LOPSA-NJ News Aggregator
Intermittent Problems Suck (your time)
For the past few days, our NYC office has had incredibly irritating problems with the internet connection. We’ve got service through a local Metro-E provider, but they’re a CLEC, which means they don’t own the lines, they just lease them from the ILEC, who is in this case, Verizon.
The root of the issue is that the wiring at the building we’re in is crap. It’s a small 5 story building that used to be apartments and has been converted to offices, and the wiring is just not up for the job. We went through several pairs of copper pairs looking for one that was good enough to carry the metro-E signal, and it was all we could do. Before metro-E, we had DSL, where we capped out at just over 1Mb/s…and this is in Manhattan.
Unfortunately, the circuit is currently in the middle of dying, so it’s working sometimes and failing others. I first opened this ticket on Monday, and have exchanged emails with our provider a dozen times or so. They’ll see the issue, but symptoms are vague as to whether it’s their equipment, our equipment, or the line running between our equipment, or (what I’m fairly sure the problem is), the lines entering the building from Verizon.
It wasn’t until last night when they finally saw enough errors on the bridge to have Verizon to commit to a service call tomorrow evening to add a loop. Every other time, everything on the line was hunky-dory. This is why intermittent problems take so long to solve…because all the stake holders have to be monitoring at exactly the right time for anything to get done.
Meanwhile, I’ve been having to apologize to my users, and give them instructions on how to forward their desk phones to their cells.
Even though the problem isn’t actually with my provider, I would love to get a secondary network connection, because the lines here are just too unreliable. No cable companies will give us service, no fiber companies will touch the building…it’s pretty much just Verizon and their CLECs at this point.
I think we’ve only got 2 more years on the lease?
Raw Satire Usually Fails on the Internet
Sarcasm and satire usually don’t work on the Internet. One cause of this is the lack of out of band signalling via facial expression or tone of voice. Another issue is the fact that in real life people usually know something about the person who they listen to while on the Internet it’s most common to read articles without knowing much about the author. So the reader can’t use “I know that the author isn’t an asshole” as a starting point to determine whether a message should be interpreted literally.
This is really nothing new. The standard in printed communication for a long time has been to use Emoticons (Wikipedia) to indicate emotion and other interpretation that might not be deduced from a direct reading of the text. The Wikipedia page cites examples of emoticon use dating back to 1857 – although the combinations of characters used for different emotions has changed significantly many times. The common uses that we now know on the Internet date back to 1982.
In my experience the symbol :-# is commonly used to note sarcasm or satire. Unfortunately it seems that none of the Internet search engines allow searching for such strings so I couldn’t find an early example of this being used. While I haven’t found a reference describing this practice, I regularly receive messages annotated with it and find that people generally understand what I mean when I use it in my own email. But that is usually applied to a sentence or two.
For a larger section of text a pseudo-HTML tag such as </satire> can be used to signal the end of satire. It seems that a matching start tag is optional as recognising the start of satire is a lot easier once the reader knows that some of the content is satirical. In spoken English a phrase such as “but seriously” may be used for the same purpose, but such a subtle signal may be missed on the Internet – particularly by readers who don’t use English as their first language.
Another way of signaling a non-literal interpretation is by using Scare Quotes – the deliberate usage of quotation symbols to indicate that the writer disagrees with the content that is written. That is common for the case of referencing a phrase or sentence that you disagree with, but doesn’t work for a larger section of text.
A final option is to make the satire or sarcasm so extreme that no-one can possibly mistake it for being literal. This is not always possible, Poe’s Law holds that “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing” [1]. I think that Poe was understating the case, it is impossible to create a parody of religion that most people won’t mistake for the real thing without signals or context. For an example read LandOverBaptist.org and Chick.com, of course if you know those sites then you will know whether they are satirical or serious – but I expect that most readers of my blog won’t invest enough effort into either of those religious sites to determine whether they are serious or satire.
But satire and sarcasm without signals or a reputation usually fails. One example of success is The Onion which is a long running and well known satirical news site [2]. But even The Onion it is regularly mistaken for being serious – the number of occasions when people forward me Onion articles for amusement are vastly outnumbered by the number of occasions when I see people taking it seriously.
Even when material is known to be satirical it can still fail grossly. An example is the Chaser’s satire of the Make A Wish Foundation [3]. Even material that is well known to be satirical seems to fail when it attacks bad targets or attacks in a bad way. One difficulty is in satirising bigoted people, to effectively satirise them without attacking the minority groups that they dislike can be a difficult challenge.
Finally, when you write some satire and members of your audience don’t recognise it you should consider the possibility that you failed to do it properly. If you can’t get a hit rate close to 100% for people with the same background as you then it’s probably a serious failure.
SysAdmin Spirit Animal?
There’s an amusing thread on the LOPSA Discuss list going on right now. It’s called “What Animal is a System Administrator“.
I was leaning toward the beaver until I saw the post by Paul Graydon, who recommends the Pooka, aka the Púca:
The púca has the power of human speech, and has been known to give
advice and lead people away from harm. Though the púca enjoys
confusing and often terrifying humans, it is considered to be
benevolent.
It’s like I’m looking in a mirror.
xed 2.0.2 released!
Verizon FIOS: No outage so far!`
Optimising the How To Vote Process
One comment noted that at one polling place “all the volunteers for different candidates had combined into a single team, handing out all the cards together“, which makes sense. There is some advantage in forcing cards on people, some people decide who to vote for once they are inside the polling booth based on information on the HTV cards (a couple of voters stated an intention to do so which disappointed the politically aware people who hand out the HTV cards). But for most voters there is no benefit in competing to hand them a HTV card.
Some of the comments expressed a dislike of being subjected to people handing out HTV cards. As a voter I don’t particularly like having a group of conflicting people wanting to hand me a HTV card either. Also it is obviously a waste of resources to hand out so much cardboard that goes to waste (particularly the Liberal and Labor parties that use glossy non-recycled paper).
I think that the ideal solution would be to have the officials at the polling booths hand out HTV cards on request. A voter would have to specifically request the card from a party and the poll officials would not be able to offer them a selection, “sorry I can’t tell you who is running for election, but if you express a desire to vote for a particular party I can give you a card instructing you how to do so“. The parties would be responsible for providing the HTV cards (according to strict specifications regarding the acceptable sizes), and if the supply runs out then the officials would decline requests.
This could even be made self-financing by making the parties who want their cards distributed pay for a fraction of the wages of the people who hand out the cards, if each polling place had one person handing out the HTV cards at a salary of $500 for the day and there were 5 parties cards to hand out then each party would have to pay $100. The reduced print runs for HTV cards would probably save each party more than $100.
Something like this should satisfy the real need of voters who want advice on how to support their preferred party while not annoying the voters who know how to vote without any assistance. I expect that most members of the parties would be in favor of this idea. The only reason we go to the significant amount of effort and expense to hand out the HTV cards is because everyone else is doing so.
Linux machines with no rebooting…? Is this what we want?
The other day, I caught a message that KSplice was available for Fedora. I thought I’d be a wiseguy and I replied “Yeah, great. Call me in 20 years when it’s available for for RHEL”. Well, as several people pointed out, it turns out the joke is on me.
As you can see, it’s actually available for many Linux-based OSes at various prices. I suppose my confusion stemmed from the fact that I misunderstood what ksplice was.
My impression from a long time ago, when it first came out on Ubuntu, was that it was essentially a kernel patch that dynamically loaded patches and provided the ability to rebootstrap a kernel that was already loaded. As it turns out, it’s a commercial product that offers the ability to not have to reboot your machine to update the kernel. Let me be frank: I’m all about that.
The part that I kind of object to is in the press release, of all things. It’s the opening line of the company profile:
Ksplice is an enterprise software company making reboots a thing of the past.
Please, lets be honest. Reboots are inevitable. Using this product as a stop-gap for untimely reboots may be handy (at the low low price of $50 per year per server), but it can’t (and shouldn’t!) replace regular reboots.
The reasons for scheduled rebooting of machines are numerous. The primary one is that regular reboots assure that the machine is configured to boot correctly. If you’ve got a machine that’s got over 100 days of uptime, how do you know it will start correctly? You last booted it last quarter…what has happened to that machine since then? Changes in installed services, mountpoints, etc…it’s hard to tell if it’s going to be in a known-good state when it comes back up after a power failure.
Another reason to reboot occasionally is to clean up the running state of the machine. What’s that you say? Your machine is running fine? Well, sure, it may be, but how much cruft is left hanging that isn’t obvious? Have you ever used kill -9? Do you know for sure that there aren’t any memory leaks in your running services? Any processes hang while reading I/O and is now stuck in uninterruptible sleep?
Yes, there are lots of things that happen to servers over the course of doing their jobs. A reboot fixes many of them. The only argument against it is uptime.
I’ve written about uptime before, and I still feel the same way. Modern system administration has advanced beyond a single server providing a service. Uptime needs to be measured from the outside in, and according to the availability of the service, not the individual servers comprising that pool.
Feel free to disagree. Let me know if you’ve got an uptime of a year plus and you’re proud of it, or if you would be ashamed to be in that position.
Edit
This entry is causing quite a stir on Reddit. Cxunix from twitter also weighed in on his blog, servermanaged.it (link is in Italian, English translation here).
Verizon FIOS Update
Conference News (LISA and PICC and more!)
This is apparently the “time to schedule your conference trips” part of the year, because there is news on the SysAdmin conference front.
First, and most pressing, the LISA10 conference schedule has been released! I’ve got to say, I’m digging the theme of the website, too. More important, though, is the content. Interestingly, all sessions and tutorials are available in half-day increments this year. This means that you can attend the first half of one session then migrate to another session after lunch. I’ve got mixed feelings about this, but I’m interested in how it will pan out. More flexibility is nice, though, and sometimes the first half of a session is really review (though there are a lot of arguments against that, too).
As always, there are discounts available for certain groups, and you do get a lower admission price if you’re a member of LOPSA, USENIX, or SAGE.
Check out the registration page for the fees. There’s an early-bird special going on until October 18th, so make sure you register soon. The return on investment for this conference is amazing.
I’m going to be there as a conference blogger, along with Matthew Sacks, Ben Cotton, and Marius Ducea. We’ll be publishing entries on the USENIX blog (which I’ll be linking to from here as well, of course).
Come to LISA and have a great time. And if you do decide to come, find me and say hello. I always love meeting readers.
Shifting gears a little bit, I’m sure you remember the PICC conference that LOPSA-NJ hosted. Well, we had a blast, and last year’s conference chair, William Bilancio, did an amazing job. It’s a bit much to do that twice in a row, though, so he was looking for someone to take the responsibility for this year’s conference, and after running it through my head a while, I decided that I’d take the job if he thought I’d do alright. Here’s his email announcing it:
It is with a great sigh of relief that Matt Simmons has decided to be
the Program Chair for PICC ‘11.
Last year Matt was the head of the marketing team and did a great job
at getting the word out about the conference and was a key person in
making last years conference a success.
Tom and I feel that he will do a great job as the Program Chair and
will make PICC ‘11 a great conference.
In other news I will be getting in contact with the hotel and get the
date locked in, in the next few weeks and then we can start really
working on the conference.
Please start thinking about sponsor ideas as well as any new people
you think will be able to help make PICC ‘11 another great conference.
Again thank you Matt for taking PICC ‘11 Program Chair job and good luck.
William
I want to thank William and everyone who was involved with last year’s conference. Everyone I’ve talked to had a great time and has been looking forward to this coming year. I’m going to work hard to try to improve on William’s example, and really grow the community of system administrators in New Jersey and the rest of the northeast. I’m going to need help, though, so if you helped out last year, I’ll be calling on you now. If you weren’t involved last year, now is a great time. Drop me an email or comment on this story to let me know that you’re interested in volunteering. We can definitely use the help.
In addition, I was talking to Lee Damon, who let me know about a SysAdmin conference called “Cascadia IT Conference” (aka “CasITConf”), and it’s happening in the Pacific Northwest. It’s being put on by SASAG, the Seattle-Area System Administrators’ Guild.
So there you go. Three sysadmin conferences in one post. It’s going to be a busy year for everyone, so get involved and lend a hand to someone in your area!
Ohio Linux Fest: you don't have to be from Ohio!
Interesting Developments in Islamic Culture
Shereen El Feki gave an inspiring TED talk about Islamic youth culture [1]. She shows some interesting exerpts from the 4SHBAB TV network which is known as “Islamic MTV“, the music video from the US was of particularly high quality – while I expect high quality videos to be made in the US I don’t generally expect quality Islamic videos from the US (or anywhere else really). She also notes that the videos show a “kinder gentler face of Islam“.
She contrasts that with a clip by Haifa Wehbe [2] – a Lebanese pop star who appears to have a lot in common with Britney Spears (Shereen describes her as a “pan-Arab pinup-girl”).
She cites the comic “The 99” which has Islamic super-heros who represent the 99 attributes of Allah. One thing that I found very interesting was that the 99 character Jemi is shown using what is obviously an OLPC.
This seems to indicate some very positive trends for the interaction of Islamic culture with the European and American culture which is Christian and Atheist dominated.
Kavita Ramdas gave an interesting TED talk about radical women embracing tradition [3]. She highlights a woman who teaches girls to read in Afghanistan based on the religious edict that every Muslim should read the Koran and a Croatian Lesbian choir that sings traditional fold songs.
Naif al-Mutawa gave an interesting TED talk about the creation of “The 99″ [4]. He starts by comparing some of the characters in the Justice League of America to Christian traditions and then describes the back story behind his Islamic super-heroes. His major aim is to provide positive role models for Muslim children.
Apparently a cross-over production involving characters from The 99 and the Justice League of America is being developed at the moment – Wonder Woman wears clothing that is less revealing than usual though. It’s worth noting that Naif is a practicing psychologist who’s clients include victims of political torture, so he seems to have some insight into the problems that most people will never have.
On the road again…
My datacenter migration (or renovation, as I’m referring to it) includes a fair amount of added virtualization. We’ll be maxing out the memory and processor power of three machines at each site, and those will act as a VMware HA cluster (we’re buying the vSphere Essentials Plus license kit for each site).
Of course, I’ve got to have some VMs to run. I could reinstall all of my machines using cobbler (which would invoke the gods of trial and error, not to mention incur Murphy’s Wrath), or I could convert the machines that already exist from physical to virtual (p2v). That second option sounds much less error prone.
That being said, converting a physical machine to a VM isn’t exactly a fast process. Hoping to get it done the weekend of the move would be foolish, so I need to get it done beforehand. That’s why I’m driving to Philadelphia today.
Last week, I threw a couple of terabyte SATA drives into a spare PowerEdge 1950 server, upped the RAM a bit, and installed a freshly minted copy of vCenter Hypervisor 4.1 (formerly known as ESXi). I’m trucking this machine down to our secondary data site today so that I can begin the p2v conversion process. I’ve got enough disk space that I won’t run out (I’m only putting the root partitions in the VMs, since all the data is stored on the SAN), and I don’t need to actually run the machines, so RAM won’t be a problem. This will just be a holding tank until I get the VM hosts setup during the conversion weekend.
The actual conversion will be done using VMware Converter, a free tool by VMware that I’ve been really impressed with. It does want an ESXi…err..vCenter Hypervisor server to connect to, but that’s free too.
Once this is down there, I’ve got some decisions to make. Namely, I need to decide how long to wait until I do the conversion. Not a lot of data changes on the root partition. It’s going to be limited to logs, really (since I haven’t gotten a centralized syslog server running yet). The exception to this rule is the domain controller at that site. That needs to be the absolutely last machine I convert, and once I do it, I’ve got to turn off the source, because if the image becomes too far out of sync, well…that’s sort of like crossing the streams.
So, has anyone else pre-converted VMs like this in preparation for a move? Any advice or caveats to watch for?
Edit
Fixed the mistaken Ghostbusters quote. Did I seriously say “crossing the beams”? I am disappoint.
Links August 2010
Urban Honking has an insightful article about the Arduino and suggests that it is one of the most important factors for the development of the computer industry in the near future [1]. It compares the Arduino to the Altair.
Wired has an interesting article about a company that provides a satellite kit and a launch into low Earth orbit for $8000 [2]. Arduino in space?
Linux Journal has an interesting article by David Rowe about the “Mesh Potato” which is a Wifi mesh router that also runs VOIP [3]. One particularly interesting aspect of this article is the explanation of the way they designed and tested it.
Susan Shaw gave an informative TED talk about the toxic effects of the attempts to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico [4]. It seems that trying to disperse the oil just makes it worse, and the chemical companies are refusing to disclose the chemicals that are being used.
The New York Times has an interesting article by David Leonhardt about the value of pre-school teachers [5]. Some research on the difference that good teachers can make in economic terms suggests that the make an economic difference to the children to the value of $320,000 per annum (IE a class of 16 children who were taught for a year would on average each receive a benefit of $20,000 over their lifetime). Also there are social benefits which aren’t counted by that study. While I can’t imagine pre-school teachers getting paid $320,000 any time soon, it does seem obvious that good teachers deserve significantly better pay. Of course one problem is how to determine which teachers are good, better test results are not a reliable indication.
The Chive has an amusing post about how to quit a bad job [7]. It would be good if someone really did this, I’m sure that there are enough creative people who don’t like their job.
Hell Pizza in New Zealand published a zombie themed choose your own adventure on Youtube [8]. Unfortunately the options to choose the next segment don’t work on HTML5 with Chromium so if you don’t have flash you miss out.
AskThePilot.com has an informative essay about airline security written by a commercial pilot [9]. The anecdote about the pilot not being allowed to take the type of knife that is issued to first and business class passengers is rather amusing.
FredOnEverything.net has an interesting analysis of Wikileaks and why the Pentagon and Fox News hate it [10]. Fred is a very skillful writer, while he’s not the first person to say some of these things he may have said it best.
The Wikipedia page on Borosilicate glass (which is best known under the trademark Pyrex) is really interesting [11]. Borsilicate glass was formerly known as “Duran” and it’s main characteristic that makes it suitable for lab use is resistance to Thermal Shock, but it’s also harder and has a higher melting point. Apparently you can get Pyrex drinking glasses, I want some!
Eben Moglen gave an interesting talk “Freedom in the Cloud” about the development of free servers to manage personal data and replace Facebook etc (among many other things) [12]. The Debian Wiki has an articla about designing such a system [13].
The APNIC published an interesting paper on IPv4 background radiation [14]. Apparently some /24′s receive so much random traffic (from broken applications and viruses) that they can’t be delegated. IPv6 will solve this problem by making it infeasible to scan all IP addresses. Also it’s interesting to note the excessive amounts of traffic to 1.0.168.192 which is from applications too broken to correctly send data to 192.168.0.1 which have been installed by sysadmins who are too incompetent to watch what is being sent out of their network.
- [1] http://www.urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2009/05/why_the_arduino_matters.html
- [2] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/07/tubesat-personal-satellite/
- [3] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10604
- [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_shaw_the_oil_spill_s_toxic_trade_off.html
- [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/28leonhardt.html
- [6] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/opinion/09krugman.html
- [7] http://thechive.com/2010/08/10/girl-quits-her-job-on-dry-erase-board-emails-entire-office-33-photos/
- [8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p1yBlV7Ges
- [9] http://www.askthepilot.com/essays-and-stories/terrorism-tweezers-and-terminal-madness-an-essay-on-security/
- [10] http://www.fredoneverything.net/Wikileaks.shtml
- [11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borosilicate_glass
- [12] http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
- [13] http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
- [14] http://meetings.apnic.net/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/23398/ipv4-background-radiation.pdf
My take on DevOps
Alright, several people have asked me why I haven’t weighed in on the current “devops” movement. Mostly because no two people can absolutely agree on what DevOps is. I’m outside of that particular community, although I read a lot of the blogs of the key members, so maybe I’m in a good position to comment on my perspective.
First, lets define DevOps. If you strip away all of the touchy-feely stuff that gets associated with the name, devops is, at its core, DevOps is an increased interaction and interdependency between developers and operations staff, whether that operations staff is specifically system administrators or whatever.
This means that the people who develop code no longer have willful ignorance of operational environments, and the people who operate the environments can’t do so in a vacuum of knowledge about the software itself. This increased communication and reliance IS DevOps. That’s it. Nothing more. It’s a methodology. It’s not a panacea and it’s not for everyone. How can you tell if it’s for you?
Let’s answer some questions…
- Does your organization have programmers?
- Do you provide Software as a Service?
- Do you release software updates frequently?
Developers are necessary for the DevOps relationship…otherwise you’ve just got Ops
DevOps grew up in the web world, around places like Flickr, who provide applications over the web. Other people may just think of them like websites, but in actuality, they’re applications with incredibly large code bases. Since a solid application depends on well-developed code running in a known stable environment, it’s natural that this kind of biosphere would produce methods like DevOps
If you’re in an environment where something is broken and gets fixed immediately, then you can say yes here, but it’s not just bug fixes. Features get rolled out, pulled in, and switched around. Agility of this nature isn’t possible without everyone working from the same playbook. It’s also not possible with an environment that can’t change rapidly to match the code.
For the 90% of companies out there without that particular environment, then you probably aren’t using DevOps, and that’s fine, because there’s almost nothing it can do for you. Especially if you don’t have programmers. Because hey, no dev, right?
You’ll notice that nowhere in the preceding text did I mention the tools that DevOps uses. That’s because the tools are completely separate. Using “puppet” doesn’t mean you subscribe to the DevOps methods (or even the mentality), and although DevOps may not be necessary for your environment, you might find puppet extremely useful. Let me say that again, Using the same tools as DevOps shops use does not tie you to the DevOps methodology.
As alluded to in the last answer up above, the shops that run DevOps need environments that can change quickly and absolutely. They needed tools that could do it, because you can’t manually change hundreds of application servers. Because of their need to change that many machines, and have it happen nearly instantaneously, tools to automate this kind of change were developed and implemented.
Other technologies that get lumped into DevOps, cloud computing and virtualization, are also natural off-shoots of the type of environment where you have hundreds of application servers. Of course that kind of environment is going to be heavily into virtualization (if they’ve got an existing large infrastructure) or cloud computing (if they don’t).
Again, DevOps doesn’t “own” these technologies. They just use them (and advance them by writing tools to improve them, in many cases).
So there, that’s my take. For the people who can use it, DevOps is developing into an exciting methodology to ensure increased availability and stability of IT resources.
It’s not for everyone, but you owe it to yourself to take a look at the tools that too many people have been misbranded “DevOps”. There’s a lot of functionality there, and it can decrease the amount of time you spend slogging through administrative tasks.
Edit
It looks like I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about this, too. Benjamin Smith wrote his take as well, and it seems like we agree quite a bit.
Exciting news about LISA 2010... soon
FIOS update
Non-technical strategies
A Netbook for Aircraft Navigation
There is apparently some MS-Windows software for navigating light aircraft in Australia. It takes input from a GPS device and knows the rules for certain types of common tasks (such as which direction to use when approaching an airport). My first question when I heard of this was “so if the Windows laptop crashes does your plane crash?“. But I’ve been assured that paper maps will always be available.
The requirement is for a touch-screen device because a regular laptop in the open position won’t leave enough room for the control stick. So the question is, what is the best touch-screen Windows laptop? It must be relatively rugged spinning media for storage is unacceptable due to the risk of damage in turbulence, it should be relatively cheap (less than $1000), and can apparently have a somewhat low resolution for the screen.
The pilot who asked me for advice on this matter is currently thinking of the ASUS Eee T91 which runs Windows XP home, has 16G of solid-state storage and a 1024*600 screen. I am concerned about the reliability of that system as the rotatable screen design seems inherently weak.
The Smartbook concept sounds appealing, I don’t expect that you would want to wait for a typical OS to boot while flying a plane. But those devices mostly use ARM CPUs and thus can’t run MS-Windows. One particularly interesting device is the Always Innovating Touchbook [1] which has a detachable keyboard – which would be handy for non-airline use. Unfortunately it seems that Always Innovating aren’t doing production at the moment, they say “The current Touch Book production is in stand-by and will resume in the summer when we will release our newest and craziest innovation” – well summer is almost over in the northern hemisphere so I guess that means there won’t be anything from them for another 9 months.
A device such as an iPad would also be a good option for looking at static documents. The pilot is considering using a MS-Windows PC to generate images and then viewing them on such a device. But he’s not really enthusiastic about it.
Are there any good and cheap touch-screen devices that run MS-Windows? Are there any particularly noteworthy PDF reader devices which would be better than an iPad for viewing maps while flying a plane? Is it possible to run a MS-Windows application that uses a GPS under Wine on a Netbook?
Disable directory listing in Apache with Debian
If you find one of your servers with the ugly directory listing enabled, there’s a quick way to disable it in Debian
# echo autoindex | a2dismod
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
For other Apache installations in other distro, you can simple find the Autoindex option in your config file and delete it manually, then restart Apache
Filed under: Apache, Debian, Linux, Oneliner, Tips
More Verizon FIOS pain
