1. Sell a disaster recovery program by doing a risk assessment or a business impact analysis.
2. Stop talking about disaster recovery and business continuity as an IT program or in terms of IT’s underlying recovery objectives.
3. BC/DR should really be integrated into an organization’s normal change processes, ideally at the architectural stage.
4. Focus on business process resiliency.
5. Lay out a five-year plan that shows improvement over time by, for example, taking additional risks out, or by better supporting a business need, or speeding the recovery time, or reducing error rates.
6. Make sure DR is dependent on more than a few trained individuals.
7: Test the plan.

In Oracle 10g and all previous versions, the password is not encrypted at all! It is simply a DES hash that is salted with the username, both of which can be found quite easily in the DBA_USERS view. DES strength is based more on the length of the hashed password than the complexity (which is hobbled by the passwords being converted to capital letters, and there are also some special characters that cannot be used). In Oracle 11g, if backwards compatibility is not necessary, SHA-1 is used exclusively, uses an unlisted salt, and is a MUCH harder nut to crack.

Your best bet is to use one of the very effective Oracle password crackers available, such as Red-Database-Security.com’s Checkpwd or John the Ripper. Both are free and work on nearly every platform/OS. CheckPwd uses a dictionary attack and given the dictionary files available (you can always tailor your own as well), it is VERY effective. John the Ripper has both dictionary and brute force attacks. A well-crafted dictionary attack is often very productive and amazingly fast because of its focused nature.

Ever fancied running Internet Explorer 7 (or even earlier versions) on your Linux machine but didn’t find an easy way of doing it – admit it, wine doesn’t work that smoothly – IEs4Linux is the solution

Installation Steps below:

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Installation

oping to steal away Oracle customers in light of that company’s price hikes, open source vendor EnterpriseDB has unveiled a program to entice them to migrate from Oracle to Postgres Plus Advanced Server.

Slyly calling it an “Oracle Bailout Program,” the Oracle Migration Assessment Program was created in direct response to Oracle’s quietly raising prices on selected database modules up to 40% on July 1.

“Oracle’s price hikes might be good news for those on Wall Street, but they’re terrible news for IT departments trying to function in the worst economy since the Great Depression,” said Ed Boyajian, the president and CEO of EnterpriseDB.

There are many benefits to the various cloud computing models. But for each benefit, such as cost savings, speed to market and scalability, there are just as many risks and gaps in the cloud computing model.

The on-demand computing model in itself is a dilemma. With the on-demand utility model, enterprises often gain a self-service interface so users can self-provision an application, or extra storage from an Infrastructure as a Service provider. This empowers users and speeds up projects. The flip side: Such services may be too easy to consume.

There are several other big what-ifs regarding providers. For example, do they have service-level agreements (SLAs)? Can you get an SLA that covers security parameters, data privacy, reliability/availability and uptime, data and infrastructure transparency?

“You can’t see behind the [cloud providers'] service interface so you don’t know what their storage capabilities really are, what their infrastructure really is … so how can you make SLA guarantees [to users]?” said Anne Thomas-Manes, an analyst at Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group.

Furthermore, would the provider be able to respond to an e-discovery request? “Is that on the SLA, and is that information classified, easily accessible and protected?” she asked.

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid182_gci1363821,00.html?track=NL-964&ad=718702&asrc=EM_NLN_8881412&uid=9117895#cloud

The easier business intelligence tools are to use the more valuable they are to your organization. BI users need the flexibility to access data without writing SQL queries. They should be able to create their own reports and dashboards, which include integrated analysis capabilities. And it should be easy to share whatever they’ve created with colleagues and customers.

JasperServer Professional is a high-performance standalone and embeddable report server

OpenEMM is a feature-rich enterprise software for professional e-mail newsletters and e-mail marketing. It offers sophisticated bounce management, link tracking, lots of statistics and a script feature to set up transaction mails (data, event and time triggered).

OpenEMM is the first open source application for e-mail marketing. Its code base has been developed since 1999 and is used (as part of the commercial ASP product E-Marketing Manager) by companies like IBM, Siemens and Deutsche Telekom.

OpenEMM offers already more than 95% of the functionality of most commercial products and some features commercial products do not offer right now (i.e. MySQL support).

The main difference is, that OpenEMM is an easy to set up single server solution, while its big brother E-Marketing Manager operates on several distributed servers as software on demand (ASP).

Red Hat released the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta (kernel-2.6.18-155.el5), with versions for x86, x86/64, Itanium, IBM POWER and System z. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta release includes a variety of new features and capabilities, combined with enhancements in virtualization, storage/filesystem, security and developer tools. As with any Beta, our goal is to provide customers and partners with the opportunity to sample and test new features of the release before it’s finalized.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.4/html-single/Release_Notes/