The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey November 10, 2013

Choresday

That's my new name for the `day formerly known as Sunday`. Today was full of shopping, laundry, car washing and paint maintenance, coffee roasting, and computer rebuilding. Only the latter was really interesting. I had a new motherboard/CPU/RAM combo, courtesy of work, to be able to do more VM work here at home. Now the processor is faster and hyperthreaded, and the RAM is faster, and more (32G). I took advantage of the rebuild occasion to remove the old Linux MD device, and installed the ZFSonLinux module and tools. Now my data store is a ZFS raidz1 pool, built from…

Brian Bilbrey November 9, 2013

Six Days of LISA '13

Howdy. My name's Brian, and I'm a tired SysAdmin... So, six days of tutorials and talks at the USENIX LISA '13 conference are done. And it was good. My behind is, however, glad to be shut of those hotel conference chairs. Sunday, 3 November Sunday's full day tutorial was called Securing Linux Servers, and was taught by Rik Farrow, a talented bloke who does security for a living, and is Editor of the USENIX ;login: magazine on the side. We covered the goals of running systems (access to properly executing services) and the attacks that accessibility (physical, network) enable. As always,…

Brian Bilbrey November 3, 2013

LISA '13

Today was the first of a six day run at LISA '13 for me. I had a full day training class with Rik Farrow on Securing Linux Servers. I learned a few new tricks to add to the layers of defense that we apply to slow attackers, and passed some of my own on, hopefully for the benefit of my classmates. I have three more days of training, followed by two days of talks and presentations. I expect to take a lot of useful info back to work with me. * * * Last night, Marcia and I went out…

Brian Bilbrey October 27, 2013

Winter inbound

We've had frost on the ground the last three days running. It's not been much below freezing, since the hanging baskets and roses on the front porch are all still alive ... but Winter is coming. A productive weekend: remote work and chores ate almost all of it. All standard stuff I've talked about a dozen times. Boring, but productive. Tonight I had a nice chat with my oldest friend (not elderly: but I've known him since I was four). Highlight of the weekend, really. * * * Our condolences to the family, friends, and unit of Lance Cpl. Christopher…

Brian Bilbrey October 26, 2013

Pi tricks

But first, 0630 EDT on Saturday the 26th day of October, 2013, was brought to you by the word "Fahrenheit" and the number '28'. Brrrrrr! * * * I got home from work yesterday evening, and found Marcia watching something that probably first appeared on an obtangular Philco Predicta television in the late 1940's. I threw an ENOTINTERESTED exception, then I came upstairs and started mucking about with the Raspberry Pi. The little credit-card sized computer, named Dortmunder (for REASONS), has languished in a corner for quite a while. I first discovered that my phone life-extension battery (acquired at VMworld,…