Nessus is a tool to test your server for any security vulnerabilities. I found out the hard way -- using it at home is a bad idea. I had all of the latest plugins downloaded and turned on all of the options to get a full report for this server. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I've been flagged as a spammer, and I can't connect to any server on port 25.
No Comments Tags: Security, Webserver
While browsing around other people's weblogs, I came across an article on SQL Joins. The article's pretty interesting, but what's more interesting are the comments. It seems like half of the comments are in praise of the article and the other half are explaining how the analogy the author made was wrong. Right or wrong, it doesn't matter too much to me because I don't use SQL Joins that often.
The question to be raised here is how do you trust what you read online? Specifically how do you know whether something you read on someone's blog is something you should be using every day in your work or something you should try to strike from your memory?
The answer is easy: be skeptical of everything you read online. Anyone can publish anything online. I ignored my skeptic side while reading this article because it was linked from what I thought was a reliable source. You should never believe what you read online (or anywhere for that matter) until you have spent time looking into the topic yourself.
No Comments Tags: Internet, Publishing, SQL, Thoughts
About a year ago I thought it would be a good idea to buy a spare hard drive and set up RAID 1 (mirrored) on my computer. I've gotten so many emails from users of Senuti who have had failed hard drives. It kind of made me paranoid that my hard drive would fail. A second internal hard drive wasn't too expensive, so I went ahead and bought one.
I got pretty much the same model as the one that came with the computer. Same size and everything; it might have just been a generation newer, but for all intensive purposes, the same drive. It took me a while to get around to setting up the RAID because I needed to format the drive at the same time. I did get around to it eventually, and it went pretty well. Disk Utility was pretty easy to use to set it up. I got a partition on each of the two disks to mirror each other.
Fast forward a year when I decided to try to get more than one partition to work with RAID 1. I don't claim to be an expert with RAIDs, but I can't think of any reason that you wouldn't be able to set up two disks with multiple partitions to mirror each other. Partitions A1, B1, and C1 on the first drive could mirror partitions A2, B2, and C2 on the second drive if the sizes were the same. Disk Utility doesn't let you do this. It doesn't tell you that you can't, though. It will just go ahead and attempt it anyway. You can set up A1 to mirror A2 just fine, but if you try to make B1 mirror B2 it will probably fail to work and also put your A1-A2 RIAD into a degraded state. When I did this, A1 and A2 held all of my important data.
Read More...No Comments Tags: Apple, OS X, RAID, Tiger