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Forking Mon and DKIM with Mailing Lists

I have forked the “Mon” network/server monitoring system. Here is a link to the new project page [1]. There hasn’t been an upstream release since 2010 and I think we need more frequent releases than that. I plan to merge as many useful monitoring scripts as possible and support them well. All Perl scripts will […]

802.1x Authentication on Debian

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 […]

Google mod_pagespeed

I’ve just downloaded and installed the Debian AMD64 package of the Google Apache Pagespeed module [1].

To see if it worked I used the Google PageSpeed insights tool which gave my blog a rating of 93% (and 88% for mobile) [2].

After installing mod_pagespeed I received the same scores. So it appears that Pagespeed isn’t […]

Server Use Per Person

I’ve just read Diego’s response to an ill-informed NYT article about data-center power efficiency [1]. This makes me wonder, how much server use does each person have?

Google

Almost everyone uses Google, most of us use it a lot. The main Google product is also probably the most demanding, their search engine.

In a typical […]

Changing Phone Prices in Australia

18 months ago when I signed up with Virgin Mobile [1] the data transfer quotas were 200MB on the $29 per month plan and 1.5G on the $39 per month plan. About 4 months ago when I checked the prices the amounts of data had gone up on the same plans (2.25G for $39 per […]

What I REALLY Want from the NBN

Generally I haven’t had a positive attitude towards the NBN. It doesn’t seem likely to fulfill the claims of commercial success and would be a really bad thing to privatise anyway. Also it hasn’t seemed to offer any great benefits either. The claim that it will enable lots of new technical developments which we can’t […]

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 […]

Good Riddance to Flash

The Age reports that Adobe has ceased development of Flash for mobile systems [1]. This is described as leading to an improvement in the web experience for iPhone and iPad users, but the more important thing is that it will improve the experience for everyone. The Flash plugin has always been a resource hog and […]

Dual SIM Phones vs Amaysim vs Contract for Mobile Phones

Currently Dick Smith is offering two dual-SIM mobile phones for sale in Australia. One is the LG T510 for $99, but it only supports GSM on each SIM. This might be a good phone for someone who needs to receive both work and personal calls and doesn’t want to carry two phones, but the lack […]

Name Server IP and a Dead Server

About 24 hours ago I rebooted the system that runs the secondary DNS for my zone and a few other zones. I’d upgraded a few things and the system had been running for almost 200 days without a reboot so it was time for it. Unfortunately it didn’t come back up.

Even more unfortunately the […]