Adam Jacob (@adamhjk) the CTO of Opscode Chef recently gave a talk at Velocity Santa Clara 2014 titled “How to be great at operations”. You should go read the slides. Go now, I’ll wait. Just a hint though, use your space bar to move through the non-linear navigation, you’ll thank me later. … You’re back? […]
At work we had an SSL certificate that is no longer required, so we want to quietly let it expire and get on with our lives. Unfortunately Symantec is doing their best to trick us into renewing it. It mentions an “order number” even though we haven’t ordered anything (perhaps their system persistently uses the […]
I love understanding the background of how particular parts of Internet infrastructure evolved to be how they currently are and the particular quirks of history that shaped them that way. Last night’s spelunking was triggered by this tweet from @miekg: Calculating why there are 13 root nameservers, based on a pkt size of 512 b. My […]
Recently at work we’ve needed to gain visibility on traffic flows across a global MPLS cloud. I would have explored open source solutions anyway but we didn’t have any budget so I was pushed that way regardless. The first part of the puzzle came in the form of pmacct, a daemon that uses pcap to […]
I use fail2ban to monitor brute force login attacks on my server. However it was quite clear that the short bans intended to deter bots but not real users with fat fingers weren’t actually deterring the bots. As soon as the ban was lifted a lot of bots come straight back and keep trying, only to […]
So I’ve been using Twitter’s mobile website for a while and it’s been updated a number of times, most recently a few months ago. There was no fanfare until just recently when #newnewtwitter was announced and it became clear that the current look was part of this redesign effort. What surprises me is that this […]
I was reminded by @dritans tweet that there a lot of great NANOG presentations which tend to get buried amongst the archives. The particular one he linked to is A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute [222KB PDF] by Richard A Steenbergen. This is a terrific primer for those who have never dug deep […]
Long time, no write. Been busy moving countries, as you do. Started a new job too. Been setting up RANCID and wanted to pull together all the pieces here: RANCID Let’s start in the obvious place, www.shrubbery.net/rancid/. I prefer my own, slightly different, expansion of the acronym. Really Awesome Network ConfIg Differ. If you are […]
As the title says… Art of scalability (1) – Scalability principles Art of scalability (2) – Scalability guidelines part 1 Art of scalability (3) – Scalability guidelines part 2 Art of scalability (4) – Scalability guidelines part 3
Australian IT is carrying a blog post by Bernadette McMenamin which is just full of mis-representation and spin. One of the most horrendous developments that we have experienced in the last 15 years is the dramatic explosion in the global trade of child sexual abuse images on the internet. No one really knows the true […]