This Week [53] Motivation

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NO GUARANTEES (by Azizi Ali) - Taken from http://www.MillionairesPlanet.com/
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I spoke at a company in Malacca recently. We all had a great time, laughed and yes, learnt how to manage our money better. At the end of the talk, a significant number of the participants rushed to get some of the products we had for sale at the back of the seminar room. Most of them were eager to pick more information so they will become even better in managing their finances.



From the corner of my eyes, I noticed a young man in the crowd looking at my two books. He would pick them up, put them down and repeat the process a couple of time. Finally, he turned to me and asked, "Mr. Azizi, can you guarantee that I will become a millionaire if I buy your books?"



I smiled at him. I wished that I could tell him yes but I knew that the answer was no. Not because the books were not good - they are excellent - but because of him. The reality is that there is only one person who can make him rich. And that one person is not me. It's not his manager, not the CEO of his company, not the finance minister and not even the prime minister. That person is him.



Folks, the only person in the world who can make you rich is you. The only person in the world who can make you smart, brilliant or successful is you. The only person in the world who can make you achieve all your goals and dreams is you. The rest of us - elders, parents, teachers, educators and leaders - can only share knowledge, ideas and wisdom. But if you do nothing with that knowledge, you will remain where you are, facing the same problems day in day out until the maker comes a-calling.



Coming back to our story and the young man; he just put the books down and faded into the darkness of the night. I will probably never see him again so I wished him well. But I know where he will end up - broke, angry and wishing for a second chance at life when he is 65.



Folks, the reality is this - there are no guarantees in life.



The moment we are born, there is no guarantee that we will live to a ripe old age. When we go to school, there is no guarantee that we will graduate. When we go to work, there is no guarantee that we will keep the job for life. When we get married, there is no guarantee that we will stay married for life. And when we invest, there is no guarantee that we will make more money.



So I'll say it again, folks, there are no guarantees in life. The faster you accept that, the better.



Because the ones who will create waves are the ones who are willing to put their necks on the block. The ones who achieve lofty heights are the ones who are willing to climb - even though they are scared of heights. Those who want to play it safe (read guarantees) will wind up working for those who are willing to live dangerously.



There's an old joke that I'm sure you've read and heard many times before. But because the point is still valid, I'll retell it one more time: there are three types of men. The first type makes things happen; the second type see things happen; and the last type stand there with his mouth wide open, "Huh! What happened?".



Incidentally, the first groups of men who make things happen never ask for guarantees. They just go ahead and do what is needed to be done.

So no, I cannot guarantee that you will become a millionaire by reading my books. Neither can Thomas J. Stanley, Robert G. Allen or Robert Kiyosaki for that matter. What we can do is increase your chances of achieving what it is that you want. We do this by educating, training, guiding, mentoring and coaching. That is why we publish books, conducts seminars, training and coaching sessions.



Now I'm not saying that one must read my books or come to my seminars. Read all the books and go to as many seminars as you can - you will learn from each one of them.



There are thousands of great books out there written by marvelous authors - Steven Covey, Anthony Robbins and Deepak Chopra to name but just three. Let's not forget Malaysia's own - Rajen Devadason, Billi Lim, Lilian Too and ehm, ehm, a certain Azizi Ali. There are also world class speakers and trainers in Malaysia - Dato Lawrence Chan leads the pack. So read, listen and learn. Get better. Grow.



Because once the knowledge is in your hands, you don't need any guarantees.

Cisco PIX - Top Ten Tips for Managing Your Firewall

This article discusses the Top ten tips that you can implement to best manage and fine tune your firewall. The purpose of this article is to get the best performance out of your firewall and increased security to your network.


1. Use the latest version of the OS software available for your particular firewall. Install the latest patches and if possible/applicable, the latest software version available.

2. Use a stealth Rule at the top of the rule base.
What is a stealth rule? A stealth rule is a rule which disallows any communication to the firewall itself from unauthorized networks/hosts. It is a rule to protect the firewall itself from attacks.

3. Place the most commonly used or accessed rules on the top of the rule base. When a packet reaches a firewall it gets checked against the rulebase of the firewall from top down. Once it matches a rule, it is either accepted, denied or acted upon depending on what the action defined is. So it is best to place the most accessed rules on top of the rule base so that it need not get matched against all the rules in rule base. This would decrease load on the firewall.

4. Keep the rulebase as simple as possible. Do not allow access to anything and everything. Give access only if it is needed or required.

5. Use object groups where possible and combine similar rules into one rule. This would keep the rule base short and simple and thus reduce the load on the firewall.

6. If your network is using VPN, then give preference to use AES 128 where ever possible. Some firewalls like the popular Checkpoint Firewall, recommend AES 128 over 3DES and AES 256, in terms of firewall load and performance issues. Check with your firewall manufacturer which encryption would provide best performance on the given make, taking into consideration that security is also one of your main priorities.

7. Keep logging to a minimum. Example: If you have a couple of busy web servers, then logging each and every http connection might bring in addition load onto the firewall and also fill up the log server quickly.

8. Try to implement High Availability if your budget would allow that. This would reduce the down time of your network considerably. If a firewall is down it would mean that pretty much most of your operations are down. If High Availability is implemented, then even if the primary were to fail, the secondary would take over. Firewall Clustering is something which can provide your firewall both redundancy and load sharing. Check with the manufacturer if it is available.

9. If there are too many VPN connections that need to connect to your network, then try to get a dedicated VPN device. How many connections are too many connections? Check the firewall manufacturer’s manual. Another way of doing it is checking the load on the firewall – memory, cpu utilization etc.

10. End your rule base with a clean up rule or a ANY ANY DENY rule. Try to also log this rule. This would assist you in analyzing the dropped connections in case you ever attacked or even while simple troubleshooting.

Note: The intention of this article is to help you manage your firewall. Check your Firewall manufacturer’s instruction manual to confirm if the tips given here would be applicable to the particular make/model.

FEEDBACK: Please feel free to leave your feedback good and bad. Best effort would be made to make this article as helpful as possible.

Referring from :
http://www.secmanager.com

Cisco PIX - Useful Commands

Useful Commands:

show config

show blocks

show checksum

show conn

show cpu usage

show history

show memory

show processes

show routing

show running-config

show startup-config

show tech-support

show tcpstat

show traffic

show uauth/clear uauth

show version

show xlate/clear xlate

Cisco PIX - Commands Supported in CLI

 

Command Mode	Command	Command Description
User Mode	enable	To change the mode from User to Enable mode.
	help	Displays the help description in the Modes.
	exit	To log out from the CLI client.
	logout	To log out from the CLI client.
	show clock	To show the clock time of the CLI agent in the network.
	show history	To display the History of the connected terminal.
	show snmp	To show the SNMP status of the device in the network.
	show version	To show the version of the device.
Enable Mode	clock set	Sets the Clock with Date and Time in the firewall device
	configure terminal	Change the mode to Configuration Mode
	disable	Change the mode to user mode from Enable mode.
	ping	Send echo messages
	show access-list	Displays the access-list configurations
	show blocks	To show the system buffer usage
	show conn	To show the number of connections in use
	show failover	To show the failover status
	show memory	To show the free memory available
	show nameif	To show the current names and security levels of each interface
	show clock	Display clock time of the CLI agent in the network.
	show history	Displays the History of the connected terminal.
	show version	Displays the IOS Version and its details of the CLI agent.
Config Mode	access-group in interface	Binds the access list to the inside interface.
	access-list host	Creates the standard access list entry
	access-list /	Creates the standard access list entry
	exit	Change the mode from Configuration to Enable mode.
	hostname	Updates the given value as the host name.
	snmp-server enable traps	Enables all the supported trap types
	snmp-server host [host-addr] [community-string]	To specify the recipients of the SNMP notification operatio
	route [metric]	Set the inside/outside default route to the router attached to the Internet.
	no number	To remove a specific access-list
	no snmp-server enable traps	Disables all the supported trap types
	no snmp-server host	Removes a specific recipient of the SNMP notification operation

MySQL - Change Root Password

How do I change MySQL root password under Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and UNIX like operating system over ssh / telnet session?

Setting up mysql password is one of the essential tasks. By default root user is MySQL admin account. Please note that the Linux / UNIX login root account for your operating system and MySQL root are different. They are separate and nothing to do with each other (indeed some admin removes root account and setup admin as mysql super user).

mysqladmin command to change root password

If you have never set a root password for MySQL, the server does not require a password at all for connecting as root. To setup root password for first time, use mysqladmin command at shell prompt as follows:

$ mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

However, if you want to change (or update) a root password, then you need to use following command

$ mysqladmin -u root -p'oldpassword' password newpass

For example, If old password is abc, and set new password to 123456, enter:

$ mysqladmin -u root -p'abc' password '123456'

keep note = no spacebar between -p'abc' 

Change MySQL password for other user

To change a normal user password you need to type (let us assume you would like to change password for vivek):

$ mysqladmin -u vivek -p oldpassword password newpass

Changing MySQL root user password using MySQL sql command

This is another method. MySQL stores username and passwords in user table inside MySQL database. You can directly update password using the following method to update or change password for user vivek:
1) Login to mysql server, type following command at shell prompt:

$ mysql -u root -p

2) Use mysql database (type command at mysql> prompt):

mysql> use mysql;

3) Change password for user vivek:

mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD("NEWPASSWORD") where User='vivek';

4) Reload privileges:

mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit

MySQL - Restore database

There are 2 ways to restore your MySQL database from sql dump file.


1st way to restore mysql database from sql dump file is using mysql web control panel – phpMyAdmin
- Log into phpMyAdmin.
- Select your preference database on the left database navigation drop down list.
- Click on Import tab on the top.
- Select your sql dumb file at File to import
- Then select your mysql database charset (ex: Latin1, utf-8)
- and click GO and it’s done!

Do not use phpMyAdmin to import or restore your MySQL database if your MySQL database file is large. This is because, phpMyAdmin has limit on total upload size which depend on php setting. Besides, there is also maximum execution time which may cause browser to time out.

The solution to restore large mysql database from sql dump file is using unix/linux shell command.

To restore mysql database from a dump file, just type the command below:-

mysql -u #username# -p #database# < #dump_file#

Of course you need to replace #username# to your database username and #database# to your target database. and rename #dump_file# to your dump file file name (Ex: dump.sql) Once you enter the command, the linux/unix shell will prompt you for your database user password, just key in your database password and you are done.


Referring from:
http://www.techiecorner.com/31/how-to-restore-mysql-database-from-sql-dump-file/

MySQL - Create database

The command is simple just write mysqladmin in a CLI followed by the database name you want to create

# mysqladmin -u root -p create building
# mysql


 Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1
Server version: 5.0.82-log Source distribution

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> SHOW databases;
+----------+
| Database |
+----------+
| mysql    |
| building|
| test     |
+----------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
mysql>

You can also type the query in mysql> prompt like this

mysql> CREATE database building;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

To show available databases in mysql use the command show databases on mysql> prompt.
Now use the database by typing USE building and then type SHOW tables to see what tables are available in the database

mysql> USE building;
Database changed

mysql> SHOW tables;
Empty set (0.00 sec)