''Don't talk to me about {cylinder rotation | free software | why erlang is cool | whatever} -- just do your damn job already...''

Notes from the field. Terse, with a minimum of philosophy...or so we hope.

• The Muddy Diamond Bar & Grill-- Project Management & Software Development
• JDYDJ: The Sysadmins Corner
• Patterns in Systems Administration
• Scale Away: Solving C10K
• It Works for Me-- Stuff I like, use, or recommend
• FYI-- Useful and interesting things to know
• Radio Free KF6NBZ-- Amateur Radio kibbles and bits
• Strata's BayLISA Working Area
• Mobilis in Mobili-- Changing in a Sea of Change
• VirtualNet

Here is a fascinating network research page whose title says it all: Measurement Studies of End-to-End Congestion Control in the Internet. The page is regularly updated by its author, Sally Floyd, and contains links to the latest scoop on real network numbers. As seen on the End to End Interest list (end2end-interest at postel.org, isi.edu, and other fine places).

posted by Strata Chalup at 10:44 AM

Very nice resource table showing WKS (and not so WK S) ports, with a link explaining the service bound to each port.

posted by Strata Chalup at 12:59 PM

Catching up on Dave Weinberger's excellent JOHO (even when I don't agree with what he says, I like the way he says it!), and found my way to the charming and useful Tweak Files site, chock full of shareware and freeware tools to mitigate the unpleasantness of an OS many of us would rather not deal with. As their motto goes, "If It Aint Broke, Tweak It!". Sysadmins at heart.

posted by Strata Chalup at 1:16 PM

NTP "FAQ" #3 (10/97 - 4/98) - Articles (part 5)

Ie, care and feeding of your NTP GPS stuff....

posted by Strata Chalup at 12:22 AM

Looking for a freeplacement for Visio? According to the published pages,
Dia is a gtk+ based diagram creation program released
under the GPL license.

Dia is designed to be much like the commercial Windows program 'Visio'. It can be used
to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw
entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and simple
circuits. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files,
using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save
space), can export diagrams to EPS or SVG formats and can print diagrams (including
ones that span multiple pages).

Unfortunately, since VISIO uses a proprietary format, Dia can't read and save VISIO files. So there's still no interoperable freeplacement for it, but perhaps when Microsoft converts it to use XML that could be fixed.

posted by Strata Chalup at 10:16 AM

SANS Institute: Information Security Reading Room is a lovely resource, and another place to spend an afternoon reading up on things you'd always meant to read someday.
posted by Strata Chalup at 4:01 PM

Public Patches is a nice little interface from Sun to let you search the "recommended" patches, ie the ones that you find out about when you don't have a support contract. :-) You can search them sorted by operating system, product, Y2K, and security. Not bad!
posted by Strata Chalup at 2:51 PM

Slashdot:Ask Slashdot: Building a Large Email Service has an enormous comment trail full of pure gems hidden in the stable sweepings. It dates from end of July 2000.
posted by Strata Chalup at 3:37 PM