Archive for March, 2008

Another Way To Build A File Server

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Somebody was talking about ZFS today and I hadn’t heard of it, but thought it might be similar to XFS. After pointing me in the direction of some information I’m not sure of the exact differences, but ZFS is more akin to raid… or at least from the information I’ve read so far.

I was pointed at Build your own multi-terabyte file server with OpenSolaris and ZFS that someone had written. The person also pointed out that Sun has already released a new 4U server - Sun Fire X4500 Server - for those that don’t have the time or know how to put their own together.

Apparently MySQL has also been benchmarked on ZFS - A look at MySQL on ZFS - Conclusions.

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Email: Top 8 Morons Of 2007

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

I found this in my inbox from a friend of mine who should know better. However, I guess it was time for an update and some of these are pretty good for the moron list.

1. Will The Real Dummy Please Stand Up? AT&T fired President John Walter after nine months, saying he lacked intellectual leadership. He received a $26 million severance package. Perhaps it’s not Walter who’s lacking intelligence.
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Server Security and SSH

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

I was in the phpc IRC channel on freenode the other day when somebody posted a link to My Server has been Hacked. I suggested he switch an option in the SSH server options to require the person attempting a login to have a key. Hopefully he’s done this by now.

Most people that deal with remote servers are usually familiar with FTP and/or Telnet. These are both pretty old technologies and were designed prior to the hostile environment that the internet has evolved into. Considering all the security issues around I can’t believe that web hosting companies continue to use it and won’t allow customers encrypted alternatives!

Basically telnet and FTP transfer everything between the user client and the remote server as plain text. This includes username and password for logging in and all the files you upload & download will be transferred visibly bit by naked bit. (more…)

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Cracked.com Links

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

As somebody else put it - Cracked.com is sort of a rehash of MAD magazine online. These are a few I’ve laughed about and read through over the last couple of days (in no particular order):
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My OLPC Arrived!

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

So I got this weird box in the mail today and started googling for it. I didn’t find anything via google, but looking closer at the FedEx & contents stickers I noticed “OLPC XO” on the side! My OLPC had showed up! Somebody asked for pictures so here’s the top & bottom… After getting a closer look at what all is on it I’ll make another post.

OLPC bottom OLPC top

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E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D, dies at 69

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

I was catching up on my Order of the Stick (aka oots) reading and noticed a In Memoriam: E. Gary Gygax post under their News section. I couldn’t believe it so read through it and ended up at a Wired article Gary Gygax, ‘Father of D&D,’ Dies at 69.
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World of Warcraft: AddOns

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

I got sucked into WoW and something I found was that WoW has a directory for AddOns!

I couldn’t find something for a particular quest and started googling for it. As usual, someone was nice enough to list coordinates for the quest. It wasn’t until later that I discovered these coordinates are percentages from the top left corner of the map, but even so it’s nice to have something that will display these.

Apparently there are lots & lots of add-ons for WoW. One that a lot of people use seems to be QuestHelper. One of the pages for 1 of the quests I was doing pointed me towards Curse.com. Curse.com has a nifty downloader/installer/updater utility that works great on windows… Unfortunately I’m on linux - but I got it working!
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