Wandering Thoughts archives

2014-12-24:	The security effects of tearing down my GRE tunnel on IPSec failure
2014-12-17:	The potential end of public clients at the university?
2014-12-10:	How to delay your fileserver replacement project by six months or so
2014-12-05:	How security sensitive is information about your network architecture?
2014-12-04:	Log retention versus log analysis, or really logs versus log analysis
2014-11-30:	You should keep your system logs for longer than you probably are
2014-11-29:	Sometimes you need to turn things into small, readily solvable problems
2014-11-24:	Delays on bad passwords considered harmful, accidental reboot edition
2014-11-20:	Sometimes the way to solve a problem is to rethink the problem
2014-11-14:	Sometimes there are drawbacks to replicating configuration files
2014-10-22:	Exim's (log) identifiers are basically unique on a given machine
2014-10-18:	During your crisis, remember to look for anomalies
2014-10-15:	Why system administrators hate security researchers every so often
2014-10-14:	Bashisms in `#!/bin/sh` scripts are not necessarily bugs
2014-10-13:	System metrics need to be documented, not just to exist
2014-09-10:	The cause of our slow Amanda backups and our workaround
2014-09-03:	Why we don't want to do any NAT with IPv6
2014-09-01:	An IPv6 dilemma for us: 'sandbox' machine DNS
2014-08-31:	We don't believe in DHCP for (our) servers The downside of expanding your storage through bigger disks
2014-08-27:	One reason why we have to do a major storage migration
2014-08-21:	How data flows around on the client during an Amanda backup
2014-08-17:	The challenges of diagnosing slow backups
2014-08-15:	Caches should be safe by default
2014-08-10:	The problem with self-contained 'application bundle' style packaging
2014-08-05:	Another piece of my environment: running commands on multiple machines
2014-08-04:	Why our new SAN environment is separate from our old SAN environment
2014-07-27:	Save your test scripts and other test materials
2014-07-23:	What influences SSH's bulk transfer speeds
2014-07-21:	What I know about the different types of SSH keys (and some opinions)
2014-07-08:	Some thoughts on SAN long-term storage migration
2014-06-30:	My `.screenrc`
2014-06-29:	The tradeoffs for us in a SAN versus disk servers
2014-06-27:	A retrospective on our overall fileserver architecture et al
2014-06-18:	Would I be comfortable documenting our systems in some sort of public?
2014-06-16:	My view: a wiki by itself will not solve your problems
2014-05-23:	What ssh-agent does with multiple keys loaded
2014-05-19:	A building block of my environment: `sps`, a better tree-based process list
2014-05-17:	The problem of encrypted SSH keys and `screen`
2014-05-15:	My personal and biased view of `sudo` versus `su`
2014-05-09:	Operating systems cannot be hermetically sealed environments
2014-05-08:	The modern world of spliced together multi-layer DNS resolution
2014-05-06:	Another problem with building your own packages: dependency issues
2014-04-30:	Failover versus sparing in theory and in practice Backup systems, actual hosts, and logical hosts
2014-04-14:	Chasing SSL certificate chains to build a chain file
2014-04-10:	My current choice of a performance metrics system and why I picked it
2014-04-08:	My goals for gathering performance metrics and statistics
2014-04-03:	The scariness of uncertainty
2014-03-28:	How we wound up with a RFC 1918 IP address visible in our public DNS
2014-03-26:	The DNS TTL problem
2014-03-24:	The importance of having full remote consoles on crucial servers Why I don't trust transitions to single-user mode
2014-03-22:	Avoiding reboots should not become a fetish
2014-03-14:	Logins and related things really do change, and for good reasons
2014-03-09:	Why we don't change Unix login names for people
2014-02-28:	Yet another problem with configuration by running commands
2014-02-24:	Nerving myself up to running experimental setups in production
2014-02-08:	You cannot have just one network install server
2014-02-07:	A followup to what `sudo` emails to ignore and not ignore
2014-02-06:	Some thoughts on what `sudo` emails to ignore and to not ignore
2014-02-02:	An illustration of the problem of noise
2014-01-28:	Building software packages yourself is generally a waste (why package selection matters)
2014-01-24:	Things I want to remember during a security incident
2014-01-15:	Real support periods versus nominal official ones
2014-01-12:	Why I don't want fully automated installs
2014-01-09:	Using different sshd options for different origin hosts

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By month for 2014: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec; before 2014; after 2014.