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BTRFS and ZFS as Layering Violations

LWN has an interesting article comparing recent developments in the Linux world to the “Unix Wars” that essentially killed every proprietary Unix system [1]. The article is really interesting and I recommend reading it, it’s probably only available to subscribers at the moment but should be generally available in a week or so (I used […]

Links April 2012

Karen Tse gave an interesting TED talk about how to stop police torture as an investigative tool [1]. Mostly it’s about training and empowering public defenders.

Phil Plait gave an interesting TED talk about how to defend the Earth from asteroids [2].

Julian Baggini wrote an interesting article for the Financial Times about the persecution […]

Neighborhood Watch

While writing my previous post I heard a huge noise at the front of my house. I found one man being restrained in a seated position on the ground at my front door, the man who was holding him down was accusing him of theft and asking me to call the police, and a woman […]

Autism as an Excuse

A Polish geek going by the handle of mmemuar has recently written a blog post claiming that people use Autism as an excuse for bad behavior [1]. He gets enough things wrong in one short post to make it worth debunking it. It seems that Google’s translation of Polish isn’t as good as some other […]

The Most Important things for running a Reliable Internet Service

One of my clients is currently investigating new hosting arrangements. It’s a bit of a complex process because there are lots of architectural issues relating to things such as the storage and backup of some terabytes of data and some serious computation on the data. Among other options we are considering cheap servers in the […]

ZFS vs BTRFS on Cheap Dell Servers

I previously wrote about my first experiences with BTRFS [1]. Since then I’ve been using BTRFS on more systems and have had good results. The main problem I want to address is with the reliability of RAID [2].

Requirements for a File Server

Now one of my clients has a need for a new fileserver. […]

Guest/Link Post Spam

I’ve been getting a lot of spam recently from people wanting to write guest posts or have their site included in a future links post.

Guest Posts

For guest posts the social convention for the planets which aggregate my blog seems to be that random guest posts are unacceptable. I could change my blog feed […]

Flash Storage Update

Last month I wrote about using USB flash storage devices for my firewall and Squid proxy [1]. 4 days ago it failed, the USB device used for the root filesystem stopped accepting write requests. The USB device which is used for /var/spool/squid is still going well after almost 5 months of intensive use while the […]

The Security Benefits of Automation

Some Random WTFs

The Daily WTF is an educational and amusing site that recounts anecdotes about failed computer projects. One of their stories titled “Remotely Incompetent” concerns someone who breaks networking on a server and is then granted administrative access to someone else’s server by the Data Center staff [1]!

In one of the discussions […]

Cheap NAS Devices Suck

There are some really good Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices on the market. NetApp is one company that is known for making good products [1]. The advantage of a NAS is that you have a device with NVRAM for write-back caching, a filesystem that supports all the necessary features for best performance (NetApp developed their […]