Shipping
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 06 29th, 2009 | No Comments
How does one go about shipping a 65-pound box? Does FedEx have offices like the Post Office where I can mail it? Is it cool with them if I wheel the box in on a dolly?
I’m looking into trying to ship it from work, since UPS and FedEx will come to our offices to pick things up, whereas they probably...
I Gotta Feeling
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 06 28th, 2009 | 2 Comments
A local DJ was talking the other day about how The Black Eyed Peas are always at the top of the charts, and how it seems like it’s probably a record.
For the past month, Boom Boom Pow has been up there, and last week, I Gotta Feeling has surpassed it. And then there was even more attention on the...
Rant
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 06 26th, 2009 | No Comments
Why does Debian (and thus implicitly, MySQL) feel compelled to replace the “root” user in MySQL with “debian-sys-maint”? If there was a debian-sys-maint for system stuff and a “root” user for root to use to administer MySQL, it would be fine. But instead, the only...
Resizing an ext3 Xen disk image
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 06 26th, 2009 | No Comments
I’ve seen this a few other places and it didn’t quite work. Let’s say you download a half-gig barebones Linux VM to use with Xen. It runs great, but you want more than 500MB of disk space. Here’s exactly what I had to do:
Shut down the virtual machine and make sure nothing is...
Mindlessly Repeating Crap
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 06 26th, 2009 | No Comments
Has anyone ever noticed that you’ll ask a question online, and people just parrot back things they’ve heard? I found a decent deal on an SSD disk, and was trying to poke around and see if I’d actually see a big boost. Here’s a summary of what I’ve found so far:
SSDs have...
Control Disk Bandwidth with dm-ioband
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 06 26th, 2009 | No Comments
One problem I run into sometimes is that multiple things on a server are trying to access the same disk. This is pretty unavoidable, and often you want the “default,” which is for them to share the disk. If I have two webserver threads, they’re equal.
But sometimes this isn’t...
The Two Types of Passwords
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 06 22nd, 2009 | 1 Comment
While setting up login credentials that would be used to have a script on one machine talk to a remote machine, I had an epiphany. There are two types of passwords: the ones you have to remember and type often, and the ones you don’t.
I’d add a third category, really: the ones you occasionally...
Team Cymru
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 06 21st, 2009 | No Comments
Team Cymru is a pretty nifty site. I’ve found their IP-to-ASN mapping to be very helpful in the past, but just noticed that they also compile stats on malware, including a queryable malware hash database. It doesn’t aim to capture everything, but it looks like it could be a nice complement...
Slowloris, Part II
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 06 20th, 2009 | 2 Comments
I posted earlier about how it seemed like one could use haproxy in front of Apache to help mitigate the damage that slowloris (Slow Loris) can do. In this (Part II), I put my money where my mouth was and tried it. And, unsurprisingly, it turns out that haproxy rocks.
I had thought this would be a quick...
Apache, squid, etc. “vulnerability”
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized on 06 20th, 2009 | No Comments
There’s a bit of buzz around slowloris, which aims to take down webservers via resource starvation via a low-bandwidth DoS attack. It’s actually somewhat like a SYN flood, but it targets HTTP servers specifically, not TCP. Basically, it opens many HTTP connections and “stutters”...