I’m not going to make a habit of posting memes on my blog here. My experience is that memes are the blogging equivalent of small talk – it’s just making noise so that people don’t feel uncomfortable in the silence. As a result, there may be periods of silence here, if I don’t have anything [...]
Everyone knows that security is important. I’ve talked before about DenyHosts, which watches for attempts to brute-force your SSH passwords and blocks them. I could probably live fairly happily without DenyHosts, since my passwords aren’t going to be caught by a brute-force attack based on dictionary words and while every password is vulnerable to a [...]
Things are quite quiet at the moment in both my day job and in the hosting. That’s not to say that both aren’t keeping me busy, but it’s the sort of busy that’s not interesting to write about. There’s not been any fun experiments with virtualisation or other shiny toys to write about. So I [...]
I just realised that my CentOS hosts don’t have Denyhosts running on them. cPanel is supposed to include some sort of anti-brute-force protection, but I don’t think it’s terribly reliable, since after installing Denyhosts on my main cPanel VM, I received the following in my admin email: Added the following hosts to /etc/hosts.deny: 222.66.76.146 (unknown) [...]
Somewhat late, here’s the run-down on what went wrong with our big upgrade. The executive summary is: very little. Saturday’s hardware upgrades went reasonably well, although we did discover that the hardware just doesn’t like 2GB DIMMs, and caused a minor panic by forgetting to activate the second disk in the BIOS. The RAM issue [...]
I’m on the train to London now, using the internet thanks to National Express including it for free on their trains. I’d be online anyway, since I can always use my phone as a modem (as an aside, that, plus 3G support, are all that’s stopping me from getting an iPhone when my T-Mobile contract [...]
This weekend’s technical dramas have largely been fighting obscure Linux authentication issues in order to get email to work. Authentication and email are two of the most important elements of a good system, but they’re both barely above the level of ‘black art’. Documentation is either scarce or impenetrable and they’re both minefields of complex [...]
Somewhat ahead of schedule we’re taking on some shared hosting customers. Our plan had been to build a special VM to use as a shared hosting platform after we work on the server at the end of the month, but events overtook us and now I’ve discovered that the shared hosting strategy I came up [...]
Sometimes, this industry confuses me. For example, HP’s DL140, which is a perfectly nice 1u rack server, costs just over £600 (including VAT – we’re not VAT registered) here at Insight. On that same page you can see the cost of adding in a second matching processor. Just under £600. By their logic, the entire [...]
A lot of what I’m going to write about here will be about virtualisation. My day job involves a lot of work with VMWare – Server, Workstation, and Infrastructure/ESX. My home workstation – a Mac OS X-running iMac – has VMWare Fusion to let me access Windows apps and test Linux set-ups. But where I’m [...]
