Month: February 2016

Question(s)

Just as the new week begins, I started thinking about what types of tools BootZilla should offer in the long term. Should BootZilla offer tools to get rid of the “Get Windows Ten” feature? Should BootZilla offer tools to maintain a system, or should it be the one-time fix toolkit that techs pull out from their pockets and use to remove all the crap that ends up on random people’s machines?

Should BootZilla act as a multi-purpose tool set, instead of the current toolkit that it exists as? As it stands, BZ is just the toolkit that a tech pulls out from their pockets, as a solution to a problem that they’re having problems solving. I’m not sure whether or not BootZilla is ready for this migratory period either.

During development of the BZBuilder, I did add a bit of ‘add-ons’ functionality, which I intended to use as a means of introducing new functionality to the toolkit. At this point in time, I’m considering adding a pre-packaged toolkit add-on that would include the tools mentioned above. This way, the toolkit would feel complete, and would allow the end-user to customize it if they don’t want the added tools. The total added size to the toolkit should not exceed 100mb. The plan for addons was to not require more than 100mb/addon script.

One of the other benefits of adding Easy2Boot to the toolkit was to make it easy to add pre-packaged ISO files to the toolkit without adding a lot of bloat to the toolkit – being able to package a whole bunch of bootable tools to a single piece of boot media is a huge advancement, let alone being able to do it without much in the way of ‘special’ tools.

So here we are, the Winter of 2016, a solid year after the initial proof of concept for BootZilla v1. What comes next is the last bits and pieces of the entire toolkit, as intended from the very start.

The next release should include the aforementioned pre-packaged add-on tools, and should also include the (currently missing) configuration for syMenu.

I’m not setting a soft or hard date, as it will happen when it happens. Work comes first, after all, and I have quite a bit of it to get through before I have a chance at doing more work on BZ. At the earliest, I’d expect the next version to be available between March-May 2016. The final version may have to wait until Summer 2016.

The eventual v2 release will be postponed for at least 6-months to a year from the release of the final version of v1.

Goodbye Apache/PHP/MySQL - Hello Nginx, HHVM and MariaDB

I think all the connection issues have been solved as of ~3 minutes ago. I spent the past two hours getting rid of all traces of php5 on my server, to force HHVM in its place. After doing so, all the weird issues with php execution on the server seems to have settled down. I don’t know what the deal is with fastcgi execution of php on nginx, but it’s unstable and logging doesn’t help much.

BootZilla development is just as strong as ever. After using the current set of tools in the field, I’ve found that there feels like a lack of certain anti-malware tools. More testing of additional tools is needed before I go and add them to the toolkit. There’s a lot of useful tools on the net, but a lot are either lacking in documentation, or intended for analysis of malware, and not so much for removal of malware.

Keeping a watchful eye on these types of tools is a lot easier today than it was even 5 years ago. There’s a push now for keeping your personal information private – and people are always looking for ways to get themselves protected. The general public seem to be more aware of what companies are trying to do when it comes to advertisements. As of right now, BootZilla.org has no advertisements. I do not intend on adding any, either. It doesn’t make much in the way of money, and only helps malvertising, which is counter-intuitive to the project.

Getting this website back up and running took a lot of work. Now that it seems to be stable, real work can be continued on the toolkit.