ITX8080

General Information

Schedule

Lecture TH 12:00 - 13:30

Practice FR 14:00 - 17:30

Communication

Discussinons will be held at: itx8080 atatat googlegroups.com

Send e-mail to hannesa at-no-spam-please gmail.com for an invitation.

The lecturers can be reached via the course coordinator:

antti.andreimann only-people-please eesti.ee

Points awarded so far

Arnis : 1 point - ab testing solution

Igor : 1 point - wordpress virtualization solution

Kaarel : 1 point - lab 1 report and conclusions

Märt : 1 point - wordpress testing procedure

Scenarios

Scenario 1

There is a Wordpress based blog.

The client is worried: How many visitors can they handle before they die.

Establish a baseline: How many page displays per second AT LEAST we can handle. Disruption of the site operation is NOT acceptable.

Minimal budget!

Be as detailed and technical as You possibly can.

Post to the discussion group the following information:

1. Detailed description of the simulation of the site. eg. if You're going to virtualize it then how? If You are running it as a process, then how You separate it from the real machine?
2. Detailed description of the attack / benchmark tools picked. Where You are going to run them? What tools? How many copies? How you are going to collect the results?!!!

Proposals

Benchmarking:

• AB - Discussed in lecture
• http://tsung.erlang-projects.org - Jérémy
• wget + AB - Arnis
• http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/ - Roland, Jérémy
• http://grinder.sourceforge.net/ - Märt
• http://httpd.apache.org/test/flood/ - Hannes
• Normal monitoring software on live server - Urmas

Simulation of the system:

• VirtualBox - Roland, Jérémy
• VMWare ESX - Igor
• VMWare Player - Marina
• Amazon EC2 - Märt
• KVM - Siim
• Original hardware - Hannes

Lab 1

We will need to create two different virtual machines, one is going to be the wordpress server and the 2nd one is the client which is used to attack the server. It's probably easiest to install only one image and then clone it.

Hard disk image cloning is best done with

Linux:

VBoxManage clonehd FirstUbuntu.vdi SecondUbuntu.vdi

Windows:

"C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" clonehd FirstUbuntu.vdi SecondUbuntu.vdi

After cloning the image create another virtual machine and attach the 2nd disk to that machine. As the result there will be two different virtual machines with two different virtual hard disks.

To be able to connect between the two virtual machines, You need to add an additional network adapter to both hosts. It can be either "Host Only" or "Internal" type.

To enable the new adapters in Ubuntu edit the file: /etc/network/interfaces

Scenario 2

Design a method for evaluating any speedup solutions for the wordpress. A repeatable process to evaluate the claims. Whatever optimizations. The process must be detailed enough so that somebody else can get the same results when applying that. The @other person@ is expected to have IT knowledge sufficient to install and run a Linux desktop. The method must specify the level performance at which the site is considered DEAD. Budget requirements: Low - Dedicated machine + dedicated tester.

Lab 2

• Get Virtual machine disk image and instructions from:

http://www.tud.ttu.ee/~anttix/lab2/

• Measure the effect of these wordpress plugins:

* WP Super Cache
* WP-Cache

• Devise Your own optimizations for the site

Scenario 3

Your client is worried about some stuff posted on a blog. They ask You to take care of it. They have a throwaway "script kiddie" in a third world country, who will mount the attack so You don't need to worry about hiding the attackers identity.

Devise a way to attack a wordpress (default installation) based site to render it unusable (page view times over 60 seconds).

Attack resources: one PC, a script kiddie, internet connection of 2Mbit/s.

How are we going to evaluate the solutions?

• Easy to use instructions
• The most efficient use of available resources

Defacing will count, IF it works for the latest version of wordpress.