In a little over two days’ time I’ll be boarding a plane in Manchester on the first leg of a 3-flight trip to Victoria in British Columbia, via Frankfurt and Vancouver. Then, 4 days later I’ll coming back again – this time through San Francisco and Heathrow, and in the process doubling the amount of airports I’ve ever flown from in the space of just under a week.
Many of the people I’ve mentioned it to have said that I’m nuts. They’re correct, but there’s a purpose to all this catapulting around in a metal tube: I’ve got a job interview.
After a handful of ‘phone interviews, an online technical test and a scripting assignment, I’ve been asked to fly over for a panel interview. To say I’m nervous would be an understatement – I’ve not had a job interview at an external company for nearly nine years, so I’ve spent a considerable amount of time preparing for this. I’ve also never been to Canada before – I joked the other day that the furthest west I’ve ever been is Cornwall. Travelled I am not.
It’s a given that I hope it goes well, but whatever the outcome it will be an experience I’ve not had before and may not get again. I’ll have a couple of days to have a wander around Victoria, so the DSLR will definitely be getting a spot in my rucksack.
Fingers crossed…
More…
After reading Kees Leune‘s guide to setting up a CA here, I thought it’d be handy to script a lot of the legwork involved. The end result after a day or two’s hacking about is ca-mgmt.
Bug reports, feature requests, etc. are more than welcome to the usual address, or to the Github Issues page.
A recent number of attempted break-ins to a few machines I manage has had me thinking again about the overall security of the machines, and how to get a better handle on what’s going on. This isn’t something new – anyone managing internet-facing systems ought to be aware of the dangers, and how to mitigate them. As with many things related to open source, there are a plethora of tools out there aimed at providing alerting based on network activity.
I’d wager that many people have heard of Snort, and what it does. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s an open source intrusion detection system (IDS)/intrusion prevention system (IPS). In a normal configuration, Snort monitors traffic and alerts based on predefined rules for such things as port scans and maliciously-crafted HTTP requests. It’s an extremely powerful tool that is also highly configurable, and with an excellent community that provide custom rules for a wide variety of situations. But alerting is one thing – being able to make sense of those alerts is something else.
It’s been a while since I posted on here. It’s been a busy year – for reasons both good and not-so-good – but I’ve got a few ideas that I’ll be posting about over the next week or two.
For those interested in amateur radio (or wonder what it’s all about) – I also have http://m0vkg.org.uk/, which is where I post all my amateur radio-related thoughts and activities.
Using NFS between two machines on the same network is usually free of hassle, so the default behaviour – on Linux, at least – is fine and can be left as it is. However, in a commercial setting (such as the ones I manage in my day job) it’s often the case that the machines might not be on the same network – or even in the same location, for that matter. It’s likely that there’s a number of network devices in between the machines, and the way NFS uses portmap can sometimes make things frustrating.
Luckily, it’s really easy to fix.
More…
I’m currently studying for my amateur radio Foundation license, and as part of this I’ve been playing about with electronics a bit – something which I never really learnt properly when I was younger.
There’s plenty of free electronics simulators (such as gEDA), and some not-so-free (Multisim), but the learning curve for them is perhaps a bit too steep for the absolute beginner.
A few weeks ago I stumbled across the personal site of Paul Falstad, and his amazing array of maths and physics Java applets. Covering acoustics, signals processing, electrodynamics and even quantum mechanics, there’s bound to be something there to keep your entertained for far longer than is probably appropriate.
The Analogue Circuit Simulator (warning: Java applet will start straight away) is the one that’s sucked up most of my time – it’s full of features and examples, and is easy to use. It allows you to see the voltages and currents at all parts of the circuit, and even has scopes so you can watch values change over time.
As well as that, I’ve also found the 2D Electrodynamics applet useful for visualising how electromagnetic waves propagate.
Give them a try, although I’m not responsible for the amount of time you’ll inevitably lose doing so…
Just a short one – and the first post in a while – but I’ve come across www.hamtests.co.uk, which contains a guide to the syllabus for the exam for the Foundation license – as well as mock tests for the exam itself – which I’m hoping to do in the coming weeks. The site’s not quite finished – there’s some stuff missing for the Intermediate level, but it’s a really useful site.
Another repost, this time from last year when Peter Davies was elected Mayor of Doncaster. I’ve noticed this is being linked to a lot, so here it is
(Update (12.06.2009): I’ve had an email from Toby Foster’s brother, who’s pointed out that where I originally transcripted Toby as saying “About right”, he actually says “Well that’s bright”. I’ve updated the transcript to that effect)
Today is Doncaster’s brand-spanking-new Mayor‘s first day on the job, and his first engagement of the day was an interview with BBC Radio Sheffield‘s Toby Foster. I hope Mayor Davies didn’t think he was in for an easy ride for his first official interview, because that’s not what he got.
Over the course of seven and a half minutes, Toby Foster took Mr Davies’ election manifesto and pulled it apart, pointing out that he doesn’t know what ‘PC jobs’ there are in the council (Mr Davies’ reply being “the things that are usually advertised in the [...] Guardian”), that he can’t cut translation services for non-English speakers (Toby Foster: “It’s more than likely illegal, isn’t it?”. Peter Davies: “I dunno”), and that he hasn’t even though of the possible benefits of funding minority events such as the Gay Pride march (when asked how much money went to funding it, he replies “Haven’t got a clue, I haven’t looked into… I haven’t got the details”). On top of this, he admits that his cuts will mean job losses – which I’m sure the electorate of Doncaster will be happy to hear.
Click here for BBC’s Listen Again (at about the 1hr 57min mark), or here for just the interview (which I hope the BBC won’t mind me putting here). For those who can’t listen to the interview, I’ve transcribed the whole thing below.
More…
Doncaster is my home town, and it’s also where I’ve lived for all of my (almost) 28 years since I popped (!) into being at Doncaster Royal Infirmary in the summer of 1982. For those unfamiliar with geography in the north of England, Doncaster’s a fairly large town (with a population just under 300,000) in South Yorkshire. It’s also the source of many a political furore at a local government level, and has been since the Donnygate scandal of the mid-to-late 1990s.
The fun never stops in Doncaster, and today is no different – the Audit Commission has published the results of their snap Corporate Governance Inspection, carried out over the first few months of this year. It’s a frank assessment of the state of Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council, and it’s not pretty.
More…
Update: I’ve not tested myself, but the comment from Sombunall below points out that package names for the TFTP server and the DHCP server have changed since I wrote this post!
It’s often the case that there’s no easy way of installing a machine that doesn’t have any removable media. For instance, I have an old Compaq Deskpro EN that’s too old to support booting from USB, so using something like UNetbootin is out of the question. Luckily, there’s an an alternative, which is to PXE boot an installer over the network.
More…
