A few days ago we unfortunately had some abuse reports regarding customers with DNS resolvers being abused in order to participate in a distributed denial of service attack. Amongst other issues, DNS servers which are misconfigured to allow arbitrary hosts to do recursive queries through them can be used by attackers to launch an amplified [...]
Dear Lazyweb, I’m thinking of having a conversation, face-to-face, with my MP about the draft Communications Data Bill. I’ve already done some research on the logical and moral reasons why the bill is a terrible idea. I feel pretty confident in how I can articulate those points. My MP is a Labour MP though, so [...]
When fiddling with CentOS 6.x in a chroot: If your host architecture is x86_64 but your chroot architecture is i686 then you’ll find that yum update will try to install lots of x86_64 packages, and then fail. That’s because the arch command still returns “x86_64″. You’ll want to use setarch: # arch x86_64 # setarch [...]
I had an interesting support ticket yesterday. Someone was trying to do an apt-get update via BitFolk‘s apt cache and was ending up connecting to 2607:f0d0:1003:85::c40a:2942, where it was failing to update. This is not a BitFolk IPv6 address, nor is it the IPv6 address of a Debian mirror. Where was it coming from? I’d [...]
Recently it came to my attention that many of BitFolk‘s customers were finding our Cacti install confusing. The main problem was that upon logging in they were confronted with the default graph view – the “Tree View” – and they didn’t understand where they might find the relevant graphs within this tree. Experienced Cacti users [...]
Over the last week I’ve been receiving calls to my mobile from an 0800 number. They’ve been ringing off too quickly for me to catch them, and being as they’re presenting an 0800 number and not leaving a message, I’ve been assuming they’re sales calls that I don’t need to return. Today I caught one, [...]
It’s a bit annoying that there don’t seem to be many low power SATA enterprise drives. The Western Digital 500GB Green Power RE2-GP ones were good for a while, but then they went end-of-life. The only enterprise Green Power now are the 2TB RE4-GP at ~£160+VAT a go. What do you do at the 750GB [...]
Having a bunch of Linux servers that run Linux virtual machines I often find myself having to move a virtual machine from one server to another. The tricky thing is that I’m not in a position to be using shared storage, i.e., the virtual machines’ storage is local to the machine they are running on. [...]
Being a seller of unmanaged hosting services, with a customer base that’s dominated by enthusiasts looking to host their personal projects, I often find myself in the position of being asked extremely basic systems administration questions. I don’t like saying no, telling people to go away or implying that they need to work something out [...]
Recap Back in part 1 I discussed what entropy is as far as Linux is concerned, why I’ve started to look in to entropy as it relates to a Linux/Xen-based virtual hosting platform, how much entropy I have available, and how this might be improved. If you didn’t read that part yet then you might [...]
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