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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 […] Systemd has a new way of specifying names for Ethernet interfaces as documented in systemd.link(5). The Debian package should keep working with the old 70-persistent-net.rules file, but I had a problem with this that forced me to learn about systemd.link(5). Below is a little shell script I wrote to convert a basic 70-persistent-net.rules (that only […] At LCA I attended a talk about Unikernels. Here are the reasons why I think that they are a bad idea: Single Address Space According to the Unikernel Wikipedia page [1] a significant criteria for a Unikernel system is that it has a single address space. This gives performance benefits as there is no need […] Compatibility/interoperability is a good thing. It’s generally good for systems on the Internet to be capable of communicating with as many systems as possible. Unfortunately it’s not always possible as new features sometimes break compatibility with older systems. Sometimes you have systems that are simply broken, for example all the systems with firewalls that block […] Lets Encrypt is a new service to provide free SSL keys [1]. I’ve just set it up on a few servers that I run. Issues The first thing to note is that the client is designed to manage your keys and treat all keys on a server equally with a single certificate. It shouldn’t be […] Here are some basic things to do when debugging storage performance problems on Linux. It’s deliberately not an advanced guide, I might write about more advanced things in a later post. Disk Errors When a hard drive is failing it often has to read sectors several times to get the right data, this can dramatically […] |
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