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Update: Due to the popularity of this post I have created a T-Shirt and put it on sale at http://www.cafepress.com/email_eula .
Update: Unlike most of my blog content I permit anyone to copy most or all of this post for commercial use (this includes blogs with google advertising) as long as they correctly identify me [...]

When advogato.org was still cool I signed up to it. It was an interesting research project in skill metrics (determining the rating of people’s coding skills by the votes of others and weighting the votes by the rating of each person), and it was nice to be rated Master soon after I joined. [...]

Should you use software or hardware RAID? Many people claim that Hardware RAID is needed for performance (which can be true) but then claim that it’s because of the CPU use of the RAID calculations.
Here is the data logged by the Linux kernel then the RAID-5 and RAID-6 drivers are loaded on a 1GHz [...]

I’m setting up a training environment based on Xen. The configuration will probably be of use to some people so I’m including it below the fold. Please let me know if you have any ideas for improvements.
The interface for the user has the following documentation:

sudo -u root xen-manage create centos|debian [permissive]
Create an image, [...]

I have just read an interesting article titled Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work [1] which documents the research on efficiency vs amount of time spent working (and by inference amount of time spent on leisure activities and sleep). It shows that a 40 hour working week was chosen by people who run factories (such [...]

Other Unix systems apparently calculate the load average differently to Linux. According to the Wikipedia page about Load(computing) [1] most Unix systems calculate it based on the average number of processes that are using a CPU or available for scheduling on a CPU while Linux also includes the count of processes that are blocked [...]

I have previously posted about the difference between using a chroot and using SE Linux [1].
Theo de Raadt claims that virtualisation does not provide security benefits [2] based on the idea that the Xen hypervisor may have security related bugs.
From my understanding of Xen a successful exploit of a Xen system with a Dom0 that [...]

Reporters Sans Frontiers (AKA RSF AKA Reporters Without Borders) has an interesting document about blogging [1]. They are specifically focussed on blogging as a way of reporting news. Their definition of a blog states that it is “a personal website” (there are many corporate blogs run by teams) and that it contains “mostly [...]

A common misconception is that only programmers can contribute to free software. The first significant reference I recall to this was in a presentation by Pia Waugh [1] where she mentioned that she felt that the way words such as “coder” and “hacker” are used in the community as synonyms for “contributor” are denigrating [...]

In a comment on my previous post about SE Linux and worms/trojans [1] a user enquired about which methods of gaining local root are prevented by SE Linux.
A local exploit is one that can not be run remotely. An attack via TCP or UDP is generally considered a remote exploit - even though in [...]