Communication is one of the most important paradigm on which a business stands. In today’s world, e-mail is still the fastest means of formal communication. Even though it has been around since mid 1960’s, never before has its glory reached the present stature. The importance of email, especially for people who conduct online business is unquestionable.

It is possible to host your own mail server using sendmail, qmail or exim, among host of other MTA’s. But - “Is there peace of mind?” What if the e-mail is delayed? What if the final confirmation mail of the very important deal, never reaches your inbox?

When so much depends on your e-mail service, you should depend on mail service providers who provide you with professional solutions such as Zimbra, Scalix and MS Exchange among others. On the other hand, you can purchase these solutions and implement them yourself. You would just need a server with network connectivity, to get started.

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Ever wondered if your website is hosted on a web-server that has a big hole right in the middle? If you haven’t, it is likely that some hacker is already thinking hard. The edge the hacker has is the tools that help him identify the unplugged holes in your webserver and web installation/scripts.

Believe me, web-server vulnerability and buggy CGI scripts are the favorite/common path taken by most intruders, who later end up harming your data, your reputation, and perhaps even your life. Simple port scanners and vulnerability scanners are employed to break into the server with ease, and Nikto is one such tool.

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Most of the Linux servers are today loaded with the EXT3 File System. We have come across a lot of incidents where files have gone lost through a simple rm -rf command, either done accidentally or sometimes even intentionally by others. There has always been a misconception that such files cannot be retrieved in ext3. In fact, it is quite possible to retrieve the data.

On further investigation into this, I was able to locate a lot of tools that could help recovering the deleted data from an ext3 file system. Magicrescue, Ext3grep, Testdisk, Ddrescue, Photorec and ext3undel are some examples, to list a few.

I was in pursuit of a tool that is capable of recovering all file types and is exclusively designed for the ext3 file system. One among the best tools that I found and would like to take you through is ext3grep.

This tool provides a good set of command line features and a good idea regarding the ext3 file system. Before proceeding further, let’s look into the merits and demerits of this tool.

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