Technology & MSG

I’ve been blogging since 2001.
After a brief stint using my own PHP-based blogging platform, I started using an external blog host in 2002. Then in 2004 I started using MovableType, hoping to provide a more polished and professional-looking site. Back then, my writing was mostly technical in nature (mostly scripting solutions, hardware troubleshooting, and mini [...]

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In the course of dealing with computers for more than a decade, I’ve seen just about everything. Most of these experiences have been with Windows users. I’ve removed viruses from people’s PCs and recovered their files. I’ve cleaned up systems that were so overridden with spyware to the point they were unusable. As part of [...]

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As of last night I’m getting PDF attachment spam and the filters aren’t getting them. Content analysis isn’t catching them because there’s nothing in the content of the email to analyze. Just the attachment. The subject always specifies the name of the attachment and sure enough the PDF is attached to the email. I receive [...]

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ZDnet reported that a set of F5 Networks’ BIG-IP load balancers are handling the official World Cup website. Despite this, F5 shares (NASDAQ: FFIV) are down $10 from last month.
SBS is hosting the web site from their headquarters in Sydney. The setup is 3-4 Sun Fire V240 servers, load balanced by a BIG-IP. Sun is [...]

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I know nothing about Erection PowerPack, nor do I care to. But it really pisses me off when bulk mailers use my domain to forge a return address for their spam mailings.
For the record, I don’t send out unsolicited email.
This morning I received several hundred bounce messages from dozens of systems, informing me that “my” [...]

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When configuring a Cisco PIX in Transparent Mode to operate across VLANs, take caution when using Foundry’s Virtual Ethernet (VE) interfaces.
On firewalls from Cisco, Transparent Mode is a significant new feature of PIX 7.0, where the firewall can be configured to behave like a Layer 2 bridge. Previously PIX devices behaved like an ACL-enhanced Layer [...]

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AOL and Yahoo! have both announced changes in policy that may affect your ability to receive list traffic from this system, at least in an unadulterated form.
A Quick Summary…
AOL (and likely Yahoo! as well) will be transitioning to a paid-sender program, which I have no plans to participate in. There may be an impact to [...]

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NRPE commands must be less than 32 characters, else NRPE will fail with the “NRPE: Command ‘X’ not defined” message. This is another reason why NRPE checks can fail inexplicably.
Note: As of January 19, 2004 the author “removed length restrictions for command names and command lines” in the 2.1 release. However, many legacy systems aren’t [...]

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S/MIME message don’t interact well with RT. If you send an S/MIME email to the system, you will likely receive the nondescript “no value sent for required parameter ‘message’” error. The mail administrator will see EX_TEMPFAIL errors (if using Sendmail). One solution is to remove MIME data from incoming messages destined for RT.
The following was [...]

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Whenever we get a new hire or transfer that’s going to be spending some time in our datacenter, I immediately give the individual two bits of advice when it comes to working on the datacenter floor. The first is to wear comfortable shoes, and the second is to have something warm to wear.
Although it defies [...]

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With a few simple changes to a robots.txt file, the daily page impressions on one of my sites have more than quadrupled. The bottom line is this: don’t underestimate the effects of Google’s search results.
One of my sites gets steady traffic from Counter Strike addicts (and has for a few years now). In recent months [...]

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BSDi is a proprietary BSD Unix variant owned, developed, and maintained by Wind River. Despite the common “BSD is dying” flame wars, the operating system has been found in numerous network appliances.
According to their training materials, Secure Computing’s Sidewinder G2 firewall runs the latest version of BSDi. As with most firewall vendors, numerous patent claims [...]

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NRPE is an indispensable part of many Nagios-based monitoring solutions, however the sample NRPE config file — though well documented — doesn’t mention the in’s and out’s of all of its options.
The Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE) allows you to execute local plugins on remote hosts, then return the results of those checks to Nagios. [...]

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There may become a time when you need to insert a random delay into a shell script. The follow script attains this in five lines of code.
Imagine that you have 100 servers — all configured similarly with some flavor of Linux — and there is some operation that you want to perform every five minutes. [...]

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Pat’s Pizzeria is home to the famous Mega Fries, first introduced to me when I visited friends at the University of Delaware. A wonderful mess of French fries, cheese and bacon that I came to enjoy most every time I visited the campus. Now that all my friends have graduated, it turns out that there [...]

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