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(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...

or, It Will Happen To You Too, Kid (15 November 2011) I had to laugh the other week. Some Ubuntu user was up in arms over the inclusion of Gnome 3 into the latest release of Ubuntu-current. For those of you not playing along at home, the controversy in Gnome 3...

Five User Experience Principles Keep it simple. But not simpler. Keep scalability in mind. End users are not dumb. Administrators are human beings, too.

(12 January 2007) This is just a little story illustrating what happens when you use the best tools for the job, not merely the best tools you have available. So my Dell laptop finally packed it in (mainboard failure -- at least, that what the Dell Dude who is...