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In a comment on my post about Designing Unsafe Cars [1] Noel said “If you don’t know how to make a surgery, you don’t do it. If you don’t know how to drive, don’t drive. And if you don’t know how to use a computer, don’t expect anybody fix your disasters, trojans and viruses.” Later […]
The LA Times has an interesting article about problems with Toyota and Lexus cars [1]. Basically there are problems where the cars have uncontrolled acceleration (there seems to be some dispute about whether it is due to engine management or the floor mat catching the accelerator pedal). When that happens the brakes don’t work (due […]
Update: TumbleDry has a good analysis of the Square Trade report [0]. It seems that there are significant statistical problems in Square Trade’s analysis and a possible conflict of interest.
Square Trade did a survey of laptop reliability and wrote an interesting article about the results [1]. One thing to keep in mind when reading […]
Sometimes computers fail. If you run enough computers then you encounter failures regularly. If the computers are important then you need to plan for the failure.
An ideal situation is to have redundant servers. Misconfigured clusters can cause more downtime than they can prevent and it requires more expensive hardware to properly implement a cluster […]
When writing a shell script you need to take some care to ensure that it won’t run amok. Extra care is needed for shell scripts that run as root, firstly because of the obvious potential for random destruction, and secondly because of the potential for interaction between accounts that can cause problems.
One possible first […]
Last night I was in the middle of checking my email when I found that clicking on a URL link wouldn’t work. It turned out that my web browser had become unavailable due to a read error on the partition for my root filesystem (the usual IDE uncorrectable error thing). My main machine is a […]
I have just filed Debian bug report #556644 against the version of openssh-server in Debian/Unstable (Squeeze). Â It has a patch that moves the code to set the SE Linux context for the child process before calling chroot. Without this a chroot environment on a SE Linux system can only work correctly if /proc and […]
I run a number of MySQL databases, the number of mysqld installations that I run is something like 8, but I may have forgotten some. With the number of servers that I run on a “do nothing except when it breaks” basis it’s difficult to remember the details. The number of actual databases that I […]
Everyone who does any significant amount of sysadmin work will break a server. Most people who have any significant experience will have broken several. Anyone who has never broken one should be treated with suspicion by other members of the sysadmin team, they probably haven’t learned the caution that most of us learn from stuffing […]
Credit Writedowns has a populist interpretation of the latest Boom-Bust cycle [1]. It’s an interesting analysis of the way the US economy is working.
Bono writes for the NY Times about Rebranding America [2]. He praises Barack Obama suggesting a different reason to believe that the peace prize is deserved and describes what he believes […]
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