Kriek's blog

CentOS 7 ships with php 5.4.16 but php is fast moving again so sometimes someone wants to use the new shiny version. The potentially best supported set of new software for CentOS and Red Hat is Software Collections (SCL) Here is how to set up SCL with puppet and have php 5.6 installed:

It turns out that the logstash, elasticsearch, Kibana (ELK) stack is also very useful for mail server logs from PowerMTA.  PowerMTA's main method of logging is to the accounting files, this is a CSV format file, and logstash has a CSV filter. To use the logstash filter on an accounting file:

People just consider the marginal cost of the media when they steal it and don't consider it as theft. But most of the cost is for the licence, you've stolen a piece of data, just like one can steal an idea or steal a name or steal a title. You don't deprive the owner of the item, but you do deprive him of the value of your extra copy. If I steal your idea without your permission and implement it and gain from it, without giving you your cut, then I have deprived you from those gains. What really disgusts me is when people justify piracy this way as their means to acquire material if they don't agree with the price and distribution mechanism. That's the same kind of thinking as that of a thief, a thief doesn't want to pay the price of something so steals it instead. That is bad for everyone. If one is really angry at the movie, music and software production and distribution industry or their prices and media, stop consuming their stuff. ...

I think receiving signals from a civilisation, that has gone extinct by the time we received it, would still be a very exciting.   Mainly because if we're lucky we might receive hundreds of years worth of signal, and we can learn a lot about them, e.g. their culture, their technologies and language etc. It's going to happen regardless, if we pick up a signal we can assume the society has either died out already or advanced significantly. We'll also know it's likely a very long time before they'll even be able to detect that we exist In other words there's no point for making contact, but the amount we can learn from it will be tremendous.  It will also change society dramatically knowing that we are not alone, and would put more importance on space travel for us.

I've worked for a very large online gambling company for a couple of years, and I wrote this during my last week employed by one.  This was in response to someone commenting about the fact that they have an IT job at a land based casino in Vegas and really shouldn't be in that job because they don't know what they are doing, but get paid fairly well anyway. I think this kind of thing is normal in the industry. First you have an industry where many land based casinos have little competition because of license restrictions making it hard for new entrants, and many online casinos had little competition because they were brave enough to operate in a legal gray area that any well run business wouldn't dare enter. That's apart from the fact that it's a type of business that takes money quickly off the majority of people who mistakenly think they're luckier than probability theory determines. The industry is slowly maturing and the margins are getting...

I came across this very interesting tutorial by James Molloy on how to roll your own Unix like clone, with nice, detailed, step by step instructions.  It assumes your development environment is going to be a GNU/Linux environment. It's aimed at developing a *nix like operating system on x86 architecture.  All the way through setting up a development environment, boot loader, interacting with the screen, dealing with interrupts and the timer, user mode, etc. This tutorial can be used as a guide for creating any operating system, or simply boot programs, for x86 and x86-like architecture, for example the RDC CPUs used on devices like the Bifferboard.

I'm busy looking at VMWare vCenter Operations Enterprise.  I've never dealt with it before so it could be interesting.  I'm going to give an overview of what this product is, where it comes from, and what it tries to achieve.  I'll also give some first impressions as a user of it. It appears that VMWare bought a lot of products in order to give their customers various comprehensive IT management capabilities for their software and platforms.  Like with most big vendors buying other software products and integrating it with their own offering, I expect some quirks with the integration. VMWare vCenter Operations started life as a product called Alive by Integrien.  Integrien was acquired by VMWare around August 2010, so VMWare has had some time to assimilate the product to make it their own.  vCenter Operations comes in a few different sizes, Standard, Advance and Enterprise: The smallest is Standard which handles up to 1500 vSphere deployments, so it's...

In a previous article, Introduction to Veritas Cluster Server , I gave a general overview of the VCS product and how it's put together and what you can do with it.  In this article I'll give a general overview of how you go about configuring it. Before writing this, I have had no dealings with with product before, so hopefully what I cover here will help some lazy folk out there to quickly get an idea of what configuring this product is about.  I'm going to be looking at it from a Solaris perspective, since I believe most of the deployments of this product out in the field is on Solaris, and it's what I may have to support and perhaps you too.  I think it's very similar to the way it's done on Red Hat, so don't fear. Files The configuration files are normally in: /etc/VRTSvcs/conf/config There are two main configuration files: main.cf that defines the entire cluster. types.cf that defines the resource types.  There are more like the above, if mo...

Regardless of outages and platform problems Blackberry is experiencing, I believe the phone that always tends to win in the long run is the one that wins both with the user interface and durability.  Early on this was Nokia, the user interface was intuitive, steps were thought through to happen in the way people would actually use it.  You make a call, you get an SMS at the same time, the SMS won't stop you from using DTMF tones to navigate your voice mail, when deciding to read the SMS the default options enable you to reply or erase with the easiest to reach button.  This couldn't be said for Ericsson phones at the time, where the steps that I described on the Nokia phone was a pain on the Ericsson.  Durability wise Nokia also won.  I've never had a broken Nokia, I've only had one Ericsson phone and it broke a few times.  I suspect Nokia must have done something similar to what Apple is rumoured to do, have lots of internal designs and prototype...

I somehow managed to escape having to deal with Veritas products over the years. Now I have been tasked to deal with some of it, so I'm taking this opportunity to familiarise myself with it. The product I'm looking at more specifically is Veritas Cluster Server, which is a different product from their popular file system and backup products. Veritas is now also a Symantec product, but I'm looking specifically at the shape of the product before the Symantec acquisition, because it's the form I have to support. Hopefully the details I cover here will help others who also end up having to support a VCS installation. Description of VCS Veritas Cluster Server is software used to facilitate and manage application clusters. Examples of these would be to manage an Oracle database cluster, a web application stack, or handle the clustering of Veritas file system products, or various combinations of all of these in a global operation. I have been told it's a good pr...

This is a little blast from my past, about 11 years ago now, when I was at school and a Robin Hood style hacker for attention. You wouldn't have thought I would turn into a right wing troll one day.

A site of my own that I submitted to Reddit, made the front page. It has made me a Reddit rock star, and I have to share this experience with all my fans and aspiring Reddit rock stars. A few years ago I put up a web site demonstrating the Forer/Barnum effect of subjective validation. Yes, it sounds boring and obscure. I decided to submit it to Reddit to increase the amount of participants for analysis, but to also raise further awareness of subjective validation. Oh, and to become famous. Here is what I have learned from this experience. Will the traffic flood your server? Not really, I'd say, unless perhaps you're hosting it from home on your ADSL connection and have a page full of large images. In my case the average visit took about 60k of data and at the time of writing I've done under 300Mb of outgoing traffic on the site since it was released to the Reddit scene. It was also reasonably spread out, even when it was number 4 on the front page I only got about 15 n...