Technical Report on Deploying a highly secured OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure using BradStack as a Case Study

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular paradigm and an attractive model for providing a reliable distributed computing model.it is increasing attracting huge attention both in academic research and industrial initiatives. Cloud deployments are paramount for institution and organizations of all scales. The availability of a flexible, free open source cloud platform designed with no propriety software and the ability of its integration with legacy systems and third-party applications are fundamental. Open stack is a free and opensource software released under the terms of Apache license with a fragmented and distributed architecture making it highly flexible. This project was initiated and aimed at designing a secured cloud infrastructure called BradStack, which is built on OpenStack in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Bradford. In this report, we present and discuss the steps required in deploying a secured BradStack Multi-node cloud infrastructure and conducting Penetration testing on OpenStack Services to validate the effectiveness of the security controls on the BradStack platform. This report serves as a practical guideline, focusing on security and practical infrastructure related issues. It also serves as a reference for institutions looking at the possibilities of implementing a secured cloud solution.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figures

A Taxonomy of Self-configuring Service Discovery Systems

We analyze the fundamental concepts and issues in service discovery. This analysis places service discovery in the context of distributed systems by describing service discovery as a third generation naming system. We also describe the essential architectures and the functionalities in service discovery. We then proceed to show how service discovery fits into a system, by characterizing operational aspects. Subsequently, we describe how existing state of the art performs service discovery, in relation to the operational aspects and functionalities, and identify areas for improvement

Using Oracle to Augment the Information Systems Curriculum

Oracle Corporation makes its software products available to educational institutions at minimal cost. This tutorial explores options for procuring, installing, and administering an Oracle client/server database in an academic setting, and describes how the Oracle software can be used in specific areas in the information systems curriculum. It also presents results of a survey investigating how IS instructors currently use Oracle, and describes the benefits and challenges they are experiencing

Towards using online portfolios in computing courses

The direct experience we had with teaching a summer pre-college computing course in which we adopted an online portfolio approach has led us to consider the use of online portfolios in our regular computer science undergraduate courses. The technical challenges we foresee include: the necessary support from the college\u27s IT department; the use of Microsoft-based web authoring technologies vs. the use of Open Source / freeware counterparts; the need for adequate technical knowledge on the part of our faculty; the need for server-side hardware and software resources

A cloud-based integration platform for enterprise application integration: A Model-Driven Engineering approach

This article addresses major information systems integration problems, approaches, technologies, and tools within the context of Model-Driven Software Engineering. The Guaraná integration platform is introduced as an innovative platform amongst state-of-the-art technologies available for enterprises to design and implement integration solutions. In this article, we present its domain-specificmodeling language and its industrial cloud-based web development platform, which supports the design and implementation of integration solutions. A real-world case study is described and analyzed; then, we delve into its design and implementation, to finally disclose ten measures that empirically help estimating the amount of effort involved in the development of integration solutions

Two research contributions in 64-bit computing: Testing and Applications

Following the release of Windows 64-bit and Redhat Linux 64-bit operating systems (OS) in late April 2005, this is the one of the first 64-bit OS research project completed in a British university. The objective is to investigate (1) the increase/decrease in performance compared to 32-bit computing; (2) the techniques used to develop 64-bit applications; and (3) how 64-bit computing should be used in IT and research organizations to improve their work. This paper summarizes research discoveries for this investigation, including two major research contributions in (1) testing and (2) application development. The first contribution includes performance, stress, application, multiplatform, JDK and compatibility testing for AMD and Intel models. Comprehensive testing results reveal that 64-bit computing has a better performance in application performance, system performance and stress testing, but a worse performance in compatibility testing than the traditional 32-bit computing. A 64-bit dual-core processor has been tested and the results show that it performs better than a 64-bit single-core processor, but only in application that requires very high demands of CPU and memory consumption. The second contribution is .NET 1.1 64-bit implementations. Without additional troubleshooting, .NET 1.1 does not work on 64-bit Windows operating systems in stable ways. After stabilizing .NET environment, the next step is the application development, which is a dynamic repository with functions such as registration, download, login-logout, product submissions, database storage and statistical reports. The technology is based on Visual Studio .NET 2003, .NET 1.1 Framework with Service Pack 1, SQL Server 2000 with Service Pack 4 and IIS Server 6.0 on the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 platform with Service Pack 1

A Hypothetical Database-Driven Web-Based Meteorological Weather Station with Dynamic Datalogger System

This paper proposes the development and implementation strategies of a hypothetical database-driven web-based meteorological (meteo) weather station with a dynamic datalogger system to provide up-to-the-minute real-time ground-based weather information online to any interested client. The meteo weather station will provide weather data/information for eight parameters namely: relative humidity; solar radiance; wind speed; wind direction; barometric pressure; temperature; nefobasimeter for monitoring and measuring cloud height, thickness and number of layers detection; and rainfall. The hypothetical design present techniques that can be used to capture and log meteo data in a dynamic relational database management system (DRDBMS) and implements a TCP/IP network server. The meteo weather information will be collected from sensors incorporated into measuring instruments and transmitted via 1–Wire network and stored in the TINI’s non–volatile static random access memory (NV-SRAM). The TINI processes and uploads the information over a TCP/IP network via a switch, router, common gateway interface (CGI), very small aperture terminal (VSAT) via an Internet service provider (ISP) to the Internet for any interested user in the world. More so, although the acquired data will be made available as they are being logged to both the Internet and the database (DRDBMS) but the data will be automatically deleted every 24 hours at 00:00G MT from the TINI’s NV-SRAM to free the memory for the next day data at the same 00:00G MT. As a result of this, the DRDBMS which is an object for data/information storage using the MySQL stores the meteo data/information which can be retrieved by any interested client on request. However, the request will be made possible via the use of web pages, where the each meteo data/information will be displayed and accessed using special user login codes (username and password) upon subscription. Keywords: DBMS, Dynamic datalogger, embedded systems, html, hypothetical weather station, JavaScript, meteorology, MySQL, PHP, TCP/IP protocol, Tiny INternet interface (TINI), WAMP server, web development

A Comparative Performance Evaluation of Hive and Map Reduce for Big-Data

Advances in information stockpiling and mining advances make it conceivable to safeguard expanding measures of information created specifically or in a roundabout way by clients and break down it to yield important new bits of knowledge. Huge information can uncover individuals' shrouded behavioral examples and even revealed insight into their expectations. All the more absolutely, it can overcome any and all hardships between what individuals need to do and what they really do and how they connect with others and their surroundings. This data is valuable to government offices and in addition privately owned businesses to bolster choice making in zones going from law requirement to social administrations to country security. One of the proficient advancements that arrangement with the Big Data is Hadoop, which will be talked about in this paper. Hadoop, for preparing extensive information volume employments utilizes MapReduce programming model. Hadoop makes utilization of diverse schedulers for executing the occupations in parallel. The default scheduler is FIFO (First In First Out) Scheduler. Different schedulers with need, pre-emption and non-pre-emption alternatives have likewise been produced. As the time has passed the MapReduce has come to few of its restrictions. So keeping in mind the end goal to beat the constraints of MapReduce, the up and coming era of MapReduce has been produced called as YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator). Along these lines, this paper gives a review on Hadoop, few booking strategies it uses and a brief prologue to YARN. Keywords: Big-Data, Hive, Map Reduc

ONLINE MONITORING USING KISMET

Colleges and universities currently use online exams for student evaluation. Stu- dents can take assigned exams using their laptop computers and email their results to their instructor; this process makes testing more efficient and convenient for both students and faculty. However, taking exams while connected to the Internet opens many opportunities for plagiarism and cheating. In this project, we design, implement, and test a tool that instructors can use to monitor the online activity of students during an in-class online examination. This tool uses a wireless sniffer, Kismet, to capture and classify packets in real time. If a student attempts to access a site that is not allowed, the instructor is notified via an Android application or via Internet. Identifying a student who is cheating is challenging since many applications send packets without user intervention. We provide experimental results from realistic test environments to illustrate the success of our proposed approach