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Switches and Cables

I’ve just read an amusing series of blog posts about bad wiring [1]. I’ve seen my share of wiring horror in the past. There are some easy ways of minimising wiring problems which seem to never get implemented.

The first thing to do is to have switches near computers. Having 48 port switches in a […]

Purging an RT Database

I had a problem where the email address circsales@washpost.com spammed a Request Tracker (RT) [1] installation (one of the rules for running a vaction program is that you never respond twice to the same address, another rule is that you never respond to automatically generated messages).

Deleting these tickets was not easy, the RT web […]

DNS Secondaries and Web Security

At the moment there are ongoing security issues related to web based services and DNS hijacking. the Daily Ack has a good summary of the session hijacking issue [1].

For a long time it has been generally accepted that you should configure a DNS server to not allow random machines on the Internet to copy […]

Ownership of the Local SE Linux Policy

A large part of the disagreement about the way to manage the policy seems to be based on who will be the primary “owner” of the policy on the machine. This isn’t a problem that only applies to SE Linux, the same issue applies for various types of configuration files and scripts throughout the process […]

SE Linux Policy Packaging for a Distribution

Caleb Case (Ubuntu contributer and Tresys employee) has written about the benefits of using separate packages for SE Linux policy modules [1].

Firstly I think it’s useful to consider some other large packages that could be split into multiple packages. The first example that springs to mind is coreutils which used to be textutils, shellutils, […]

Australian Business and IT Expo

I’ve just visited the Australian Business and IT Expo (ABITE) [1]. I haven’t been to such an event for a while, but Peter Baker sent a link for a free ticket to the LUV mailing list and I was a bit bored to I attended.

The event was a poor shadow on previous events that […]

Starting to Blog

The best way to run a blog is to run your own blog server. This can mean running an instance on someone else’s web server (some ISPs have special hosting deals for bloggers on popular platforms such as WordPress), but usually means having shell access to your own server (I’ve previously written about my search […]

CPU vs RAM

When configuring servers the trade-offs between RAM and disk are well known. If your storage is a little slow then you can often alleviate the performance problems by installing more RAM for caching and to avoid swapping. If you have more than adequate disk IO capacity then you can over-commit memory and swap out the […]

SpamAssassin During SMTP

For some time people have been telling me about the benefits of SpamAssassin (SA). I have installed it once for a client (at their demand and against my recommendation) but was not satisfied with the result (managing the spam folder was too complex for their users).

The typical configuration of SA has it run after […]

Compassion for Windows Users

In a discussion which covered some of the differences between Linux and Windows, a Windows using friend asked me if I felt compassion for Windows users.

I feel some compassion for people who have bad working environments. While using an operating system that has poor support for the business tasks does decrease the quality of […]