delete the file the first machine was reading and put some other stuff on it. Then replace the floppy on the first machine where the first machine has no way to tell that anything has happened.
      Disclaimer: I have shared a disk between two systems. Crude and messy but better than messing with the tape drives on the two systems. There are NO proper drivers for this type of thing.

    6. Re:Nasty thing to do to buffer cache by Salamander · · Score: 2

      There are several others - HighRoad, SANergy, QVFS, etc. Also, let's not forget that DEC pretty much beat us all to the punch with work they did on VAXclusters.

      --
      Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
  22. Log server by Kizzle · · Score: 2

    I've had a similar idea when it comes to making a log server. If it is only physically possible to write to the log server, then there would be no way someone could erase their tracks.

    1. Re:Log server by SuiteSisterMary · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I've had a similar idea when it comes to making a log server. If it is only physically possible to write to the log server, then there would be no way someone could erase their tracks.

      Why do you think a lot of logservers print to a lineprinter? :-)

      Hell, I think the upper levels of the old Orange Book *required* a hardcopy of logentries, in real time.

      --
      Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
    2. Re:Log server by kevin+lyda · · Score: 2

      now, where might one find line printers these days?

      --
      US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
  23. Well it's a clever idea but... by rocjoe71 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Some of the biggest e-commerce blunders have been allowing hackers to read credit card numbers, etc.

    Sure, this new drive can protect existing data from destruction, but we need protection from the wrong people reading the information that's already in a website.

    --
    Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
    1. Re:Well it's a clever idea but... by kreyg · · Score: 2

      Well, then you need a write-only head. :-)

      --
      sig fault
    2. Re:Well it's a clever idea but... by PunchMonkey · · Score: 2

      Some of the biggest e-commerce blunders have been allowing hackers to read credit card numbers, etc.

      Very good point. So what we need is a hard drive with two heads, one readwrite, and one write. :-)

      --
      I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
  24. Been done before... by Darren.Moffat · · Score: 2

    This has been done before on a slightly different scale.

    When you have a storage array that supports multi initiator SCSI you can connect one connection of the array to the external facing machine in read-only mode and the other connection to the internal facing machine in read-write mode.

  25. Read/Write Servers by Null_Packet · · Score: 2

    Unless you want to go to the trouble of making an OS that is 100% read-only, you'll need to have something writeable on that web server. It'd be cheaper to serve your website off CD-ROM (for the sake of this argument) but who's to keep a script kiddie from mounting your website on a ramdisk or another writable area?

    Besides, you can always make hot-swap hard drive read-only with a jumper block.

    1. Re:Read/Write Servers by SuiteSisterMary · · Score: 2
      Unless you want to go to the trouble of making an OS that is 100% read-only

      Actually a capital suggestion. Make a bootable CD-ROM that has your OS, drivers, and webserver. Make a ram drive for temp space, if required. Then have it mount a read-only partition, and you're aces.

      This is quite common, actually. Something gets buggered up, you reboot. New patch? Update your image, burn a new CD, and you're gone.

      --
      Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
  26. How would this exactly ah, work.... by weave · · Score: 2
    I assume it'd be presented as two different devices. OK, so you mount one as r/o and the other as r/w but the r/o mount wouldn't be expecting nor appreciating changes to what's on the disk being done by another system.

    It's the same deal with a SAN (Storage Area Network). I could easily zone two physical servers into the same LUN on the SAN and make one mount r/o and the other r/w, but unless the OS has some sort of understanding that this kind of thing is going to happen (like a clustering system), I would expect some problems on the r/o mounted system.

    p.s. I'm no expert, I'm just wondering logistically how this is all going to work. It doesn't make sense to me...

    p.p.s. I know there is no real security in mounting a disk r/o because someone could just remount r/w, unlike the physical solution this product provides. But in either case, I would think the issues with two boxes mounting the same file system without clustering would be a problem. If it isn't, I'd love to do something similar with my SAN just for performance and load balancing purposes...

  27. how about performance? by Stoutlimb · · Score: 2

    How about 2 r/w heads, to increase performance?

  28. Ahem by The_Shadows · · Score: 5, Funny

    So sayeth the article:

    Hackers will be unable to attack Web sites protected by a new security system unless they can change the laws of physics, according to Naoto Takano

    I'm working on it all ready. So far I've managed to get the relativity theory down to E/2 = MC^(1.9)

    And standard Earth Gravity now has a value of 8.8m/s/s.

    Up.

    And don't try to fill up a garbage bag anytime soon. I've been playing with volume. They're now "Garbage Bags of Holding."

    1. Re:Ahem by Kredal · · Score: 2

      I claim prior art on the Garbage bag of holding. I hung one that was full of water upside down over a desert one time... Now there's that pesky ocean between Japan and California.

      --
      Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
  29. Gah.. do it in software. by billcopc · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is SO a gimmick. It is no replacement for a properly configured server that's 99.98% locked down. You're going to need a second machine to feed files onto the box anyway, so why not just grant the webserving box read-only access on the file server ? Ideally this server would be totally isolated from the internet, and wouldn't accept write requests coming from the web box. So the only way to update anything is to be sitting on a workstation on the inside, and then to have a valid login on the fileserver.

    This is so frickin' simple, the only reason this Scarabs company is even in business is because there are too many idiots running semi-important servers out there. Having your network admin'd by a clueless fuck is not something that will be solved by a piece of buzzy hardware.

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com
  30. Re:How are cookies (session data) going to be stor by Diamon · · Score: 2

    On a different disk, in other words yes. OS, pagefiles, and files that the web server would be writing to are still on a R/W drive. Information you only view would be on the read only drive.

  31. Hope they try to patent it , Ive got prior art :) by CDWert · · Score: 2

    I built a system like this with 2 and later 3 heads, years ago. actually wrote an article on it for a magazine:)

    Uses 20 Meg MFM single platter 5 1/2 drives (the tolernaces were the most forgiving, I probably had the only 486 with MFM hard drives in it :)

    It was WAY cool though, (I had it under glass to watch it)

    We took pictures, and the rejected aticle, sealed em in an envelope with a signed notarized affidavit. and had the post office postmark the flap .

    I was going to patent it (this is circa 1992) but I was told by many contemperaries it was the dumbest idea they had heard.
    Now if I can find it watch out

    --
    Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
  32. Small (to nonexistant) Market Segment by peterdaly · · Score: 2

    This product seems to me to be useless for any site that provides access to database information through dynamic pages.

    Seeing how most web sites who would be in the market for a product like this have "advanced" sites, I would argue this product has a very small potential customer base.

    -Pete

  33. Re:How are cookies (session data) going to be stor by 1010011010 · · Score: 2

    Uhhh, once you have control of the web server, can't you write outside of DocumentRoot if you choose?

    --
    Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
  34. Correct, you don't need this... by ajs · · Score: 2

    Yes indeed, this is a complicated, sure-to-cause-more-problems-than-it-solves solution to a non-problem. Export filesystems read-only to your static Web servers and read-write to your back-end thinkers (DB servers, content management systems, etc).

    If you're really smart, you're doing all of this on a netapp filer so that the access speed is as good as or better than local-attached storage (and, yes that's true even though it sounds wacked... it's because of thier NVRAM-based journaling filesystem for which their NFS server code is hand-tuned).

    1. Re:Correct, you don't need this... by Tony-A · · Score: 2

      Yes indeed, this is a complicated, sure-to-cause-more-problems-than-it-solves solution to a non-problem.
      Plus there have to be some "interesting" cache-consistency problems with the "read-only" side of the disk. If the write-side is very active, the read-side, when and as read, may contain all sorts of integrity problems.

    2. Re:Correct, you don't need this... by ajs · · Score: 2

      Presumably you would get around that in software by using a journal on the write side and then doing all of your journal commits atomically. Then on the read side you would ignore the journal and just look at the commited portion of the disk. That should give you a consistant if slightly outdated image on the read side.

    3. Re:Correct, you don't need this... by Tony-A · · Score: 2

      Atomically, how?
      Unless the writing side has some means of locking out the reading side until completion of the write, which should lead to some performance issues.

  35. good for dumb MBAs / VC and idiot security staff by noahbagels · · Score: 5, Informative

    Great.

    Now, we have to explain one more thing to VCs and MBAs. All they know is there is this thing called a website that exists on a thing called a webserver.

    Hasn't anyone on /. ever taken a security class?
    Has anyone on /. ever worked in on security projects and/or audits?

    Let me break it down for the rest of you:
    This ads exactly zero extra security for a well-run website. Most well-run sites already have seperately firewall'd http-webservers and database machines. Some well-run sites have the application server on yet a third firewall'd network (or vlan etc).

    Any place worth 5cents will not have valued data sitting on an httpd server!

    This is really Ooooga-Boooga in a nutshell for VCs and MBAs trying to make a buck on security-scared VCs and MBAs running other companies.

    I don't buy it.
    Secure your site properly - as one other poster mentioned, for the less-funded (read: cheap/poor/startup/blah) company/service you can simply mount a CD-R with your site's static content on it. Even JSPs can live on a CDr (as long as they're precompiled into servlets, or there's a scratch disk for the JSP-container to compile them).

  36. Re:Read head, read/write head by Vengie · · Score: 2

    Haven't you all seen urls of obscene length at some point? Dynamic pages are generated by _static requests_ -- in a sense, you could generate ALL possible dynamic pages and store them, giving them all their unique url. This of course, is a "Bad Thing". However, some (older) cgi scripts let you see the url to the page you are reading. Take, for instance, a google search. A google search for "hax0red" yields....http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=IS O-8859-1&q=hax0red&btnG=Google+Search

    Not for nothin, but I didn't need write access to google to get a dynamic page. As long as the user doesn't have to _ENTER_ any data that needs to be stored locally, this system works just fine.

    This is _NOT_ a solution for ebanking, etrading, managing personal accounts and the like (where data needs to be WRITTEN back). For the majority of dynamic web pages, this works just fine.

    (ok ok ok yes there is still the buffer overrun issue -- and yes your url's get messy...but at least they dont have actual _write_ access to the hard drive...as someone else already said...a quick reboot and any _possible_ -- not even probable -- damage is gone.)

    --
    When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
  37. Some HDD have write protect jumpers. by NateTG · · Score: 2

    Not sure if they do anymore, but IIRC hard drives already have or have had write protect tabs available. Write protect works just fine for floppy disks.

    Multiple heads seems like it would be a massive extra expense compared to changing the firmware that doesn't really provide a whole lot of extra security.

  38. Dual-ported drives are nothing new... by tshoppa · · Score: 2
    Dual-ported disk drives are nothing new; they've been around in many forms since the 70's (SMD), 80's (DEC SDI), and up through today (SCSI has supported multiple initiators since it graduated from SASI in the mid-80's.)

    Of course, most of the older drives also had prominent lights and pushbuttons on the front that let you write-protect the drive, in some cases on a per-port basis.

    What has often been missing is OS support for dual-ported drives; the lack of support is most conspicuous today. As a result most modern OS's trying to use a dual ported drive will have to "take its turn" having the disk mounted if there's any possiblity the other machine is going to do a write. If the OS doesn't even support the simple concepts of mount and dismount, then you probably cannot use it at all!

  39. Prior Art? by El_Smack · · Score: 3, Funny

    According to this "The God Janus, husband of Jana, is known as the custodian of the universe, the God who watches over doors and gateways, and the two-headed God of ... "

    Please send any patent inquires to
    Cesear, Emporer of Rome
    123 Pantheon Drive

    --


    There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
  40. Industry rejected multi-head drives long ago... by Zinho · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From the article:
    "The original idea of a hard disk having two heads emerged around 1985..."

    Funny that the technology hasn't been implemented after all this time... Or has it?

    From the StorageReview.com reference section:
    "Such hard disks have been built. Conner Peripherals, which was an innovator in the hard disk field in the late 1980s and early 1990s (they later went bankrupt and their product line and technology were purchased by Seagate) had a drive model called the Chinook that had two complete head-actuator assemblies: two sets of heads, sliders and arms and two actuators. They also duplicated the control circuitry to allow them to run independently. For its time, this drive was a great performer. But the drive never gained wide acceptance, and the design was dropped. Nobody to my knowledge has tried to repeat the experiment in the last several years.

    There are several reasons why it is not practical to make a drive with more than one actuator. Some are technical; for starters, it is very difficult to engineer. Having multiple arms moving around on a platter makes the design complex, especially in small form factors. There are more issues related to thermal expansion and contraction. The heat generated inside the hard drive is increased. The logic required to coordinate and optimize the seeks going on with the two sets of heads requires a great deal of work. And with hard disk designs and materials changing so quickly, this work would have to be re-done fairly often.

    However, the biggest reasons why multiple actuators designs aren't practical are related to marketing. The added expense in writing specialty electronics and duplicating most of the internal control components in the drive would make it very expensive, and most people just don't care enough about performance to pay the difference. Hard disks are complex technology that can only be manufactured economically if they are mass-produced, and the market for those who would appreciate the extra actuators isn't large enough to amortize the development costs inherent in these fancy designs. It makes more sense instead to standardize on mass-produced drives with a single actuator stack, and build RAID arrays from these for those who need the added performance. Compare a single 36 GB drive to an array of four 9 GB drives: in effect, the array is a 36 GB drive with four sets of everything. It would in most cases yield performance and reliability superior to a single 36 GB drive with four actuators, and can be made from standard components without special engineering."

    So, from the looks of things, it would be easier and cheaper to use single-head drives in easy-to-put-together configurations than put two heads in the same drive. Admittedly, the StorgeReview.com reference's author didn't mention setting up a read-only/read-write scheme, but the logic still works. I'd guess that it would still be easier to make a RAID container that provides read-only access on one channel and read-write on another.

    Again, from the article:
    "Scarabs is also working on a different version of the technology--instead of putting two heads on a hard disk, the company is connecting two SCSI interface circuits to a conventional hard disk with one head, one set to send read-only electronic signals and the other to send read/write signals."

    This company already knows that their gimmick drive won't sell. No one will buy an over-priced drive with higher probability of failure over a (comparatively) cheap SCSI trick that requires no extra moving parts.

    --
    "Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
  41. Re:What would be the input route? by Clay+Mitchell · · Score: 2

    somebody give this man a cookie! he pretty much nailed it. of course this isn't the case for most small sites, but once you start looking at the "enterprise" level, you see than your webservers are in new york while your databases are in chicago. this type of thing is great for webservers that are "dynamic" by way of a database

  42. Re:Sounds like a good idea to me by strictnein · · Score: 2

    And then how does the database get updated via user input?

    Again, works great for static web sites, but doesn't help much for dynamic.

  43. Been doing this for YEARS. by BrookHarty · · Score: 2

    You can do the same with dumb sun boxes, that boot off the net, mount a read only parition with apache/content, and connect to a database. Good thing, if you update the content directly, your stack of boxes all have updated content. Make sure you have a nice storage array that can push data to the boxes.

    Simple, Secure, and very easy to maintain.

    1. Re:Been doing this for YEARS. by Hard_Code · · Score: 2

      Well, yeah, but the article was about doing this at the *hardware* level. Anybody can turn the write bit off on a partition, or mount a remote volume as read only. Yes, it's overkill to do it at the hardware level and I'd imagine this is only for the most sensitive of applications.

      --

      It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
  44. Re:You don't need 2 physical heads to do this... by Junta · · Score: 2

    Complicates the cache issue? How? Basically, they are making two complete hard drive assemblies on a common assembly, but one can only is designed from the ground up to be read-only, from the head to the interface, providing the most possible levels of protection to get through. If the drive head is physically incapable of modifying data, then no bug in any software or firmware can be explotied to allow writes.

    I personally think this is useless for other reasons, completely redundant with networked strategies to do the same thing, at least with competent administrators. However, I guess this thing would be good for places with less-than-stellar administration. Then, they could have the web server's only connection to the data through that safe harddrive cable. If an organization is just serving up static data, then they probably aren't sophisticated enough of an organization to afford stellar admin people, so I guess this thing has a place.... No where near me though.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  45. Why not use shared storage? by Ouroboro · · Score: 2

    Other than expense, why not just use some sort of shared storage appliance. The admin can be allowed to mount the appliance rw, while the webserver can be given read only access? I think EMC has products that do this.

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    When I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.
  46. Two Headed Hard Drive? by MadFarmAnimalz · · Score: 2

    A headline to draw in the geek girls?

    Tsk tsk... Timothy!

    --
    Blearf. Blearf, I say.
  47. Re:How are cookies (session data) going to be stor by Diamon · · Score: 2

    Not if writes to the disk as physically prevented which they are in this case. The general idea is not to prevent the trashing of the web server, but rather it is to protect the data it is serving from being wiped out. Which of course as others have said is pretty pointless, people generally don't break in just to erase things.

  48. Re:What happens if one of the heads dies? by Xaoswolf · · Score: 2

    A head crash would still kill the whole drive, but I'm guessing that if the read head were to just wear out, or if a wire were to come loose, then only one set of heads would stop working.

  49. Sort of related - more heads for performance ? by MeerCat · · Score: 2

    I remember someone telling me from back in the magnetic drum days, that the fastest drums had one head per track, so you only ever had rotational latency delays (average half the the rotation time) - no physical seek (move the head) delays. I often wondered if multiple heads on a modern disk drive would improve performance...

    I know on a modern disk the tracks are too tightly packed to do a head-per-track, but was wondering if you had (say) 2 heads on a single arm seperated by a third the width of the disk, then any track could be read with a much smaller movement (compared to full disk seeks) by seeking with the closest head, and when queuing up reads for an "elevator algorithm" of seeks you could also get performance gains by grabbing out of order data with the "trailing" head.

    I realise the price goes up with complexity, and the heavier head might take longer to settle, but was wondering if this wouldn't give better performance for scattered reads for those who need it (eg servers) and don't mind paying....

    Now I'm a software geek, not a hardware bod, so does anyone know why this isn't done ? (I can guess lots of reasons myself, thanks). Is it effectively just RAID striping on a single disk ?

    And how about more heads (5 across, 10 across...), or 2 sets of heads on opposite sides of the disk to cut rotational latency in half (if kept in step) or ... again, let the disk controller decide to move the closer head ... I know that I can pick items out a heap much quicker with two hands than one due to economy of movement....

    --
    T

    --
    I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
    1. Re:Sort of related - more heads for performance ? by MeerCat · · Score: 2

      Thanks for the reply, but what I mean is not to improve transfer rate so much as transfer latency... the gap between the request and the data.

      If you have multiple r/w reads, but the drive itself still appeared "as normal" then it could optimise its movements to reduce latency by using which ever head was closest, assuming it only used one head at a time.

      The guys who said "mechanical-complexity vs RAID-multiple-drives" sort of answered the question, but i was wondering if multiple heads caused balance problems, or disruptive airflow problems dominated, or what....

      Cheers

      --
      T

      --
      I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
  50. Why not make a hard drive with two arms? by KyleCordes · · Score: 2

    Why not use two hard drives, and a bit of cleverness in the software to write the incoming data stream to one while the user is viewing a stream on the other? This seems cheaper than custom hard drives, and preserves the ability to keep upgrading the capabilities by going to new commodity hard drives as biggers ones continue to get cheaper.

    1. Re:Why not make a hard drive with two arms? by Krellan · · Score: 2

      Two hard drives isn't a complete solution, because what if the data you are reading and the data you are writing are *both* on the *same* drive?

  51. Content checking by philipsblows · · Score: 2

    I've seen a couple of projects on freshmeat that do this. Basically, a daemon sits around and watches files and if they change, they do something about it. This could be anything from logging to sounding an alarm to replacing the content.

    I could have a repository sitting offline storing all of my content (or even everything... OS, databases, scripts, tools, etc etc) and have it "log in" to the servers from the inside and check everything for changes periodically. In a lot of cases, tests could be done from the outside as well (web content specifically). That machine, though physically connected, would simply shut off its interfaces and block everything unless it was doing its work.

    I think a recent website hack occurred at USA Today... such a scheme could have caught the hack within minutes and even have replaced the forged content with whatever was supposed to be there.

  52. Re:What would be the input route? by Uttles · · Score: 2

    Well I'm pretty sure that all the data is stored on the same drive and both heads can read from that drive. The difference here is that one head can read only, and that is connected to the outside world, while one head is read/write, and that is connected to the server. No matter what security you put in, if you have user data that can somehow come in and be written, you still have potential for hacking, and so having two heads really doesn't get you anywhere.

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    ~ now you know
  53. Re:Terminator? by Speare · · Score: 2

    Anyone else reminded of the silly scene where Arnie has to instruct his friends how to flip his neural net from R/O to R/W mode?

    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
  54. how about this? by brad3378 · · Score: 2


    I've been hearing a lot of people say "clip pin 23 to your IDE cable" to prevent writing.

    Would it be difficult for a company to come up with a "plug between" adapter between the harddrive and the IDE cable? maybe it would have a jumper on it that you could remove, or better yet, plug in an extension cable with a switch onto the jumper location so you wouldn't have to open the case every time a change is made. If there was enough of a demand, these could be manufactured cheaper than IDE cables.

    I think it could be a much cheaper solution to the folks that don't need top of the line. Then again, Mounting the filesystem "read only" would be even easier.

    --

    1. Re:how about this? by schon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Mounting the filesystem "read only" would be even easier.

      Which is all fine and dandy, until the guy who just rooted you figures out that all he needs to do is 'mount -o remount,rw /dev/hda4'

      Seriously, you can't rely on the OS to protect you from this (with the possible exception of BSD's hich security more coupled with the immutable flag - so the file can only be modified when the system is in runlevel 0..)

  55. I read the article, did you? by Carnage4Life · · Score: 2
    Instead of saying that the sun can burn you, he told someone sitting in a dark closet that they are going to get burnt if they stay there. Still maybe not flamebait, but if you are going to type in l33t to look cool, at least read the article.

    I read the article and it described a system where if you have a website that serves only static content you can use this snake oil technology to prevent people from defacing your website. Why is the technology snake oil:
    1. Most websites worth anything are dynamic so can't benefit from this system.
    2. One of the primary concerns after a website has been hacked is that the script kiddies got away with valuable information, this technology does not prevent that in the slightest
    1. Re:I read the article, did you? by Yankovic · · Score: 2
      Regardless of the rest of the point of the article or your other points, something being dynamic does not mean that the pages aren't static. If i put:
      <? print "$yourname got here at " + time();?>
      That doesn't require rw, and is fully dynamic. RW generally only needs to happen on file servers and databases... certainly not webservers.
    2. Re:I read the article, did you? by Beliskner · · Score: 2
      I think that a read-only hard drive is a great idea. I wish I could store my OS files on it and my user files on my main hard drive. This way no matter what I do I won't get the dreaded "Operating System partition corrupt, you're screwed".
      Dell should say, "You would like to order a PC?"
      Customer: "Uh huh."
      Dell: "What type?"
      Customer: "Uhhhh, a cheap one."
      Dell: "Would you like to use AoL as your ISP? It's nice and easy"
      Customer: "I like easy, sounds great"
      Dell: --quietly selects "read-only hard drive" on the checklist

      As far as webservers go, a lot of sysadmins will appreciate just having to call and say "Dude, someone's defaced your website, better reboot" instead of having to find a rootkit and then reimage

      --
      A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
    3. Re:I read the article, did you? by danox · · Score: 2
      One of the primary concerns after a website has been hacked is that the script kiddies got away with valuable information, this technology does not prevent that in the slightest.

      Actually, I can see how it would get around this. Say your web server was completely cut off from your internal network, except for this one hard drive. You write data to the webserver that is ok to go out to the public, and anyone who cracks the server can only see what is on that drive and has no possible way of getting into the rest of your network. Now, of course they could easily get data from your web server, but they whole point is that whatever you put there is available to the public. Any private data is nice and safe in your internal network.

      There are other problems though, like what about your server log files. where do they go? If you wanted to keep logs, you would need another writable drive, and then crackers could modify your log files. Its kind of a silly idea I think

      --
      "Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
  56. Truely secure "e-business" by Auckerman · · Score: 2

    Get two of them. One to serve "content", the other to record transactions. Content server has the read only head on, the transaction server has the write only head on. Hot swap them for updates and transfer of information.

    Not as convient as it is currently done, but for a little ma/pa shop, it might be perfect.

    --

    Burn Hollywood Burn
  57. Re:About the same as running it off of a CD-ROM... by Anonvmous+Coward · · Score: 2

    I had an idea along these lines, only it worked a little differently:

    Create a webserver that has a RAM disk big enough to hold the site. Then, at boot, dump all the contents from the CD-ROM over to the RAM Disk. Then, periodically check a few things in RAM:

    - # of files served vs. # of files on the CD

    - Dates modified

    - Significant changes in file size

    - Maybe a file comparison on a random file here and there

    - Refresh the RAMdisk with what's on the CD-ROM at regular intervals like every hour. ... and so on. If there is a change, the server could alert the admin and let them know what the attempted change was to.

    That idea's not as well developed as I'd like, but it's food for thought. :)

  58. Obsolete Read Cache by nuggz · · Score: 2

    Wouldn't this make the web server unable to read cache, the information could change.

    Can't you have the same effect by having the web server with read only permission to be the only externally accessible program?

    Or just mount a ro network drive, over dedicated gigabit ether it shouldn't be that big of an issue.

  59. Re:What would be the input route? by Oculus+Habent · · Score: 2

    I think it's set up so both heads access the same data, just whatever is using the read-only head can't modify anything.

    Not sure if it would be best to have two separate computers access opposite sides, or have one use the drive as two parts. Probably the first.

    --
    You are the weakest link! BLEARGH!

    --
    That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
  60. Re:Lisa by n6mod · · Score: 2

    BTW, anyone owning an old Mac or any Apple][ series outfitted with a 3.5" drive has a similar setup. 5 zones, but definitely directly-opposing heads and not this nonstandard setup. I think the 5zone drives finally got the axe when Jobs decided to not include a floppy with iMac.

    The 400k (single sided) and 800k (double sided)formats were always zoned, though the early drives did actually change speeds, and loudly at that. Once Apple introduced HD drives, (the first "SuperDrive") the variable spindle speeds went away. That said, they could read and write the old formats just fine, by changing bitrates instead of spindle speed. The SuperDrive could also read and write MFM DD floppies (720k) in addition to HD. (1440k)

    We varied bitrate instead of spindle speed from the beginning on duplication equipment, but the dupe equipment never had the cost pressure that a consumer-ish PC did.

    Thank god we never had to build a Twiggy duplicator....and my Lisa had a proper 3.5" drive

    --
    You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
  61. Why bother? by dmiller · · Score: 2

    Why not just keep your content on an NFS server and export it read-only via GigE?

  62. But... by kwishot · · Score: 2

    Couldn't this potentially cause problems with log files being written? Unless you'd prefer not to have log files, but we are on the subject of security, right?

  63. Just don't forget by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 2

    to turn off the buffer cache.

  64. Re:How are cookies (session data) going to be stor by SCHecklerX · · Score: 2
    any web developer who knows what they are doing will only store one cookie on a user's browser. The session data itself is referenced by that cookie, but stored in some way on the server.

    So, yes, the cookie is stored client side. The data it represents, however does not (and shouldn't for a number of reasons, including security) reside on the client computer.

    Good web programmers should also delete the cookies from the browser for login data when the user 'logs out' from the site.

  65. Re:What would be the input route? by Koos · · Score: 2
    Seeing as most large web sites don't serve their database off of their web server, I don't think this would be a problem. The code for the web page is served off of the server with that funky two-headed drive. Its read only to the internet, but the dynamic content, for instance user posts here on slashdot, are retreived and stored on a separate, secure db server. Your PHP, ASP, whatever, will call SQL queries to that server and not 'localhost' like (un)usual.
    My best guess for securing order info gathered on a webserver is to store it in a database on a different server. The database username in the web scripts only has the privileges to call stored procedures owned by a different user to store data in the tables and cannot retrieve it. Oracle and Sybase offer this kind of privilege separation for example.
  66. Occam's Razor? by Zocalo · · Score: 2
    This seems like a needlessly complex solution to me; what's wrong with using a network storage device (or devices) in a dedicated DMZ for crying out loud? All you need to do is allow writes from your "dev" machines and simply drop write requests from anything else. Plenty of firewalls understand the appropriate protocols (CIFS, NFS...) enough to do this.

    Surely two heads is going to have a considerable effect on the MTBF, in the order of 40% maybe, since most of the the drive failures I've had have resulted from head failure. With enough drives in your storage array that increase is going to become very visible, very quickly.

    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  67. Content Checking and detecting defacements. by Nonesuch · · Score: 2
    I've seen a couple of projects on freshmeat that do this. Basically, a daemon sits around and watches files and if they change, they do something about it. This could be anything from logging to sounding an alarm to replacing the content.
    Depends on how 'good' (smart, thorough, cautious) the hacker is. There are rootkits with features specifically written to work around the various 'checksum' mechanisms.

    I think a recent website hack occurred at USA Today... such a scheme could have caught the hack within minutes and even have replaced the forged content with whatever was supposed to be there.
    This too can be worked around. For example, I might watch the logs (or add my own logging) for an obvious pattern of recurring requests from the same source address/network for the same files. I might install my own replacement HTTPd (Or just add 'Handlers' to Apache's configuration) to serve up the 'normal' page for these requests, but serve up the 'U B 0WN3D' page at random intervals to requests from customers.

    In a lot of cases, tests could be done from the outside as well (web content specifically). That machine, though physically connected, would simply shut off its interfaces and block everything unless it was doing its work.
    Better yet, you have a tightly-secured machine one hop away on the outside of the web server, with sufficient control over the network to spoof HTTP requests from a random source IP at randomized time intervals. If a hack is detected, this guardian server has the ability to connect to the switch and shutdown the ethernet interface(s) to the affected server.

    Of course, now this Guardian is itself a great target for hackers... Plus I think this technique is already patented :-)

  68. Line Printers by Nonesuch · · Score: 2
    now, where might one find line printers these days?
    A lot of corporate datacenters still have rows of line printers. Among other things, they are one of the most reliable ways to print checks.

    Many old school coders still feel that the only way to debug source code is with a blue bic pen on greenbar.