I've two identical and identically configured fileservers with LSI megaraidsas controllers.  They've each got 12x  3TB (haha, that's 2794GiB to you, sunshine) disks, configured as a RAID6 array over disks 0-10, with 11 as the hot spare. At some point in the last mumble … [Read more...]

My desktop machine broke itself on a reboot last Friday evening, so that was a nice thing to look forward to fixing on a Monday morning ... I'm still trying to characterise the problem (it feels like a problem with the underlying nest of symbolic links that is the debian … [Read more...]

To make Cognos work sensibly, it needs firefox to associate the adobe acrobat plugin with the various pdf mime types. When you go to the firefox Preferences menu, and to the Applications pane, there are a batch of three "PDF" content types, each of which you carefully … [Read more...]

If you have an icon in your MacOS Finder sidebar (in the "Places" section) that corresponds to a resource that no longer exists (eg a network share that has disappeared), it becomes surprisingly difficult to remove it (the right-click menu on it no longer has an option to … [Read more...]

I'm becoming decreasingly happy with using email for some purposes.  This is an attempt to put into words one small subset of the problems I feel exist with email (as a general concept).  I'm not going to propose any solutions ... This set of complaints is with mailing … [Read more...]

Recently, I needed to get rid of googles indexing and cache of a directory on one of our ftp servers. This is easier than I was expecting, but a description may save other people pain (this is usually an operation that needs doing in a hurry ...) arrange to have a … [Read more...]

Sitting all day isn't very good for you;  standing all day isn't all that great either (I've tried it for a few months, and am not convinced it was that good an idea).  The latest variant in trying to make day-long computer use less damaging is motorised sit/stand desks … [Read more...]

When it first appeared, UEFI secure boot was going to be doom for free operating systems: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/5552.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/6054.html but it turned out to be easier than predicted to get Microsoft to sign … [Read more...]

Note to self:  if you use rsync (or cp -ar, or ...) to make a copy of an existing directory, things that are symlinks to absolute paths in the original will also be symlinks pointing to the same original absolute location in the copy. Fortunately, we had good backups.  … [Read more...]

A long time ago, a web server I look after (divf.eng.cam.ac.uk) would regularly get into a (irretrievably) wedged state, and a while later people would complain. It was unobvious what was causing this, and disruptive that it was happening.  So as a quick fix, I wrote a … [Read more...]