A simple matter of…

Well I’ve had enough of Xen - I’ve recently moved a disk from hdd to hdc and since I referred to it in a xen domain, when I tried to start that domain, it hung for several minutes (other domains also seemed to stop responding for a while) and then failed with:

abridgett@ripley:/var/log/xen$ Error: Device 2081 [...]

Or “Oh bugger”.
In short, Debian made a slight change to openssl which means that all keys (SSH user and host keys, X509 keys and certs, OpenVPN passwords) have not been sufficiently random for the last few years.
This is a _lot_ of effort to correct:

remove all bad ssh keys and regenerate [...]

Dear firefox developers. Could you _please_ rethink the current braindead approach to security? Security is important, but the current design is diabolical. I realise that this sometime changes (the windows version seemed better last time I used it). The rant below applies to the latest version on Ubuntu Hardy. For example, [...]

Well fakeraid really is a pile of unpleasantness. I need fakeraid since it’s the only way Vista will be protected against hard disk failure short of buying a hardware raid card (which have their own problems).
Linux support for fakeraid is a bit crap. The installers don’t handle it at all - debian and [...]

This is aimed fair and square at Nokia, but applies to many other companies too. I’ve been lucky enough to get a new Nokia E60. It has built-in wifi access, but whilst surfing the web is all well and good, it’s tricky from a phone. The _real_ use is for internet telephony [...]

Look, if I wanted networking to be automatically configured, I’d ask for it. In fact, I do so I’ve setup dhcp etc. Now avahi comes along and breaks everything.
So far I have my initial “WTF”, ifconfig shows the avahi address (you need to use “ip addr” to see that it’s just been [...]

After fighting ant relentlessly for several days, I can say that it’s been some time since I’ve been quite so narked off by one piece of software.
What is it about Java developers? They take existing programs with known problems (make and leading tabs in this case), and come up with something “better” using XML. [...]

I”m talking the 19″ wide variety that you put servers etc in. They seem to vary greatly in quality - unfortunately some customers seem to get really cheap and nasty ones.
First of all, some comments. There are two types of rack - comms rack and server racks. Comms rack are for network [...]

Some scumbag broke in to this server last week. I knew about one drupal exploit (in the comment code) but since only registered users (which I vet) can use that I thought I was okay. Didn’t know about the xmlrpc.php exploit
Anyhow, box rebuilt from scratch, everything upto date and all important [...]

I’m a huge fan of open source. If there’s a bug, I can generally track it down and with luck, fix it. The likelyhood of me fixing something various from very high with stuff I’m familiar (shell script, Linux, perl, C) to very little (Java, databases).
Currently I have a few problems to resolve, [...]