Conficker
People are already calling Conficker the worst worm in years, even though bloggers in Europe (where it’s already April 1) are saying it’s not doing anything.
It looks like ESet, makers of the fine NOD32 anti-virus software, have a page on how to remove Conficker, including what seems to be...
E-mail Holding Tanks
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 03 30th, 2009 | No Comments
I suspect my situation really isn’t that different from a lot of people. I get a lot of e-mail every day. Easily 250 messages on a good day, and well over 1,000 on a bad day. I get a copy of every error that occurs on our site, an e-mail for every cron job that runs anywhere, and a whole lot of...
Viewing all cron jobs
Periodically I run into the situation where I’m trying to find a cron job on a particular machine, but I can’t remember which user owns it. At least on CentOS, it’s easy:
cat /var/spool/cron/* will show all crons. The crontab command doesn’t seem to support doing this. The downside...
SHOW CREATE TABLE
Silly MySQL trick of the day. This is probably no stranger to those work with MySQL all the time, but it’s a nice trick to have up your sleeve.
For reasons I still can’t wrap my head around, one of the MySQL tables we need for Cacti just up and vanished. It’s not really used for anything...
Handling Swap
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 03 27th, 2009 | No Comments
Here’s a neat tip I picked up from Andrew. Have you ever run into a machine that won’t reclaim all of its swap? It turns out there’s an easy way to force a reclaim.
First, a caveat. For most people, this makes no sense. If something is just sitting in swap even when there’s lots...
Mailserver Errors
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 03 25th, 2009 | No Comments
At work, I have to deal with a ton of mail bounces. We get hundreds a day. Automating the process has been a bit of a side project of mine, but it’s been slow going, for the simple reason that mailservers don’t use standard codes. I’m able to catch something like 50% of mail, but that’s...
Twitter
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 03 25th, 2009 | No Comments
We talked a bit at work tonight about Twitter. It have a release to push out in an hour, so I’m basically killing time. (Waking up after a 90 minute nap is murder.) So be warned that this post may be a bit rambling. This post is really just a collection of disparate thoughts relating to Twitter.
Immediately...
Burden of Proof
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 03 24th, 2009 | No Comments
I started to write out a question on my favorite Ask MetaFilter, asking if Obama’s citizenship has ever been concretely proven. There are still some who call it into question.
But as I wrote the question, I started to realize how absurd the argument was. Right about the time he was being labeled...
In Soviet Russia
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 03 24th, 2009 | No Comments
Failblog posted this amusing homework assignment, and someone in the comments pointed out that if you Google all five of the terms, you get taken to this page [spoiler!], which probably posted it originally and has access to the answer key. (The assignment is apparently from Russia, yet in English.)
I...
Voting
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 03 22nd, 2009 | 1 Comment
A few years ago I took an interest in electronic voting machines. As a computer geek, it seemed odd to me that most fellow computer geeks were opposed to the idea. Computers make everything better and easier: why oppose them? I soon found the answer: what they make especially easy is fraud. Rigging a...