Monthly Archives: November 2009

Geek Heaven

Okay, so I’m leaving in a little over a week for South Africa. I’m the only sysadmin at the Institute where I work – more to the point, I’m the only technical person on the entire campus with the chops to oversee their servers. (That’s a comment about the Vanuatu environment and absolutely not myself or any other IT professional. There are some very talented people there who simply lack exposure to some kinds of technology.)

The challenge: How to make sure that everything’s ticking along more or less as it should when I’m a continent away, in a locale whose Internet decrepitude is surpassed only by the locale I need to monitor? If I wait until something’s gone so wrong that someone has to contact me, I’ve lost the game already.

The solution: I’ve just hacked up a little OSD display in perl that uses SSH::RPC to poll server stats on all my production machines. It sits in the bottom left corner of my screen. As long as everything stays mostly green, I’m okay.

Total bandwidth usage is about 2 Kbps. Given that this is manageable from my pathetically poorly conditioned 128K DSL line from home, I have every reason to believe that it will be viable in SA as well.

For bonus points, I’m going to configure it so that it just pops up for a minute or so every $INTERVAL (which will likely be 15-30 minutes).

For yucks, if load average gets completely out of hand, it starts shouting that my computer is on fire. (Blame Nik for this one.)

I am one very contented geek.

Good Neighbours

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]

As Internet services become more common in Vanuatu, local businesses have been using it to supplement their normal advertising and communications channels. In their enthusiasm – and, it must be said, naivete – they’ve overlooked a few fundamental rules of good online behaviour.

Businesses and individuals (there’s no need to name and shame; they know who they are and, if you have an email account, so do you) have more and more often taken to sending unsolicited promotional and editorial emails to hundreds of Vanuatu addresses.

Regardless of their good intentions, these companies and individuals are spamming. In other countries, it would be illegal. Here, it’s a nuisance for virtually all involved.

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ACTA Without an Audience

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

News has leaked out in dribs and drabs over the last several months about a US-led drive to negotiate an international treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. Conducted under a veil of secrecy, these negotiations have been the source of considerable speculation and not a little alarm among advocates of online freedom.

Part of the reason for the alarm is the utter lack of publicly verifiable information concerning the content of the treaty. When US organisations attempted to gain access to a copy of the draft, their government withheld them, citing national security, of all things.

Intellectual Property expert professor Michael Geist writes, “The United States has drafted the chapter under enormous secrecy, with selected groups granted access under strict non-disclosure agreements and other countries (including Canada) given physical, watermarked copies designed to guard against leaks.”

In spite of their best efforts, however, details of the online enforcement aspects of the treaty leaked out last week, following a negotiating round in Seoul, South Korea.

The details don’t look good.

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Time for a Change

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]

I don’t usually like to advocate for particular products or technologies. There’s no shame whatsoever in having an opinion and – in this space – it’s my job. But there’s a difference between arguing for a particular approach to something and arguing for a particular thing.

It’s time to make an exception.

The Linux operating system has a well-earned reputation as the software of choice for uber-hackers and propellor-heads the world over. That’s because it is. It runs the majority of the world’s servers right now, from giant supercomputing clusters to Google to the Dow Jones stock exchange.

So what, exactly, is this Linux thing? At its core, it’s a suite of very basic utilities that allow a computer to run. Because it’s so easy to configure and customise, it runs on everything from supercomputers to your wireless router. Google’s new Android mobile phones are built on it, as are many of Nokia’s.

Nearly two decades after it took its first faltering steps, I can say with some assurance that Linux is good enough, easy enough and – this is important – safe enough for you to pick it up and use it without really breaking a sweat.

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