Perpetual MotionPerpetual Motion
It seems that many blog posts related to fuel use (such as my post from yesterday about record oil prices [1]) are getting adverts about perpetual motion [2]. Note that[...]
Record Oil PricesRecord Oil Prices
MarketWatch reports that oil prices had the biggest daily gain on record, going up $11 in one day. They claim that this is due to an impending Israeli attack on[...]
SE Linux Support in GPGSE Linux Support in GPG
In May 2002 I had an idea for securing access to GNUPG [1]. What I did was to write SE Linux policy to only permit the gpg program to access[...]
I Just Joined SAGEI Just Joined SAGE
I’ve just joined SAGE AU – the System Administrators Guild of Australia [1] . I’ve known about SAGE for a long time, in 2006 I presented a paper at their[...]
BIND StatsBIND Stats
In Debian the BIND server will by default append statistics to the file /var/cache/bind/named.stats when the command rndc stats (which seems to be undocumented) is run. The default for RHEL4[...]
The Date Command and Seconds Since 1970-01-01The Date Command and Seconds Since 1970-01-01
The man page for the date command says that the %s option will give “seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC“. I had expected that everything that date did would give output[...]
Moving a Mail ServerMoving a Mail Server
Nowadays it seems that most serious mail servers (IE mail servers suitable for running an ISP) use one file per message. In the old days (before about 1996) almost all[...]
Mobile FacebookMobile Facebook
A few of my clients have asked me to configure their routers to block access to Facebook and Myspace. Apparently some employees spend inappropriate amounts of time using those services[...]
Shelf-life of HardwareShelf-life of Hardware
Recently I’ve been having some problems with hardware dying. Having one item mysteriously fail is something that happens periodically, but having multiple items fail in a small amount of time[...]
Links May 2008Links May 2008
The Daily WTF has published an interesting essay on why retaining staff is not always a good thing [1]. The main point is that good people get bored and want[...]