nycterent - Kuru

ipmi card reset from linux machine

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:31:03 +0200

This hint has been provided by brilliant colleague sysadmin:
“if you can log on to the console, the ipmi can be reset as follows: modprobe ipmi_si
modprobe ipmi_devinf

ipmitool mc reset cold”

Posted via email from Unread Manuals | Comment »

Iconoclastic Tendencies: OpenSolaris is Dead.

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:31:31 +0200

What follows is an email sent internally to Oracle Solaris Engineers which describes Oracle’s true intentions toward the OpenSolaris project and the future of Oracle Solaris.

via sstallion.blogspot.com

Posted via email from Saint | Comment »

Latency: Why you should worry, what you can do about it

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:00:45 +0200

via slideshare.net

Posted via email from Saint | Comment »

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World | February 2010 | Communications of the ACM

Sun, 30 May 2010 09:57:06 +0200

Some poking around exposed the following chain of events: the company’s make used a novel format to print out the absolute path of the directory in which the compiler ran; our script misparsed this path, producing the empty string that we gave as the destination to the Unix “cd” (change directory) command, causing it to change to the top level of the system; it ran “rm -rf *” (recursive delete) during compilation to clean up temporary files; and the build process ran as root. Summing these points produces the removal of all files on the system.

via cacm.acm.org

nice feature ;-)

Posted via web from Saint | Comment »

Hackers Phishers and Carders, Oh My!

Fri, 07 May 2010 10:38:10 +0200

via youtube.com

Posted via web from Saint | Comment »

M.I.A, Born Free

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:30:24 +0200

via vimeo.com

Posted via web from How to kill creativity? OFFyouON | Comment »

Untitled

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:17:00 +0200

http://gigaom.com/2010/04/13/eric-schmidt-todays-most-interesting-engineering…

Posted via email from Saint | Comment »

Caucho Resin : Reliable, Open-Source Application Server

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:06:30 +0200

Quercus is Caucho Technology’s 100% Java implementation of PHP 5 released under the Open Source GPL license. Quercus comes with many PHP modules and extensions like PDF, PDO, MySQL, and JSON. Quercus allows for tight integration of Java services with PHP scripts, so using PHP with JMS or Grails is a quick and painless endeavor.

via quercus.caucho.com

Posted via web from Saint | Comment »

Mind Hacks: No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 08:48:58 +0200

The Frontal Cortex reports on an interesting study that found that the personality characteristics teachers define as creative are the same ones that make their pupils least likeable in the classroom.

via mindhacks.com

Sounds familiar?

Posted via web from How to kill creativity? OFFyouON | Comment »

PeteSearch: How I got sued by Facebook

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:46:56 +0200

I’m bummed that Facebook are taking a legal position that would cripple the web if it was adopted (how many people would Google need to hire to write letters to every single website they crawled?), and a bit frustrated that people don’t understand that the data I was planning to release is already in the hands of lots of commercial marketing firms, but mostly I’m just looking forward to leaving the massive distraction of a legal threat behind and getting on with building my startup.

via petewarden.typepad.com

Posted via web from Saint | Comment »

Security Programs Focusing Too Much on Compliance, Study Finds | threatpost

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:55:11 +0200

Forrester’s research also found that although data breaches and accidental losses of sensitive information get most of the headlines, intentional theft of corporate data causes 10 times more financial loss. Interestingly, the study also found that regardless of the number and severity of these kinds of incidents that a company has endured, the IT staff is still likely to think that its security controls are working well.
“Even enterprises with a high number of incidents are still likely to imagine that their programs are ‘very effective.’ We concluded that most enterprises do not actually know whether their data security programs work or not,” the study found.

via threatpost.com

No suprises here. As long as IT staff will generate passwords that consist of name of the month + day the password has been issued, there is no reason to think that IT cares about security at all.

Posted via web from Saint | Comment »

Tribler Evolves Its Decentralized BitTorrent Ecosystem | TorrentFreak

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 13:55:55 +0200

Researchers from the Tribler P2P team at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, have been working on their next generation BitTorrent client for a few years now.

The project has been awarded millions of euros in funding from the European Union. With this money, the researchers have been developing a new BitTorrent ecosystem where torrent sites are no longer needed.

via torrentfreak.com

I like EU support ;-)

Posted via web from Saint | Comment »

XenFaq - Xen Wiki

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 15:08:27 +0200

4.9. When I use the balloon driver, why do tools like ‘top’ and ‘free’ not show a change in memory usage?

The balloon driver requests memory from the system allocator which it then directly gives back to Xen. From the kernel’s perspective, however, that memory is still part of the system and is being used by the balloon driver. Hence the unintuitive memory statistics.
4.10. I increased the memory (RAM) in a domain and rebooted it, but it still shows the old memory value?

You need to “re-create” the domain using the
xm create
command again. Simply rebooting the domain does not cause it to read the new value from the domain definition file.

via wiki.xensource.com

Who stolen my memory?

Posted via web from Unread Manuals | Comment »

Olomouc return trip

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:07:13 +0200

We have visited Olomouc today. Few shots from the journey and going back.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Saint | Comment »

Website registration snafu

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 13:18:50 +0200

I like to try various new things sometimes, so have to register to one or two new sites now and then. Usually after doing this I start to feel that nothing can help mankind to survive at all. Environment is just too complex to do even very simple things right, especially if it requires thinking (I am even not talking about common sense here).

Today I’ve tried to register to some business site for consultants, that is made by some company with a “research” part in the name. (That one thing should have made be careful and abandon the site immediately).

Most of the time I do not spend one day trying to register to some site and have some rules for it: If I am really are interested in a site, I give it 3 credits to spend on me. If the site is JAS (just another site) - it gets 1 credit. Rules might be broken or sites revisited if there are external factors (friends, good reviews, new features, etc).

Now I just want to lay my anger here (this is just a tip of iceberg, leave your own experiences in the comments. That is - if anyone is reading this).

1. If you can extract my address information from whatever sources you extract it from (in my case I have uploaded resume), then obviously you can select timezone for me by default.

-1 + 3 = 2

2. “+420xxxxxxxxx” is not a valid international phone number”. How for fucks sake did we get here? How do YOU know? Have you tried calling? Well, sorry to tell you, but - YES, IT IS VALID INTERNATIONAL PHONE NUMBER.

-1 + 2 = 1

Even your explanation says so:

“International phone numbers should contain a country code prefixed by a plus sign followed by the local number.”

-1 + 1 = 0

As I have been feeling brave and tried to game the system (removed ‘+’ from phone number and reuploaded resume again), ventured deep into the woods with security questions. Now this is very good test to see if people “back there” have any ideas about security at all. Usually they don’t. For example:

1. mothers maiden name - http://www.myheritage.com

2. city you were born - http://www.facebook.com

3. library card number. LIBRARY CARD NUMBER!!!!!!

Next time ask for my nickname. Or gender. Might save some typing - you could just select from dropdown (female, male, not sure yet). And this is from the site which says that my password is weak (12 characters, numbers, caps and symbols).

-3 + 0 = -3

For whatever reason this didn’t stop me (probably because most of sites have such security questions, nothing new here).

The thing that killed me was:

”* The specified province was not found in the specified country.”

Look better!!!!! Google maps finds it, Bing maps finds it. Your tool - doesn’t. FAIL. WHY THIS IS EVEN REQUIRED FIELD on registration?

-3 + -3 = -6

-6 is just screaming - “look ma - no brains!”

I am not talking about spending more than 0 minutes on usability or even better selection of photos in the title page, nor font size or anything else, just simple registration as 1-2-3. I will spend my 8 hours work worth of money to the company, that will create instant registration, using information from LinkedIN, Facebook or any other publicly available source, such as Internet and will fill this information without me and update it as it changes from LinkedIN (or at least suggest to change it). You can invite me to such site via email - saint@ghost.lt.

Please rant. We have to do something about it. As it looks like this is work of hands of the devil (http://www.boukenshin.net/crowley/doevil.php). (cheers to http://twitter.com/terryandrob and http://twitter.com/terryandrob - if not your books, things would be even more bloody)

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/darkpatator/

Posted via email from Saint | Comment »

Website registration snafu

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 13:18:50 +0200

Now I just want to lay my anger here (this is just a tip of iceberg, leave your own experiences in the comments. That is - if anyone is reading this).

1. If you can extract my address information from whatever sources you extract it from (in my case I have uploaded resume), then obviously you can select timezone for me by default.

-1 + 3 = 2

-1 + 2 = 1

Even your explanation says so:

“International phone numbers should contain a country code prefixed by a plus sign followed by the local number.”

-1 + 1 = 0

1. mothers maiden name - http://www.myheritage.com

2. city you were born - http://www.facebook.com

3. library card number. LIBRARY CARD NUMBER!!!!!!

-3 + 0 = -3

For whatever reason this didn’t stop me (probably because most of sites have such security questions, nothing new here).

The thing that killed me was:

”* The specified province was not found in the specified country.”

Look better!!!!! Google maps finds it, Bing maps finds it. Your tool - doesn’t. FAIL. WHY THIS IS EVEN REQUIRED FIELD on registration?

-3 + -3 = -6

-6 is just screaming - “look ma - no brains!”

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/darkpatator/

Posted via email from Saint | Comment »

The Collapse of Complex Business Models « Clay Shirky

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 11:57:10 +0200

In spring of 2007, the web video series In the Motherhood, a humorous look at modern motherhood, made the move to TV. In the Motherhood started online as a series of 5 minute videos, with viewers contributing funny stories from their own lives and voting on their favorites. This tactic generated good ideas at low cost as well as endearing the show to its viewers; the show’s tag line was “By Moms, For Moms, About Moms.”

The move to TV was an affirmation of this technique; when ABC launched the public forum for the new TV version, they told users their input “might just become inspiration for a story by the writers.”

Or it might not. Once the show moved to television, the Writers Guild of America got involved. They were OK with For and About Moms, but By Moms violated Guild rules. The producers tried to negotiate, to no avail, so the idea of audience engagement was canned (as was In the Motherhood itself some months later, after failing to engage viewers as the web version had).

The critical fact about this negotiation wasn’t about the mothers, or their stories, or how those stories might be used. The critical fact was that the negotiation took place in the grid of the television industry, between entities incorporated around a 20th century business logic, and entirely within invented constraints. At no point did the negotiation about audience involvement hinge on the question “Would this be an interesting thing to try?”

via shirky.com

Shared by @fredwilson

Posted via web from How to kill creativity? OFFyouON | Comment »

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils Selected Works

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:09:25 +0200

via alexandrefarto.com

Thanks to http://twitter.com/fishtalks for a link.

Posted via web from How to kill creativity? OFFyouON | Comment »

TipsAndTricks/BecomingRoot - CentOS Wiki

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:42:46 +0200

1. Using the su command

Many commands can only be run as the root user so to run these commands we need to become “root”. To do this, we can use the su command (substitute user). The su command takes the following format:
su -   
or
su   
but most commonly we will use su to become the root user:
su - root  
or
su root  
If no username is specified, then the root user is assumed, so the above is often shortened to:
su -  
or
su  
but the two commands above behave differently. ‘su ’ gives the current user the identity of whereas ‘su - ’ gives the current user the identity of together with ’s environment that would be obtained by logging in as .
Often a user will become root using just ‘su’, try to run a command (eg, ifconfig), and get a ‘command not found’ error. For example:
su  Password:  ifconfig  bash: ifconfig: command not found  
The reason is that regular system users and the root user have different PATH environment variables (you can view a users PATH with ‘echo $PATH’). When you type a Linux command, the shell will search the users PATH to try to locate the command to run. It starts searching each directory on the PATH until a match is found.
Commands for regular users are mostly located in /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin, and /bin. However, root commands are mostly located in /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin, and /sbin and root’s PATH reflects this.When you become root by using ‘su -’, you also adopt root’s PATH whereas using just ‘su’ retains the original users PATH, hence why becoming root using just ‘su’ and trying to run a command located in /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin, or /sbin results in a ‘command not found’ error. For a more detailed explanation, see the bash manual page (man bash), particularly the section on INVOCATION and login shells.
So you either need to specify the full PATH to the command if you just used ‘su’ (eg, /sbin/ifconfig) or use ‘su -’ when becoming root.

via wiki.centos.org

This question is asked simple too many times. It is great to assign experience level to a sysadmin ;-)

nycterent - Kuru

ipmi card reset from linux machine

Iconoclastic Tendencies: OpenSolaris is Dead.

Latency: Why you should worry, what you can do about it

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World | February 2010 | Communications of the ACM

Hackers Phishers and Carders, Oh My!

M.I.A, Born Free

Untitled

Caucho Resin : Reliable, Open-Source Application Server

Mind Hacks: No dark sarcasm in the classroom

PeteSearch: How I got sued by Facebook

Security Programs Focusing Too Much on Compliance, Study Finds | threatpost

Tribler Evolves Its Decentralized BitTorrent Ecosystem | TorrentFreak

XenFaq - Xen Wiki

4.9. When I use the balloon driver, why do tools like ‘top’ and ‘free’ not show a change in memory usage?

4.10. I increased the memory (RAM) in a domain and rebooted it, but it still shows the old memory value?

Olomouc return trip

Website registration snafu

Website registration snafu

The Collapse of Complex Business Models « Clay Shirky

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils Selected Works

TipsAndTricks/BecomingRoot - CentOS Wiki

1. Using the su command

ExtensionFM Blog, Introduction Video -- ExtensionFM -- Chrome Extension