A few times recently i've had to think about the essential applications i use on my desktop. The latest was Anthony Burke's tweet, but the recent churn in the Linux desktop world and my unhappiness with Unity means that i need to be prepared for...
Debian Project News recently linked to a helpful infographic of Debian versions. It doesn't include anything about backports, volatile/updates, or contrib, main, and non-free, but it's a great resource nonetheless. The main point i would disagree...
Background I first came across HP's A5500 switches when i started looking at configuring VRRP and distributed trunking to provide routing redundancy for the core of a client's campus network using two ProCurve 5400 switches. I found that i could...
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...
2011-09-20: Edited to add section about IPv6 options; minor cleanup; references added. This is kind of a follow-on from my post about the subnet addressing design differences between IPv4 and IPv6. Recently, Tom Hollingsworth started a little...
It must be the week for stupid error messages. I just tried to create a private SSL certificate for one of our server VMs from our Novell eDirectory iManager server. The CSR was created by OpenSSL on the command line on the Ubuntu server, and i...
Last week i made some fairly significant changes on a client's production firewall/routing cluster during our maintenance window. The next morning there were reports of file server drives not connecting correctly and inaccessible web sites. ...
I tweeted about the HP LaserJet P2035n a while back, and things have only gotten worse for me since. To summarise: it has no SSL support for administration, its SNMP response is patchy (see graph below), and it isn't supported by JetAdmin. This...
Edit, 2011-05-03: To all those poor souls who have been directed here by Google in their search for best practices on IPv4 and/or IPv6 subnet allocations (or worse, the HP A5500's NAT capabilities), please accept my sincere apologies. This page...
One of my clients had some very interesting Internet traffic statistics last week. We came in Thursday morning and found that overnight we had downloaded over 700 GB of data from our ISP (UQ SchoolsNet). When we looked through our proxy server...