When I was growing up, one of the things that particularly interested me about the English language were idioms and proverbs. I think today, whilst many are still suffering the effects of the week, we should look a little more closely at one particular proverb, and perhaps its effective meaning today. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” :- This phrase is commonly (and some might say, incorrectly) attributed to Miguel Cervantes (in Don Quixote), but some sources have reported its usage as early as 1600. Also of little surprise is that many other historical cultures had similar phrases. ...

Lately, I’ve been playing around with a pair of domain controllers in the office, trying to figure out a good way to implement a domain. See, the problem is, this kind of thing is a “nice-to-have” rather than a core requirement. At least as far as the business directors are concerned. Their argument is something like “It worked fine with just a bunch of PCs connected to a switch”. I do like things manageable, and planned, and certainly now as we’re approaching 50 desktops in the office, plus mobile devices, plus laptops, and FSM knows what else, that there’s a real need for a bit more structure and management. ...

As I proved in my last blogpost, it’s actually trivial to compromise a facebook account given a very small amount of personal information. After talking to a number of other geeks on Friday night, two things became quite apparent. Facebook security is poor, at best, and the ability to change the user’s contact email address is shocking. Security questions and secret answers are easily exposed by social engineering, thus, these questions only work effectively if you have a completely different identity which you only use for secret questions and answers. I don’t approve entirely of having secret questions that aren’t related to you directly.. I mean, if you had a secret question which was “What is your mother’s maiden name?”, and you gave an answer which wasn’t true, you’d have to do two things. a) remember that you lied, and b) always use the same one, or you’d be forever confused. ...

To prove a point about the latest “Pornstar Name” Meme that’s currently going around Twitter. Basically, the meme asks for you to tweet your Pornstar name which is comprised of the name of your first pet, and your mother’s maiden name. I’m furious about this. Those two names are the two most common answers to security questions found on a number of websites. So. A theory: “Given just a user’s facebook name, and their Pornstar name, it should be possible to compromise their facebook account”. ...

About a week ago, my good friend @Moof asked the question “Is there a website out there monitoring if countries currently in revolt have full connections to the internet? Is eg Bahrain disconnected?” I thought this sounded like a challenge too good to pass up, and set about coming up with a way to figure out how we could programattically determine the state of a country’s internet. I’ve lately come up against the problem that when faced with a new idea, the hardest problem is getting it created, and working fast enough to ensure that your idea isn’t stolen by another like-minded individual. ...

One of the things I’m massively fond of when it comes to systems administration, is logging and monitoring. I love munin, and still prefer it over Cacti and Zabbix. I think the main reason is that it allows plugins to be configured with absolutely no browser interaction. Creating a new graph on cacti and zabbix both require a considerable number of clicks. It’s easy to install new munin plugins with things like Puppet. ...

After answering this question, I reconsidered my answer a number of times, and I’ve finally decided to rewrite it as a longer version as a blog/essay on my website. One of my fellow sysadmin types on Serverfault wrote an answer from a blog-post, and I intend to do the opposite. Right. I see a lot of questions which are basically, “I want my blog/social network/niche site/new product launch site to handle a whole bunch of traffic, how do I do it?”. ...

Download the Qcontrol application source. (32.6 KB) About 5 years ago, I wrote some “drivers” to interface a Velleman K8055 USB interface card . After a recent request, I have decided that they should be brushed up a little, and reinstated with a download link. I’m open to bug reports, but I can’t promise that I’ll be able to fix them quickly. Instructions to compile/install You’ll need the following dependencies: libusb-dev libqt4-dev qt4-qmake (ubuntu deps) ...

The legacy of a nobody I work hard, and try not to let the future bother me. I don’t make 10 year plans, hell, I’m lucky if i know where I’ll be in 30 days time. I don’t make massive future plans, because I’ve found that everything can change massively week-to-week, and hastily made plans are often proved unservicable. I suppose this is par for the course when working in IT. There’s a sheer unpredictability when working with the internet, long hours and late nights along the way, but basically all computer systems listen to Murphy’s Law. ...

After receiving such a great response to my own article (thanks everyone!), a good friend of mine asked whether I’d publish his similar story here. If any of these stories give enough hope to just one teenager (or anyone) to let them survive the hardship of coming out, and homophobic abuse, then that’s enough. For various reasons which will become apparent as you read, N has decided to use this moniker to protect his identity. ...