Posted on in System Administration
This comes up pretty infrequently, but I think it's worth knowing. I specifically had a situation where I was greping hostnames out of a file. Personally, I like hostnames to appear in all uppercase, but this file was full of hostnames in all lowercase. You can solve the problem with …
Posted on in Networking
Generally speaking, a route server is a network device that does not participate directly in routing, but carries an entire routing table that other devices may refer to. Often times, this is a router that carries the entire Internet BGP routing table (currently over 220,000 routes).
More commonly, a …
Posted on in Graphics Design
Without much fanfare, Slaptijack broke into the Alexa Top 1,000,000 web sites earlier this week. Although the Alexa ranking is notoriously inaccurate, it does give some gauge of a site's popularity.
Since Alexa relies on their toolbar to determine the reach of a website, I'd like to thank …
Posted on in Software
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., makers of the popular BIND <acronym title="Domain Name Service">DNS</acronym> server and INN Usenet server, has announced the End of Life for BIND 8 . I received an email from ISC on this topic earlier in the month, but I wasn't aware that the <acronym …
Posted on in Programming
Sometimes it seems like a great idea to receive updates whenever someone commits something to your Subversion repository, right? This has definitely seemed like a good idea to me, but it's only nice if you work in a small shop with only a few developers. Too many developers make this …
Posted on in Software
Somehow I managed to miss the fact that Mac OS Forge released MacPorts v1.5. If you aren't familiar with MacPorts, it's the reincarnation of DarwinPorts under the Mac OS Forge / Apple banner. For any UNIX admin, or serious OS X-er, MacPorts is an extensive collection of UNIX tools ported …
Posted on in Networking
You might have a situation where you have multiple network segments utilizing <acronym title="Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol">DHCP</acronym> to assign IP addresses, name servers, etc. DHCP clients use network broadcasts to alert a DHCP server to their presence. Once a request for an address has been made, the …
Posted on in Software
Anyone that has spent any time with Best Practical's RT: Request Tracker knows that it is a leader in the open-source ticketing system market. It is both robust and highly configurable. I've used several systems for incident, trouble, and bug tracking over the last 10+ years, but RT is by …
Posted on in Networking
This isn't late breaking information, but there's an interesting post in the Cisco WAN, Routing and Switching Forum regarding a particular regular expression that, when used in conjunction with the show ip bgp regexp, results in a router crash. Here is the full command.
show ip bgp regexp (.*)(_\1 …Posted on in Software
The Camino Project has announced version 1.5.1 of the Camino Browser for Mac OS X. This update includes security and stability fixes over version 1.5.
According to the release notes, Camino 1.5.1 contains the following improvements over version 1.5:
Posted on in System Administration
You may run into a case where you are running a name server (perhaps a caching-only name server) that is not allowed to communicate with Internet name servers. The most common case for this is a local caching name server being blocked by a corporate or <acronym title="Internet Service …
Posted on in Networking
Let me start by saying this article is not about server load-balancing. That's a different topic, and I apologize if that's what you were looking for. That said, interface load-balancing is an interesting topic and one that comes up quite frequently.
A time will come when it becomes necessary to …
Posted on in software
By default, MySQL only allows access by the 'root' account from the host running the database server ('localhost'). Often times that's perfectly adequate. There are occasions when you need remote access as the 'root' account, however. In these cases, it's helpful to be aware of one little gotcha when creating …
Posted on in System Administration
Personally, my data isn't so important that I need to keep years of it backed up to tape. Obviously, that isn't always the case in a corporate environment, but luckily that's not a problem for me.
That being said, I do like to have at least a week's worth of …
Posted on in Networking
On most networks, there is a subset of IP addresses assigned to "management" hosts. These hosts might be the workstations of network administrators or monitoring servers. One of the keys to network security is restricting who has access to the device. Generally, we think of access restriction in terms of …
