It appears that Sun and IBM have struck a deal to help Solaris adoption by supporting it on many IBM servers. This could really help Sun and IBM both, and from someone who is deeply entrenched in Solaris (ableit on the SPARC platform), I think this is great news. As much as I love Linux, nothing I have seen can scale as large or run as well as Solaris. Linux is great, and works for many things, but when you need big systems, Solaris and SPARC work wonderfully. Now, one note is that if it fits the situation, Linux clusters have proven very powerful. Check out the article.
Category Archives: Tech News
Site Upgrade Complete
In case anyone out there using WordPress didn’t know, there’s a security update available bringing the current version up to 2.2.2. I just completed the upgrade for Solarum, as well as all the other WordPress sites that I host. So far it seems to have been a quick and painless upgrade that any of you affected ought to do in order to plug any potential security holes. Heads up!
Windows is free?
Here is an interesting article that I ran across. It’s in response to another article comparing Windows and Linux and attempting to show why Windows is so much the better. The article I am linking to is a rebuttal, yes, but more of a take on the comparison of Linux (which is open source and free) to Windows (which is not free, or maybe it is in some respects). It’s a good article, and he has some valid points I think. All in all I thought it was worth the read, so I decided to share it. Enjoy!
RIAA Goofs Again
This isn’t a technical post per se, but I found it interesting because the big behemoth that is the RIAA is using technology (inappropriately in my opinion) to go after everyone it can even remotely think is sharing files. They really don’t seem to care about the privacy of the person that is in their sights, nor do they seem to do a whole lot of work to validate their claims. It seems to me they simply load the scatter gun and start firing away. I think this article over at ars technica shows some good examples of their approach. I don’t think they are even good enough that I can call it a methodology.
Finding the right RDNS blacklist from SANS
Anyone reading this post, that also runs a mail server should immediately know what I am talking about. Reverse DNS blacklists for mail servers to stop spam. What are these lists? Well, these are lists of known bad senders (open relays, spambots, spamfriendlies, whatever) that are maintained and setup to act like a DNS server. When you configure your mail server (and some clients too! Mailwasher anyone?), you can tell it to check all incoming mail senders against the blacklist, and then what to do if they are on it, like bouncing, deleting, tagging, etc. Basically, it works by doing a reverse DNS lookup agains’t the blacklist server, if the address in question is found (i.e. it resolves), then it’s a match and the mail is dealt with. These are very handy for helping slow the flow of spam. Here is an article from SANS about how to pick a good one, and some things to look out for. This is a good read from a good place, check it out.
Google using too much energy?
This is actually kind of funny, at least I got a chuckle out of it. There is an article on Slashdot that talks about Google and how the folk at Nature Climate Change is arguing that Google’s white background is using too much electricity to display on all of our monitors, and that if they would just change to a black background it would save the world, end global warming, feed your dog, and make your girlfriend come back. Sounds kind of silly to me, but then again, look at how many tons of weight they shaved off of the space shuttle by not painting that big fuel tank!