Fubaredness Is Contagious

Are you thinking about using OpenDNS in your servers’ /etc/resolv.conf? Don’t. Why? Because when OpenDNS receives a query for a non-existing name, instead of returning NXDOMAIN (essentially name you’re looking for does not exist), it will return some IP, which probably is meant to catch typos, misspelt URLs or phishing attempts. Works great for humans [...]

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I recently wanted to compile Erlang (in order to install RabbitMQ) on a Linux box with old glibc (2.3.2, from days of Red Hat Linux 7.0). It was the only out-of-date component, everything else was quite fresh – GCC 4.3.3, binutils 2.19.1.
Version of Erlang I used was R12B-5. I configured it with ./configure –disable-x –enable-threads [...]

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It appears that Amazon EC2 instances always boot to runlevel 4, no matter what runlevel you set as default in your /etc/inittab. I found a very old reference to this fact in forums (see here), which explains *how* it happens (XEN does it) but doesn’t explain *why*. And yes, by passing “4″ as last argument [...]

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Yesterday was 1 year since I started at CohesiveFT. New things this year (in no particular order):

Mac. I got a Macbook Pro as my work laptop. Feels great every time I sit down to work, even though I am not a very demanding desktop user – browser, email, IM, rss reader for non-public feeds, [...]

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Lack of persistent disk out of the box and IP addresses that are not preserved between reboots are indeed the 2 primary issues that make hosting public web sites on Amazon EC2 “tricky” (even though not impossible).
Instead of addressing the problem head on, have you considered multisourcing your infrastructure? Let Amazon EC2 host your [...]

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If you maintain a VBulletin installation and spam bots are causing trouble, these two links are a must read: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=211647 and http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=205214

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Update: Commercial counterpart of VcubeV is called VPN-Cubed, it’s being developed by my employer CohesiveFT. VPN-Cubed is a vastly superior product, which eliminates various limitations of VcubeV and introduces new functionality. Check it out at http://cohesiveft.com/vpncubed.
This week on Elastic Server blog we announced the official name of the technology that I described in my article [...]

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February issue of Linux Journal includes my article titled Building a Multisourced Infrastructure Using OpenVPN.

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So say you need to require users to enter their username and password before they can get content from your Apache server? Well, that’s easy:
<Location “/”>
AuthType …
AuthName…
Require valid-user
…
</Location>

But what if you want to have one special directory where you don’t want to authenticate users? Extended regular expressions to the rescue (perldoc perlre)! Just change [...]

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