forkqueue

Or rather, 30% of sites which already have some other security issue also store passwords in plain text.

Frankly, I'm surprised the percentage isn't higher if the sites are badly maintained enough to let this guy in through another exploit.

It never ceases to amaze me how an online bookstore can be so ahead of all the self-professed hosting providers.

I'm excited to see what innovations come out of this. Of course, this will only become really interesting when there are other providers doing the same.

They were sub-allocated 4.3.2.0/24 by Level3. The traffic isn't actually handled by level3, the block is being advertised by Google's AS (15169).

They weren't even the first to plan to do it, the new Telehouse DC in London does the same:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/15/teleh...

Interesting to note that the major motivation for them switching to the Amazon 'cloud' was to avoid procurement rather than the technical merits.

Such as?

Using a vendor-supplied kernel means that there are extremely likely to be other people using most of the same stack as you, many of them on the same hardware. If there are problems, it's likely that other people have noticed the issue, even if the bug hasn't been found, so it's much more likely to get fixed.

If you compile your own kernel (and/or copy of Apache, MySQL etc etc) you're running something unique to you. If you have problems, you're on your own.

If you're paying for Red Hat Enterprise, use the Red Hat Enterprise packages unless there's a good reason not to. If something goes wrong, you can call Red Hat support and have at least a steer in the right direction. Custom-compiling everything just for the sake of it, just to have new 'shiny' stuff is crazy.

Funny, I saw an interview with Stelios (of EasyJet, Easy*) and he was saying his motivation was always to prove himself to his father, even after his father died.

It's pretty clear to me what the thought processes are behind this. Microsoft have seen all the release parties that Free Software projects like Debian and Ubuntu, FreeBSD et al have, and somewhere there's been a meeting that posed the question 'How can we have the same for Windows 7?'.

Videos like this are the answer they came up with. Unsurprisingly it looks plasticy and fake, because they're trying to fake something that has grown spontaneously elsewhere.

Shameless self promotion, but we're a Django specialist host: http://kutoken.com/

Did you consider homeplug networking?

I have two ZyXEL home plug devices and get ~ 60-70Mbps from them (they're rated at 200Mbps for the whole network you can add them as you go). They're pretty good, but latency is higher than I'd expected - ~4ms.

And the manufacturer to do this? Nokia.

Frankly, if the N97 only ran Android and had a better touch screen it'd do most of what this article recommends.

I can only assume you didn't read Luke's article, with which I wholeheartedly agree. The crux - what do you do when you need to depend on non-Ruby libraries? Include the binaries of these? What if they depend on glibc (which they probably will) - do you stick that in vendor too? You'd be better off shipping whole virtual machine images as your 'application' if that's the route you want to take.

All modern Linux distributions - RHEL, SuSE, Ubuntu and yes Debian too have packaging formats to handle dependencies. It's up to the distributions to package the apps, as a software developer I think you should be shipping just a plain tarball, which lists its dependencies but doesn't include them.

My main point was the idea that Django apps shouldn't have dependencies is wrong. Django is awesome mainly because of the ability to easily build on other apps. Doing this creates dependencies, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I mentioned .deb only in passing. The same applies equally to RPM or any other modern packaging system.

The package explicitly specifies the dependencies. I agree custom installers are a very bad idea, but you seem to be arguing against the very idea of having dependencies, which seems crazy to me.

I couldn't disagree more with the idea that it's embarrassing that PHP apps tend to run with just a simple untar and Django projects don't. For me, this highlights some of the weaknesses of PHP - that there is a lack of pre-built libraries out there, and the difficulties in reusing code.

When I first started using PHP god knows how long ago (IIRC PHP 4 was still in beta), one of the things that shocked me was that there was no equivalent to Perl's CPAN. Things are better now, but not that much, and beyond DB libraries there is still far too much reinvention of the wheel in PHP.

Django is very much in the Unix philosophy of code re-use, and anytime you re-use code there are going to be dependencies. Added to this, many apps are going to use Python, non Django-related libraries, creating more dependencies. Any good Django app that's doing anything moderately complex should have a pretty long list of INSTALLED_APPS.

Many rails apps work with a simple untar because they include their libraries in vendor. I'm not a ruby guy, but Luke Kanies (creator of puppet) is, and wrote a great post on why this is stupid - see http://www.madstop.com/ruby/ruby_has_a_distribution_problem....

Basically what I'm saying is don't fear dependencies, embrace them.

Dependencies are the exact reason a plain tarball isn't good enough. They're why package management was invented.

For http://kutoken.com/, our Django hosting service, we've spent quite a while packaging Django apps into .deb format, so our users can for example just 'apt-get install python-django-tagging' to have tagging support in their app (for a really simple example). Now I've got used to working with a system like that, I really couldn't go back to individual tarballs and setup.py and the like.

Puppet is written in Ruby too.

I've yet to see a compelling reason to use Chef rather than Puppet, but maybe I've just not been looking hard enough. Puppet is great, and we're a Python shop..

Alternatively: why aren't more Windows MySQL users submitting patches?

The GPL can't force them to work on getting the code included in the mainline kernel.

They did this for one reason plain and simple: competitive advantage over VMWare.

On the mail servers I run messages marked as spam get a 550 Spam error at SMTP time. The vast majority of users prefer this, as they can't be blamed for missing an email because they didn't look in their 'spam' folder, and the sender knows pretty much immediately that their message hasn't got through (in the event of a false positive).

The book of the same name that accompanies the series is well worth reading and is bound by no such regionalism.

Might want to try Varnish ( http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/ ), which has seriously impressed me with both its performance and flexibility.

I'm really interested to see how TrafficServer stacks up compared to Varnish.

Nagios for alerts, Cacti for reporting.

I used to be a die-hard Squid aficionado too.

Now I used Varnish, and it's awesome. Far more powerful than Squid, and massively better performance too. Want to drop cookies from some requests/replies? Simple. Want to direct some types of traffic to a different set of backends? Simple.

It's possible to do all these things with Squid using external helpers too, but Varnish makes it so much easier, I'd never go back for a reverse proxy cache.

We're intending to launch our hosting service targeted at Django users shortly.

Highlights of our service include a separate MySQL cluster (databases on a VPS don't perform so well) and a proper SLA.

More info at http://kutoken.com/

I realise you're only regurgitating what you saw on a Youtube clip linked to by reddit, but you do realise that standard mobile ('cell') phone conversations don't use satellites don't you?

Anyway, RIP Fravia

I saw this a while ago and my question is the same as before - anyone know a Linux equivalent?

Given that the geographically concentrated swine-flu related death toll is already over 81, this doesn't provide compelling evidence that 'most deaths will be from human response as opposed to the pandemic itself'.

TV news stations will of course hype this thing beyond all proportion, as they always do, but that doesn't mean the threat isn't real and that, as the article suggests, the death toll from Swine 'flu itself won't run into tens if not hundreds of millions.

Pretty sure he can't - the ECU in the RX8 is encrypted in a way that hasn't been broken yet :(

Honestly, I think anyone asking for HP-UX or AIX "because it's UNIX" should have retired at least a decade ago.

Similarly, anyone naive enough to believe that "Any skills, staff, source code, infrastructure, and solutions you invest in any Unix are portable across IBM, Sun, Fujitsu, HP, Apple, and generic 32- and 64-bit x86 hardware." really shouldn't be placed in a position where they have any say over platform choice.

Pfft. I can (and do) easily cope without Ad Block Plus, but until there's a Vimperator alike Chrome won't get a look in for me..