Liberty Systems & Software

It seems in the merging of Oracle.com and Sun.com, Sun's blueprints site has disappeared from view.  A lot of it was very specific to Sun hardware & software, but it had much general applicability as well.  One of the treasures in their collection was a series of three documents on understanding NTP (Network Time Protocol), called "Using NTP to Control and Synchronize System Clocks".  Thanks to the Internet Archive, they are still available, and i thought i'd throw up some links here so they won't be forgotten:

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Just a quick post today - here's a great article from Cory Doctorow on his computing experiences with Ubuntu and Lenovo ThinkPad X series.

The Register has a review of the Ubuntu 11.04 beta release which suggests there are some rocky times for existing Ubuntu users ahead.  The part the article that stuck out to me reads:

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I has been our privilege at Liberty Systems & Software to support the flood relief efforts of High and Dry Computers 4 U, a volunteer effort to provide computers for those affected by floods in the Ipswich area who are least able to provide them for themselves. Our thanks go to Redlands College, who provided a number of systems for us to refurbish and donate to the flood relief effort. We recently received the attached letter of thanks to all involved.

Within two days of its creation, my wiki guide to hardening ProCurve switches for Internet use is the first non-HP result on the Google results for "procurve hardening".  One wonders how good an idea it is, since no one else must have done it before...  To me, it just proves what a stranglehold Cisco has on the networking market.

It appears that Apple has finally worked out that they make bad servers and deprecated the Xserve.  Their solution?  Run your server OS on a workstation or mini PC.  Hmmmm....  What's more, their workstation mounted in a rack configuration takes up a whopping 6 RU.

This morning i migrated NTPmon's source code from a private Subversion repository to a public repository hosted on Github.  Many thanks to the folks at Pro Git and Github for making the learning and migration process so smooth!

I happened across this post on Infoworld today which is more than a year old, but still highly relevant to many organisations.  The con that is cloud computing will continue to take over traditional IT departments until organisations realise the foolishness of making IT just a service provider to "internal customers" (that's an oxymoron if ever i've heard one).

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"Cloud computing was built for suckers by hustlers."
    -- Ted Dziuba

Bruce Schneier recently linked to an interesting article about the failure of a project to implement city-wide surveillance cameras in New Orleans, Louisiana.  The project started in 2004 and since then netted a total of three convictions due to crimes caught on camera.

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