In the past decade the internet has surpassed all expectations and changed the lives of us all. The World Wide Web holds little or no safety for the end user. Very much like the Wild West in the 1800s, the …

Today I saw a ‘how-to’ of what is supposed to be the ‘perfect server‘ setup. Well, the ‘perfect’ was not meant literally, but the setup is in fact very nice – from a functional point of view. Open source is …

I decided to go a bit further than usual, and push the limits of the unknown. I decided to install Funtoo, a Gentoo based distro or rather fork, by the Gentoo fouder Daniel Robbins. Daniel is no longer active in …

So it happened that the disk hosting our code repository developed some bad blocks. Must be contagious or something, this is already the third system within a month… I noticed this, when I received some strange messages from cron. Basically …

A disk can, and will, develop bad blocks during its lifetime. Usually the disk firmware is good enough in recognizing failing blocks, before they become unrecoverable and remap them, but nothing is perfect and  problems happens. In that case, where …

Have you ever wondered as to how processor affinity influences a single threaded process on a multiprocessor machine? Well, I have. Today nearly all new machines come with 2 or 4 cores. If you’re lucky, you have an 8 core …

Old news: Fighter jets grounded, base infected with Conficker! Recent news: Hospital equipment infected by Conficker worm! What? How can a supposedly secure environment like a military installation or a hospital catch a worm? Panic everywhere. Why is everyone so …