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A common problem with Linux systems is when Windows users press CTRL-ALT-DEL at the login prompt and reboot the machine.
To fix this some people change the ^ca line in /etc/inittab to just disable the reboot function. However this is not desirable because sometimes you want to reboot a machine with a simple keypress.
Another [...]

Today I was doing some network tracing and figured out how to track the start and end of TCP connections. The following tcpdump command will get all SYN, FIN, and RST packets on port 80 and all ICMP packets:
tcpdump -i bond0 -n “port 80 and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-fin|tcp-rst) != 0 or icmp”
Also recently I [...]

Bonding is one of the terms used to describe multiple Ethernet cables used to form a single virtual network link. This can be done for performance or reliability.
Bonding for performance used to be common when 100baseT was the fastest network technology that was commonly available. In 1999 servers could usually sustain considerably more [...]

At http://www.infodrom.org/Infodrom/fortunes/download/infodrom-linux there are a heap of quotes from Debian people, and more than a few from me. It’s strange reading my own writing in someone else’s quote file. Some things seem so removed from context that there is little point to them. For some things I couldn’t even remember writing [...]

For fun I just set up my own Planet. Reading both Planet Debian and Planet Linux Australia is a bit of a drag due to the overlap. So I wrote a little Perl script to extract the feeds from both those sources and generate a Planet configuration. My planet is publicly available [...]

I recently watched the movie Super Size Me. Due to working some strange hours I’ve been eating more fast-food than usual recently and had experienced some of the symptoms that were featured in that movie.
So now I have decided to improve my diet. From now on I will go hungry rather than eating [...]

I had a few comments on my last so I decided to write a new post about it.
Firstly in regard to Elspeth’s comment. I agree that children should wear glasses if necessary. That part of my entry was not clear, I was trying to make the point that I can understand children not [...]

At the start of the year I suffered a minor injury to my left eye. This brought my vision down to slightly below average for my age. A doctor and an ophthalmologist both thought that my vision was good enough at this level and that I don’t need glasses. But the ability [...]

TerrorBullGames has just released the board game War On Terror. The first I heard of this was a short article in a local news paper about how much the game has offended some people (quoting someone who was injured in the London bombings). A co-creator of the game Andy Thompkins said “We accept that [...]

Recently I’ve been unfortunate enough to be the sys-admin of some systems running CA software, the specific horror in this case is Siteminder.
The latest excitement was when an important machine stopped working abruptly and gave the error “ff ff ff ff” in the Apache error log. I have been familiar with the [...]