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Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 an...

(2005/2006 era) Alex is at the age where Sesame Street is a frequent, if not regular, visitor to our TV. It is gratifying to see parts of the children's shows which are aimed not at the children, but at the adults which frequently watch the shows with their ch...

(7 September 2012) Poul-Henning Kamp writes about A Generation Lost In The Bazaar: Here is one example of an ironic piece of waste: Sam Leffler's graphics/libtiff is one of the 122 packages on the road to www/firefox, yet the resulting Firefox browser does no...

Law There's always an easier way. Corollary Things frequently get done sooner if you just do them the hard way rather than continuing to seek an easier way. (Also known as the Projects Manager's Observation: sometimes you just have to shoot the engineers and p...

Law Anything which can be measured, will be measured on the Internet. 1st Corollary Anything measured on the Internet will become the subject of a Dick-Size War. 2nd Corollary Anything measured on the Internet will become the subject of at least one person or ...

(29 January 2008) I watched the Google Talk video about the Inbox Zero concept. It is long (about 60 minutes) but the first half hour especially is good, where he talks about his system. My system is similar. I don't process to zero (ie reduce everything to an...

(10 October 2011) Interesting results from an IBM study comparing the effectiveness of folder-filing email versus just sorting a big random pile of email: Search-based users find what they are looking for in an average of 18 seconds; folder-based users take a...

Put five apes in a cage. In the middle of a cage is a set of steps, and at the top of the steps is a banana hanging from the top of the cage. When the first ape starts up the steps, blast all five apes with ice cold water from a firehose for five minutes. When...

(written back in 2005) IT Is A Utility For most companies, IT is just as much a utility as HVAC, electricity, or plumbing is. The difference is that most companies don't keep a team of electricians or plumbers on staff. The basic service comes out of the wall ...

(5 October 2011) So a long time ago, the company I worked for at the time decided that the head office (which was in California) needed to have 24x7 access to a technical contact here in Ottawa. To gain this access they obtained a North-American-wide pager wit...

Problem Mixed-mode file systems suck. You'll have to be a bit more specific. Someone applied a CIFS ACL to a directory tree in a mixed mode filesystem and now the unix permissions are not usable. Specifically: there was a requirement to deny a Windows user (an...

Problem Doing an rsync to a filer, the user gets gratuitous errors: rsync: mkstemp "$LONGPATH/$FILE.gz.FiA0Vm" failed: Operation not permitted (1) Solution OK, that was painful. The root problem here is that this is a mixed-mode filesystem. In a mixed-mode fi...

You have multiple places for problems to occur. Performance areas are: how fast can your disks (or arrays) pass bits how fast can your network devices pass bits how fast can your software translate between the two General notes: Linux has, in general, a po...

This is a page which includes my thoughts on documenting a live, running network. It will be perpetually under construction as my thoughts change depending on what problems I've recently had to deal with. It's also kind of a mess right now. Principle #1: It Is...

Thou shalt above all, maintain the integrity of the network. Thou shalt have a long term strategic direction. Thou shalt always opt for quality before expediency. Thou shalt meet the requirements, exceed the expectations and anticipate the needs of users. Tho...

The question is usually framed as Is Hardware RAID better than software RAID? Well actually it's usually framed as a statement: Hardware RAID is better than software RAID. The theory is usually two-fold: RAID operations are offloaded to a secondary processor,...

(May 6, 2010) Recent History At one of my customer sites, I have a pile of Sun X2200-M2 systems. After a recent move where the pile was moved from one location to another, I started having problems with a couple of them. One which had been reliable started thr...

(2013-08-15) 11:03:49 < xdroop> I just pulled another private /24 out of my ass for overlapping use. 11:04:07 < Myke> I know Windows isn't okay with IPs like 10.0.0.255/23 11:04:22 < Myke> or 10.0.1.0/23 11:04:38 < xdroop> Really? 11:04:45 < xdroop> I know W2K...

(11 January 2012) There seems to be an almost-declared war on email going these days. I have read of people abandoning email either temporarilly or permanently. I also read of CEOs deciding they want to ban email from their companies completely. I really don't...

Get along with everyone. Strive to be welcomed by all: the sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads. Be a righteous dude. Look out that window. How can you possibly be expected to handle school/work/insert-worry-here on a day l...