Recently a client decided to set up an AWS Hardware VPN to their site. The simplest way to research this seemed to be to set up a test VPN to my own router – a MikroTik 951G-2HnD running RouterOS 6.30.2. Here’s how I did it.
I recall our little team getting into trouble many moons ago. We were writing a creditor system, and one of the requirements was for comments to be attachable to individual invoice lines. In COBOL every data structure has to be predefined. One of us thought that surely, surely, 400 comment lines would be enough for any one invoice line. This turned out not to be the case. Continue reading
Someone asked on the Ubuntu users mailing list how they could set up a keypress that would resize the currently active window to 75% of its present width. It took a little thought, but eventually the tools were found…
My old Dell Vostro 1720 is on the way out, after giving sterling service for over six years. The replacement is a Lenovo E560. I just spent a day trying to get it to dual boot the installed Windows 7 and Ubuntu.
As the proud owner of a Synology DS415+ NAS (network attached storage) device, I thought I had better protect the large amount of data accumulating on it by also becoming the proud owner of a suitable UPS (uninterruptible power supply). That way, when the power fluctuates or goes off unexpectedly (as is quite common in rural Australia, where I live) the NAS is protected and will have time to shut itself down in an orderly fashion. So I purchased a Schneider (APC) BR900GI UPS. This article is about how I set things up.
A colleague teaches ethics in IT. He said in a recent email regarding cyberwarfare, that he would be happy if his students thought about whether it was ethical to be involved in planning a cyber-attack. Continue reading
In a recent email conversation, the relative virtues of Hyper-V and VMWare were being discussed. I stuck my hand up to suggest going with both. Why? Because heterogeneity is a good thing. In this post the topic is two competing hypervisors, but the arguments are the same for almost any technology. And they mostly apply to open technologies as well as to closed, proprietary technologies. Continue reading
A few people in the Ubuntu forums have of late been complaining about things they don’t like. Harsh words have been used. When someone referred to GRUB2 as “crap”, I found myself inspired to write a rant, reminding people that they don’t know how lucky they are. It is reproduced, lightly edited, below…
Apparently some people at University College London (UCL) have achieved data transmission speeds of greater than a terabit per second to a single receiver:
To which I say – phooey!
It’s on fibre – but copper is the future.
Copper is faster, cheaper, and can be installed more quickly. That’s why all the really top-shelf research is concentrating on getting super high speeds over copper. Apparently people are already pushing tens of gigabits over inch-long snippets; it’s just a simple matter of scaling that up. And Australia’s world-class broadband network will be ready and waiting when they do!
UCL? Fibre? What a pack of amateurs. Sheesh.
On a mailing list I frequent, someone asked about policies to help a company avoid losing intellectual property. The generic term for stopping the loss of important information (with loss being not just destruction, but also the wrong people getting it) is data loss prevention or DLP. I was moved to comment… because most DLP policies are not worth a button.