When DVD Jon was arrested after breaking the CSS encryption algorithm, he was charged with “unauthorized computer trespassing.” That led his lawyers to ask the obvious question, “On whose computer did he trespass?” The prosecutor’s answer: “his own.”

If that doesn’t make your heart skip a beat, you can stop reading now.

Or you can read the whole article.

I ran a system upgrade (from etch to lenny) on one of my Debian servers today. There seem to be lots of people who have their own ideas about how to go about this, which is fair enough, there's more than one way to climb the mountain. In fact I deviated (very) slightly from the steps kindly provided in the official upgrade instructions.

I double-checked the official issues to be aware of for lenny. Nothing about MailScanner!

This is a great collection of random Linux tips (57 in all). They were originally published in Linux Format magazine. The various tips are categorised into three levels of difficulty, easy, intermediate, and expert. Well worth a read.

I'm sure many Solaris admins will have come across this problem before. You have a SAN-attached host with dozens, maybe even hundreds of visible LUNs. Each LUN has a highly improbable and unwieldy name, as some of these SAN-attached devices do, and you need the iostat data for that LUN.

grep is no help, because you also want the four lines of data beneath the 'disk' name.

Well, you could just run iostat and painstakingly trawl through hundreds of lines of data, searching for the information you need. Or you could use the goodness of sed to find your LUN, and the four lines of data beneath it ...

$ iostat -En | sed -n '/c4t60060480000290101035533030433430d0/{p;n;p;n;p;n;p;n;p;}'

c4t60060480000290101035533030433430d0 Soft Errors: 0 Hard Errors: 1223 Transport Errors: 1170
Vendor: EMC      Product: SYMMETRIX        Revision: 5771 Serial No:
Size: 54.41GB <54408314880 bytes>
Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 75 Recoverable: 0
Illegal Request: 0 Predictive Failure Analysis: 0

And that is a genuine LUN id!

I recently purchased a laptop, and having installed a proper OS, I found myself a little disappointed with the default battery meter provided by GNOME. Unless you mouse over the icon on the panel, it doesn't display exactly what charge level it is at. I am aware of the other options such as conky, gkrellm, screenlets, etc, but being the lazy sort, I consider it a long way to move your eyes! Since I'm the type who always has several terminals open, I thought it would be handy to display the charge level and status of the laptop battery in my shell prompt.

I found a new article about the remarkable command-line interface utility 'find' today. It's a good article, but the best I've found so far is Daniel Miessler's excellent tutorial on the subject, which also incorporates some xargs goodness, something which the former sadly neglects.

This article is eye-opening to say the least. It's a guideline written in 1997 on how to get Microsoft's platforms accepted as de facto standards. Here are some classic quotes, but you should read the full article to get a fuller flavour.

Working behind the scenes to orchestrate "independent" praise of our technology, and damnation of the enemy's, is a key evangelism function during the Slog. "Independent" analyst's report should be issued, praising your technology and damning the competitors (or ignoring them).

Analysts sell out - that's their business model. But they are very concerned that they never look like they are selling out, so that makes them very prickly to work with.

Get a well-known consultant on your side early, but don't let him publish anything blatantly pro-Microsoft. Then, get him to propose himself to the conference organizers as a moderator, whenever a panel opportunity comes up. Since he's well- known, but apparently independent, he'll be accepted ...

lt's amazing what some people will do for a T-shirt.

Interesting peek into an alien mindset.