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MarketWatch reports that oil prices had the biggest daily gain on record, going up $11 in one day.
They claim that this is due to an impending Israeli attack on Iran and a weak US economy. $150 per barrel is the price that they predict for the 4th of July. That’s an interesting choice of […]
In May 2002 I had an idea for securing access to GNUPG [1]. What I did was to write SE Linux policy to only permit the gpg program to access the secret key (and other files in ~/.gnupg). This meant that the most trivial ways of stealing the secret key would be prevented. However an […]
I’ve just joined SAGE AU – the System Administrators Guild of Australia [1] .
I’ve known about SAGE for a long time, in 2006 I presented a paper at their conference [2] (here is the paper [3] – there are still some outstanding issues from that one, I’ll have to revisit it).
They have been […]
In Debian the BIND server will by default append statistics to the file /var/cache/bind/named.stats when the command rndc stats (which seems to be undocumented) is run. The default for RHEL4 seems to be /var/named/chroot/var/named/data/named_stats.txt.
The output will include the time-stamp of the log in the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (see my previous […]
The man page for the date command says that the %s option will give “seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC“. I had expected that everything that date did would give output in my time zone unless I requested otherwise.. But it seems that in this case the result is in UTC, and the same seems to […]
Nowadays it seems that most serious mail servers (IE mail servers suitable for running an ISP) use one file per message. In the old days (before about 1996) almost all Internet email was stored in Mbox format [1]. In Mbox you have a large number of messages in a single file, most users would have […]
A few of my clients have asked me to configure their routers to block access to Facebook and Myspace. Apparently some employees spend inappropriate amounts of time using those services while at work. Using iptables to block port 80 and configuring Squid to reject access to those sites is easy to do.
So I was […]
Recently I’ve been having some problems with hardware dying. Having one item mysteriously fail is something that happens periodically, but having multiple items fail in a small amount of time is a concern.
One problem I’ve had is with CD-ROM drives. I keep a pile of known good CD-ROM drives because as they have moving […]
The Daily WTF has published an interesting essay on why retaining staff is not always a good thing [1]. The main point is that good people get bored and want to move on while mediocre people want to stay, but there are other points and it’s worth reading.
Following the links from that article led […]
Today a client asked me to advise him on how to dramatically reduce the number of servers for his business. He needs to go from 18 active servers to 4. Some of the machines in the network are redundant servers. By reducing some of the redundancy I can remove four servers, so now it’s a […]
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