Internet

The more I read Medium, the more I like it. For a change, a site focusing on essays on diverse topics without hyperbolic “You Won’t Believe What Scientists Have Found Inside A Grapefruit!” titles, complete with “Stories You Might Like” sections at the bottom (IFLS, I’m looking at you. You’re great, but stop using third-party traffic referers, please). Medium’s presentation is clean, text-focused (no annoying sidebars with Things I May Like) and the typography is wonderful. ...

Zimbra have recently released Zimbra Collaboration Suite 8.5 (JudasPriest). One of the most-hyped features of 8.5 is native support for Exchange Web Services (EWS), meaning Macs and Outlook clients can natively connect to EWS instead of using the Zimbra Connector or IMAP. After laying the groundwork for doing the upgrade – moving data around, system updates, installing the LTS Enablement pack from Canonical on Ubuntu 12.04 to upgrade the kernel among other things, we were ready for the upgrade to 8. ...

Yesterday, internet service providers around the world and the services that used their networks started going offline and experiencing abnormal levels of packet loss and latency. The issue was widespread and affected a great many services. What happened? The internet ran out of routes. Update:  Here is a more thorough explanation of the issues of a couple of days ago: https://www.bgpmon.net/what-caused-todays-internet-hiccup/ The IPv4 public address space (the available publicly-routable IP addresses) has become more and more fragmented as companies have broken down the address blocks they own more and more and sold small chunks of their IPs on. ...

For the past six months or so, I’ve been running an ELK stack setup in our hosting infrastructure at work to monitor, among other things: HTTP requests coming in Nginx response times System loads Sendmail and Postfix activity Disk IO and related metrics To do this, I’ve had to evolve the infrastructure somewhat. Here’s a brief overview of what happened. v1 Logstash was installed on a single box using its built-in Elasticsearch server to store data. ...

This remix of Cavalier is very nicely arranged and unlike a lot of others doesn’t try to completely re-do the track..

I’ve not the time right now to write more in the Logstash series, but as a quick interlude, I’d like to link to my ever-expanding Gist containing some useful Logstash GROK patterns for Postfix and Sendmail. Good, comprehensive sets of these are a bit of a slog to find online, so I cobbled together some from posts on the Internets, GitHub Gists and some tweaks of my own to make them work. ...

In my previous post, I outlined how I manage the collection of logs across our infrastructure at a high level with Logstash and Elasticsearch. I also touched upon viewing and searching through the data with Kibana, a Javascript frontend. In this post, I want to cover an important interim step if using the packages in the ElasticSearch repos is unfeasible or if you are running legacy servers that the repos don’t provide packages for. ...

Hello, I’m a sysadmin. I manage servers for a living. About a hundred of them, at last count. One of the biggest challenges in my job is keeping tabs on what’s going on inside my infrastructure. Was the last email sent to dave.mcUserface@example.org delivered? What’s the busiest nginx host in the network? Which vhost gets the most traffic? What was the average load across the entire infrastructure at 04:53, three days ago? ...

Dear Microsoft, If you’re selling a product to, presumably, existing windows users (windows 8 is hoped to gain widespread use in the enterprise), marketing it as ‘easy to get the hang of’ is an admission of just how alien the UI is to most windows users.

This is grand. It’s recorded by way of a series of snapshots of Google Street View

This has been doing the rounds online, but it’s nonetheless rather amusing I present for your amusement: The Gentleman’s Guide to Amputation

An utterly fascinating essay by Jean-Baptiste Quéru just caught my attention and as a technology nerd, I find it incredibly awesome. It’s called Dizzying but invisible depth. It appeals to me on a number of different levels, encapsulating a concentric series of black boxes, each more fascinating in its complexity than the last. Dizzying but invisible depth You just went to the Google home page. Simple, isn’t it? What just actually happened? ...

Dumb Ways to Die is by far and away one of the best videos promoting safety I’ve seen. It was created for the Melbourne Metro. The original has since amassed 170 million hits on YouTube and has spawned a bunch of spinoff clips, including a version from Cinesaurus about the Curiosity Rover. Also, there’s a motherfucking Karaoke version available on YouTube and iTunes. It’s a ridiculously chipper song about dumb ways to die. ...

I don’t really have a preamble to this… Just watch it. It’s badass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkLM-IlwwPk

A friend and fellow blogger, Villiljós, linked a disturbing post about how terrible an organisation PETA actually is. Read it here. The thing that shocked me, upon cursory examination of a fraction of their publicity is just how openly misogynistic and abusive to women it is! In all of the footage I’ve seen, women are routinely abused or are shown as looking like victims of abuse. Why is it specifically women that are portrayed as standing in for all the animals that are ‘abused’? ...

**[Update 27-06-2012 courtesy of Ars Technica] ** The astonishingly tenacious Arizona attorney Charles Carreon, apparently not satisfied with his original filing last week, has now amended his case against Matthew Inman et al. to now include California State Attorney General Kamala Harris. Read the full story here [Update #2 27-06-2012 courtesy of Ars Technica] FunnyJunk lawyer’s wife wades into fray, calls critics “nazi scumbags” Meanwhile, husband Charles pens angry poems defending his mom. ...

Welcome to the life of more or less ever designer/front-ender/developer/creative ever. These guys truly are clients from hell. Via clientsfromhell.net

A couple of weeks ago, I installed the Varnish Cache daemon on the server this blog runs on to see if it’d speed it up any. The answer is, emphatically, yes. Images and pages load in seconds, as they’re being served from the static cache. The number of hits to Apache has decreased dramatically, which is fantastic! The tradeoff was that Piwik, my analytics package that produces pretty graphs and charts like these… ...