slaptijack

My wife uses a Canon FS100 for taking home videos of the kids. If you aren't familiar with it, it's a fairly light-weight camcorder that uses SDHC cards rather than tapes. The only real grievance I have with it is that the video codec it uses is not compatible with …

A while back, I sent an email describing the strategic management process. Although the email was written for an internal audience, it's generic enough to be reproducible here...

Strategic Management is a five step process:

1. Corporate Identity
   This is the definition of the company and is broken down into three …

In a small environment, there's very little reason to rely on DNS resolution inside MySQL. You can disable it by adding skip-name-resolve to your my.cnf or by using the --skip-name-resolve command line argument.

Remember that if you disable DNS lookups, you will need to set permissions using IP addresses …

ReadWriteWeb is highlighting the recent hubbub around the fact that IT staffs aren't shrinking despite the rapid adoption of cloud computing. It's always been assumed that outsourcing IT infrastructure would result in reductions in IT staffing. Although that is still generally assumed to be the future, recent studies have shown …

Slaptijack reader Raj is looking for a way to limit inbound traffic on his switch ports based on the time of day. Specifically, he wants to restrict speed to 256 Kbps between 9 AM and 9 PM, and allow up to 1 Mbps the rest of the day. I've done …

I've mentioned before that I use Unison to keep a few important directories synchronized between my various workstations and file server. I made the switch to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS recently, and started using its unison 2.27.57 package. This breaks all of my Macs that use unison 2 …

For troubleshooting tips regarding the error message %TAC+: no address for get_server see: Troubleshooting "%TAC+: no address for get_server" on Cisco Devices.

While working with Cisco Catalyst IOS image 12.2(58)SE1, I noticed that configuration for TACACS+ had changed. My first clue that there was a problem was …

In the past, I've written about the usefulness of using iptables to limit incoming SSH connections. Although it isn't a replacement for a good password policy, it at least limits the ability of outsiders to perform a brute-force password attack on your system. Now that I've started using Ubuntu more …

rsync: on remote machine: --extended-attributes: unknown option

If this is the output you get when running rsync, you are almost certainly running the Mac OS X version of rsync -E on the client with something else on the server side. The fix is to install the MacPorts version of rsync …

Behold, the benefits of virtualization!

I spent most of the evening preparing to move a few websites. I decided to do some benchmarking just to see what sort of improvement I was getting from the new server setup. Although the old server didn't feel slow when browsing sites, the results …

Although this process is well documented on the Ubuntu community site, I decided to take notes of the exact steps that I took so that I wouldn't have to fumble through that long document next time. I'm installing the tools in a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS …

Using WordPress to write a technical blog can be occasionally frustrating. WordPress uses the wptexturize() function to rewrite certain ASCII character combinations into HTML entities. Although this may generally be a "good thing," it's really annoying on technical blogs where two dashes is not an em dash.

To disable this …

This will just be a short reminder. If you're planning to create multiple-column indexes in MySQL, remember that the order of the columns matters. As the MySQL documentation points out, any "leftmost prefix of the index can be used." This means that the index can be used for any number …

Via: Wikibon

The Influences Driving Virtualization is a new white paper from the guys at ReadWriteWeb. I recently downloaded and read through it. If you're curious about virtualization, but aren't sure about giving up your contact info to ReadWriteWeb, here are some notes about what you'll find after you download.

"Organizations that …