Archive for October, 2006:

Disk performance, Opterons and Smartraid 5.

By andy
Published on October 29th, 2006
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I wrote to the Linux Kernel Mailing List earlier this year complaining that I was getting shocking performance from a Smartraid V card, in an Opteron server, running Linux 2.6. It’s worth noting that performance seems much better if installing a 32 bit distribution and kernel is attempted.
I had a similar experience yesterday trying [...]

Are security risks over-hyped?

By andy
Published on October 11th, 2006
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According to this week’s Computer Weekly, 79% of ‘top IT professionals’ surveyed by recruitment consultant PSD think that IT security risks are over-hyped.
All IT support desks suffer a similar problem – very few people notice when everything is going well, but everyone notices when something is going wrong. Security support desks will suffer a [...]

Handling timeout properly

By andy
Published on October 1st, 2006
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I love Sysadmin magazine, it has been my first exposure to lots of really good technologies. Which is why when I come across an oversight, I think it’s a terrible shame. I think this month’s Shell techniques article on handling timeout is missing the most useful technique – the unix alarm signal.
An alarm [...]