Basically Tech

"Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world"

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2010-02-01T11:30:10Z

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.

London Stock Exchange moving to a GNU/Linux-based system

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2009-10-07T13:25:08Z

There are various news sources which are reporting that the London Stock Exchange is moving from the Microsoft .Net-based TradElect to the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system. In fact not only are they moving to this new system, they appear to like the company that produced it so much that they are actually buying it. As usual, the comments contain some of the more interesting viewpoints:

TradElect never met its goals for trading speed, never managed to achieve its availability goals and indeed, managed to shut the LSE for an entire trading day, (this) was a complete disaster for both the LSE and for Microsoft, who had invested considerable time and expertise in underpinning the installation.

TradElect has now been surplanted by a Linux + Solaris setup which has already met the latency goals that TradElect was supposed to provide is a massive loss of face for Microsoft in this area. Those who point to Accenture and assume they carried the can for this alone are ignoring reality.

I'd be willing to bet that the decision to deploy TradElect was one of those crazy decisions, where the techies were all saying, "No, don't do it, it won't work," and the management just ignored them and implemented it anyway. As usual.

London Stock Exchange abandoning Windows

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2009-07-03T16:08:27Z

The London Stock Exchange is abandoning it's Windows-based TradElect trading system. The system crashed in September 2008.

TradElect runs on HP ProLiant servers running, in turn, Windows Server 2003. The TradElect software itself is a custom blend of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. On the back-end, it relied on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Its goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times, real-time system speeds, for stock trades.

It never, ever came close to achieving these performance goals. Worse still, the LSE's competition, such as its main rival Chi-X with its MarketPrizm trading platform software, was able to deliver that level of performance and in general it was running rings about TradElect. Three guesses what MarketPrizm runs on and the first two don't count. The answer is Linux.

I'm sure someone got some nice lunches out of it while it lasted.

Debian lenny MailScanner woes

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2009-04-03T12:58:28Z

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!

Continue reading "Debian lenny MailScanner woes"

The Tech Lab: Bruce Schneier

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2009-03-21T13:49:42Z

A cautionary viewpoint concerning the unintended consequences of the current Information Age from Bruce Schneier. I think it's worth reading.

Data is the pollution of the information age. It's a natural by-product of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it's disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after-effects are toxic.

Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply.

Linux tips every geek should know

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2009-03-02T11:25:01Z

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.

sed and iostat

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2008-11-22T03:23:21Z

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!

Colour-coded battery charge level and status in your bash prompt

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2008-09-11T11:23:57Z

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.

Continue reading "Colour-coded battery charge level and status in your bash prompt"

find is an amazing tool

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2008-07-10T23:02:36Z

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.

ZFS and Linux?

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2008-05-18T21:36:56Z

This is concerning a cryptic entry from the blog of Jeff Bonwick. The two guys in the photos (follow the link) are Linus Torvalds and Jeff Bonwick. Jeff Bonwick is maybe not quite as well known as Linus Torvalds. He's the CTO of Storage Technologies at Sun Microsystems, he's also the ZFS development team leader, and his blog pretty much focuses on ZFS.

So, what's this about? Aren't there supposed to be licensing issues with Linux and ZFS? All I can assume when Jeff Bonwick says:

All I can say for the moment is... stay tuned."

is that there are "talks about talks". There are certainly interesting possibilities, ZFS is impressive stuff.

Three awk resources (and one old sed)

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2008-05-14T20:34:08Z

I use awk (or rather gawk and nawk) a lot, and I was intrigued to find two resources on the internet very recently. This sort of information used to be hard to come by, so it was good to find it.

The first (and IMO the best) resource I found was an awk tutorial called Getting started with awk.

The second was an Awk, Nawk and Gawk cheat sheet.

Add to that my old favourite Handy one-liners for awk, which seems to have taken it's inspiration from the venerable and much-queried Handy one-liners for sed, and you have the four resources hinted at in the title. I hope it proves useful.

Safari imposition

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2008-03-27T19:57:16Z

There's been a little flurry of news regarding Apple's "Safari" web browser.

The first thing which caught my attention recently was Apple's bundling of Safari by default into iTunes and Quicktime updates on Windows PCs. So unless you're on the ball (but aren't all Internet users on the ball?) and deselect the "Safari" checkbox, you get Safari downloaded and installed on your Windows PC. Well of course you wanted it!

In this update, Apple claims that "Safari for Windows is the fastest and easiest-to-use web browser for the PC", a claim which is countered by many sources. I guess these things are perceptual to some people, rather than quantitative!

This has now been followed up with a fascinating paradox in the EULA which comes with Safari for Windows, which states that you are permitted to install said software (unwittingly downloaded or not) onto no more than "a single Apple-labeled computer at a time." Which means that if you're installing Safari for Windows (which you may have been tricked into downloading and installing in the first place) onto a Windows PC, you're violating the terms of the license.

Added March 28, 2008

Slashdot has a couple of articles related to this, one discussing the points above as well mentioning that Safari seems to be suffering some security vulnerabilities. The second article follows up on the vulnerability theme; at the CanSecWest hacking contest, a MacBook Air was compromised within two minutes due to a Safari-based vulnerability.

"Effective Evangelism" from Microsoft

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2008-02-18T22:22:44Z

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.

Hotmail doesn't work with Firefox 2.0 and GNU/Linux

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2008-02-11T13:11:06Z

Personally, when I first saw the headline, I thought, "So what?" However on closer reading, it seems that Hotmail has been deliberately rigged not to work with Firefox 2.0 and GNU/Linux. To work around it, all you need to do is use User Agent Switcher to masquerade as Firefox running on Windows, and it works just fine. There is no technical reason why it shouldn't work, this just seems to be a deliberate attempt to block Linux users from Hotmail.

The funniest part of this whole story is when the author contacted Hotmail support with his woes, explaining that Firefox 2 wasn't fully supported under GNU/Linux, and he received a reply recommending him to use Outlook Express, as well as details of the steps required to set up Outlook Express on Windows XP and Vista.

Linux security tips from the pros

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — 2008-01-27T21:09:01Z

I'm always interested in security tips for Linux. This article is short and sweet and contains brief snippets of advice from the likes of Ted Ts'o, Andrew Morton, Linus Torvalds, and Fyodor (yes, he of Nmap fame) on how they secure their Linux desktops and networks.