Basically Tech

Battle for the Internet

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:59:47 +0100

The Guardian newspaper website has an interesting series of articles running through this week called the Battle for the Internet. It is governments and organisations which are eroding our freedoms, and they're not just the usual suspects.

PCI Lawsuit

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:39:32 +0000

This is interesting.

... the McCombs allege that the bank, and the payment card industry (PCI) in general, force merchants to sign one-sided contracts that are based on information that arbitrarily changes without notice, and that they impose random fines on merchants without providing proof of a breach or of fraudulent losses and without allowing merchants a meaningful opportunity to dispute claims before money is seized

"It’s just like Visa and MasterCard are governments," said Stephen Cannon, an attorney representing the McCombs. "Where do they get the authority to execute a system of fines and penalties against merchants? That’s a very important issue in this case."

Shades of Wikileaks, perhaps?

30 online sources for Linux/Unix documentation

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:00:11 +0000

NixCraft is an excellent source of Linux/Unix documentation in itself, but this article lists 30 offsite sources of technical documentation. Some old, some new, most are good!

Lessons from Wikileaks

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:46:54 +0000

An interesting article by Simon Phipps, discussing the implications of actions of Paypal, Amazon, and others, namely blocking Wikileaks from their paid services without judicial review, useful explanation or workable recourse.

While the Internet itself may have a high immunity to attacks, a monoculture hosted on it does not. We might be able to survive a technical outage, but a political outage or a full-fledged termination of service are likely to put a company that's relied on the cloud for critical infrastructure out of business ... a sales system hosted in the cloud can be taken offline instantly by someone we will never discover, for reasons we can't determine and with no way for us to get them back online.

Amazon and PayPal shouldn't be boycotted; they are just reptiles, after all. The problem is that we have a society with the governments that it deserves, ready to encourage summary judgement rather than consider matters deeply.

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

nospam@example.com (Rob Newcater) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:30:10 +0000

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) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:25:08 +0100

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) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:08:27 +0100

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) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:58:28 +0100

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) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:49:42 +0000

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) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:25:01 +0000

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) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 03:23:21 +0000

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) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:23:57 +0100

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) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:02:36 +0100

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) — Sun, 18 May 2008 22:36:56 +0100

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) — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:34:08 +0100

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.