Tag: technology

If you’re a Systems or Network Administrator and you have Windows PCs on your network, this How to find BOTs in a LAN article may be of interest.

I can seldom remember which SSL ciphers to set up, which is why I’m so glad https://cipherli.st exists. That makes it so much easier to get an A rating on the SSL Labs security tests.

In a huge and stunning move, Tesla invites all comers to help themselves to Tesla’s patents: All Our Patents Are Belong You.

Elon is refreshingly candid, explaining exactly why, “Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars.”

In other words, Tesla gathered their patents to protect against competition from the market incumbents (Ford, GM, Toyota, VW, etc.) who are almost entirely disinterested in eCars. Instead, Telsa’s most worrisome problem is a lack of consumption. If Tesla and electric cars are to succeed long term, they need to disrupt gasoline powered cars. To accomplish that, they need a thriving marketplace with strong competitors pushing forward the state of the industry.

I want a Tesla Model X more than ever.

I just wrote a command chain (something unix admins do often) that looks like this:

1. gzcat threeGB-file.gz \
2. | grep ‘match this’ \
3. | grep -Ev ‘but not this’ \
4. | cut -f1 -d’ ‘ \
5. | uniq \
6. | /usr/local/bin/idn -u \
7. | tr ‘[:upper:]’ ‘[:lower:]’ \
8. > infile.fifo &

That command pipeline decompresses a file, filters out the metadata, weeds out dupes,  converts punycode IDN names to  UTF-8, converts caps to lower case, and makes the data available as a file.

While sucking the contents of that file into a MySQL table, I noticed that each of the commands in the pipeline was running on a separate CPU core. While it’s not the same as Grand Central Dispatch, it’s fun to see just how well the Unix Philosophy had weathered the decades.

I have a Dell R610.

1. I want to update the firmware (BIOS, NIC, iDRAC, etc..)
2. I can’t update the firmware using the built in Lifecycle Controller because it’s too old (as of 2012) to recognize the signatures on the current Dell firmware updates.
3. I can’t update using a USB drive with the updates for the same reason (signature not recognized).
4. The only path forward is to install from a host environment (Windows or Linux)
5. I happened to have a Windows 7 installer on a USB thumb drive, and I only need the OS running for about 20 minutes, so I chose Windows, because then it can natively run the the Dell Repository Manager, which fetches the firmware updates.
6. After installing Windows 7, I can’t install Dell Repository Manager because .NET 4 isn’t installed.
7. I can’t install .NET 4 because SP1 is installed.
8. I can’t install SP1 yet. Maybe because these 103 other patches need to be installed first.
9. First attempt to install patches fails.
10. Install a half dozen patches. Reboot. Install 25 more. (Repeat 4x)

PS: After a few dead ends, the solution to getting all the updates applied was booting the system onto Windows and installing a newer (v1.5.X) Lifecycle Controller. Once that is accomplished,  booting into it via F10 at the BIOS POST, and let the lifecycle controller upgrade everything else directly from ftp.dell.com.

Yesterday my ancient TimeCapsule was misbehaving. Our network connection still worked, but nothing else did. Because of its age, I decided it was time to retire it from being our home’s gateway to the internet.

I reconfigured my v6 Airport Extreme and connected it to the shiny new IPv6 enabled cable modem that I installed in 2012. I had been anticipating that eventually IPv6 would arrive. My 10 year old Motorola Surfboard 5100 was retired because it didn’t support IPv6. After rebooting the Motorola SB6121 cable modem, the IPv4 network came right up. I went in to set up IPv6 tunneling and noticed I had native IPv6 addresses assigned!

Apparently Comcast rolled out IPv6 in Washington in Sept. 2013.

One of the many arguments Open Source advocates make is is that OSS is more secure because “anyone and everyone” can review the source.  This critical crypo bug in the GnuTLS library takes that idea out back and shoots it. Execution style.

(I’m not being critical of OSS. After all, I’m an OSS author and contribute to quite a few OSS projects. There are plenty of compelling arguments for OSS software, but increased security isn’t one of them.)