how to tell apache to not log "File not found" for favicon.ico requests and to serve the smallest possible error page for same

Top 100 Canadian IT service providers -- when CDW doesn't have what I want, I start on this list

Unifi is this too-good-to-be-true centrally-managed wireless AP -- Oliver covers some of the downsides nicely here (no SNMP, non-802.11af POE).

Adapters, not injectors.

Recommended for the Buffalo router we just picked up, but apparently they'll make a POE adapter for pretty much anything you want, in a nice inline form factor.

the absolute basics of project management.

a quick read suggests this is a two-radio AP capable of running 802.11a and b/g at the same time (but: no 5GHz wireless-N). Should investigate further

how to track down what's making the "System" process take up CPU in Windows

When running MySQL on a large system (e.g., 64GB RAM and dual quad core CPUs) with a large InnoDB buffer pool (e.g., 48GB), over time, Linux decides to swap out potentially large amounts of memory, despite appearing1 to be under no real memory pressure. Monitoring reveals that at no time is the system in actual need of more memory than it has available; and memory isn’t leaking, mysqld‘s RSS is normal and stable.

(and why NUMA causes it and what to do about it)

a gazillion youtube videos about sysadmin-type topics, found via reddit /r/sysadmin. No idea about quality yet but they sure win for quantity.

How to Crush an Employee's Enthusiasm

In addition to demotivating talented workers, an opaque and dictatorial leadership style can silence innovation from below, leaving the leader in charge of coming up with all the great ideas.

Jim Collins

Jim Collins

Business Consultant / Author

via maciej - this sums up my thoughts pretty well too. My mantra at FreshBooks is "For our users, we *are* the cloud."

As I said at the very beginning, it's all about respect. If you can identify and cultivate those individuals and processes that earn genuine respect from IT pros, you'll have a great IT team. Taking an honest interest in helping your IT group help you is probably the smartest business move an organization can make. It also makes for happy, completely non-geek-like geeks.

Brad's presentation on LJ scaling and clustering

Abstract. Banks worldwide are starting to authenticate online card transactions using the ‘3-D Secure’ protocol, which is branded as Veri- fied by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode. This has been partly driven by the sharp increase in online fraud that followed the deployment of EMV smart cards for cardholder-present payments in Europe and else- where. 3-D Secure has so far escaped academic scrutiny; yet it might be a textbook example of how not to design an authentication protocol. It ignores good design principles and has significant vulnerabilities, some of which are already being exploited. Also, it provides a fascinating les- son in security economics. While other single sign-on schemes such as OpenID, InfoCard and Liberty came up with decent technology they got the economics wrong, and their schemes have not been adopted. 3-D Se- cure has lousy technology, but got the economics right (at least for banks and merchants); it now boasts hundreds of millions of accounts. We sug- gest a path towards more robust authentication that is technologically sound and where the economics would work for banks, merchants and customers – given a gentle regulatory nudge.

on chasing disappointments and unsatisfying demands, quotes Joko Beck heavily -- "i've been here before, this isn't working"

Just spent a morning tracking down a mysterious unaccounted-for 20GB of space on a 150GB disk; turns out it was system restore. Here's how to force it to keep fewer restore points and use less disk.

What Clay calls "not being a real person" I called "opting out" when I left the MBA program

Dell's "break my computer" button!

OSS replacement for CiscoWorks' backup/diff functionality. Also supports Juniper, ProCurve, and the other

Ask's MySQL and web service scalability talk slides.

like "top", but for Apache, for poking around in web apps.

salary stuff's neat, but drilling down by certification is even neater

specifically talks about using a network address as the destination for ip helper-address

Sometimes I find the Happiness at Work guy a bit overbearing, but this one's dead-on.

Lancelot is a Web-based non-intrusive software product for performance management and trends analysis of large IT&C systems. Its engine has been developed around a unique agentless collector that is non intrusive and performs with minimum parasitic load o

Josh Kaufman's idea: Instead of going to b-school, just pick up the material yourself. He suggests 40-odd business, management, and other books to get the ball rolling.

BCP on running opt-in mailing lists

guide to moving VMware guest VMs between VMware versions and products

Modern-looking, lower-contrast makeover for Nagios 2.0's Web interface

A corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don’t get to use the word “motherfucker.”

These are the drivers that allow failover on RHEL4/Centos 4 (8.01.03-14).

Index of ftp://ftp.qlogic.com/outgoing/linux/beta/8.x

Includes "Booting Linux from an HP SAN" pdf

main entrace page to HP SAN stuff

qlogic failover manual from HP

[Internet Archive copy] Instructions for booting RHEL3 from a QLogic HBA with multipath

walkthrough of how to create script- and SNMP-based graphs in Cacti

on why spamassassin might do better than that yellow $50k box, and more

Notes on many antispam RBLs and RHSBLs

Windows 2003 DHCP server best practices

MS Technet chat transcipt, touches on dhcp load-balancing

All about errcode 24

Might be useful for diagnosing problems with mail after it's entered Notes

this may be a bad idea

presentation notes on LVM basics

web-based per-user configuration for spamassassin/amavis

monthly RBL comparison

(HTML version of) straightforward explanation of antispam techniques