I was recently asked to get data from a computer that controlled security cameras after a crime had been committed. Due to the potential issues I refused to collect the computer and insisted on performing the work at the office of the company in question. Hard drives are vulnerable to damage from vibration and there […]
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I’ve recently had some discussions about backups with people who aren’t computer experts, so I decided to blog about this for the benefit of everyone. Note that this post will deliberately avoid issues that require great knowledge of computers. I have written other posts that will benefit experts. Essential Requirements Everything that matters must be […] The Need for Speed One of my clients has an important server running ZFS. They need to have a filesystem that detects corruption, while regular RAID is good for the case where a disk gives read errors it doesn’t cover the case where a disk returns bad data and claims it to be good (which […] I recently had to setup some Linux workstations with 802.1x authentication (described as “Ethernet authentication”) to connect to a smart switch. The most useful web site I found was the Ubuntu help site about 802.1x Authentication [1]. But it didn’t describe exactly what I needed so I’m writing a more concise explanation. The first thing […] Just over a month ago I ordered a new Nexus 6P [1]. I’ve had it for over a month now and it’s time to review it and the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini I also bought. Security The first noteworthy thing about this phone is the fingerprint scanner on the back. The recommended configuration is to […] In Australia we are about to have a federal election, so we inevitably have a lot of stupid commentary and propaganda about politics. One thing that always annoys me is the claim that we shouldn’t have small parties. We have two large parties, Liberal (right-wing, somewhat between the Democrats and Republicans in the US) and […] I think that a major deficiency in Computer Science degrees is the lack of sysadmin training. Version Control The first thing that needs to be added is the basics of version control. CVS (which is now regarded as obsolete) was initially released when I was in the first year of university. But SCCS and RCS […] Last year I wrote a long-term review of Android phones [1]. I noted that my Galaxy Note 3 only needed to last another 4 months to be the longest I’ve been happily using a phone. Last month (just over 7 months after writing that) I fell on my Note 3 and cracked the screen. The […] 8 years ago I wrote a script to summarise Xen CPU use per domain [1]. Since then changes to Xen required changes to the script. I have new versions for Debian/Wheezy (Xen 4.1) and Debian/Jessie (Xen 4.4). Here’s a new script for Debian/Wheezy: #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; open(LIST, "xm list --long|") or die "Can't get list"; […] I’ve recently been setting up more monitoring etc to increase the reliability of servers I run. One ongoing issue with computer reliability is any case where a person enters the same data in multiple locations, often people make mistakes and enter slightly different data which can give bad results. For DNS you need to have […] |
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