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Links February 2009

Michael Anissimov writes about the theft of computers from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab [1]. He suggests that this incident (and others like it) pose a great risk to out civilisation. He advocates donating towards The Lifeboat Foundation [2] to try and mitigate risks to humanity. They suggest pledging $1000 per year for 25 […]

Tragedy and Profit

Every time something goes wrong there will be someone who tries to take advantage of the situation. The recent bushfires in Australia that have killed hundreds of people (the count is not known yet) are a good example. Pastor Nalliah of Catch the Fire Ministries [1] claims that it is due to legalising abortion. This […]

Red Hat, Microsoft, and Virtualisation Support

Red Hat has just announced a deal with MS for support of RHEL virtual machines on Windows Server and Windows virtual machines on RHEL [1]. It seems that this deal won’t deliver anything before “calendar H2 2009” so nothing will immediately happen – but the amount of testing to get these things working correctly is […]

Lenny Play Machine Online

As Debian/Lenny has been released and the temperatures in my part of the world are no longer insanely hot I have put my SE Linux Play Machine [1] online again. It is running Debian/Lenny and is a Xen DomU on a Debian/Lenny Dom0.

To get this working I had to make a few more fixes […]

Xen and Lenny

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 AKA “Lenny” has just been released [1].

One of the features that is particularly noteworthy is that Xen has been updated and now works fully and correctly on the 2.6.26 kernel (see the Debian Wiki page about Xen for details [2]). This may not sound exciting, but I know that a lot […]

Do Spammers target Secondary MX Servers

Rumour has it that some types of spammer target the secondary MX servers. The concept is that some people have less control over the secondary MX server and less ability to implement anti-spam measures. Therefore if they accept all mail from the secoondary then a spammer will have more success if they attack the secondary […]

Normalising Wages

John Robb writes about the normalisation of salaries that is driven by the use of the Internet and global corporations [1]. He cites an example of IBM forcing many of it’s employees to work in developing countries for lower wages.

It seems to me that IBM is leading the field in this regard and many […]

Bridging and Redundancy

I’ve been working on a redundant wireless network for a client. The network has two sites that have pairs of links (primary and backup) which have dedicated wireless hardware (not 802.11 and some proprietary controller in the device – it’s not an interface for a Linux box).

When I first started work the devices were […]

Employment Packages

Paul Wayper has said that he only wants to work for companies that will send him too LCA [1]. While that criteria is quite reasonable it seems overly specific. Among other things the varying location of LCA will result in the expense for the employer varying slightly year by year – which employers generally don’t […]