by ezs | Jul 11, 2012 | Uncategorized
One of the major frustrations with wireless networking is the proliferation of noise from neighbours.
When I got my first Wifi router – back in 1999 – there was practically zero interference. From our house in Nottingham I got a whopping 11Mb/s and mine was the only network in sight.
I’m writing this sitting on the deck working. My laptop can see over 30 different wifi networks. Some are secured; most are not. I’ve been offering to secure neighbours networks to prevent “driveby surfing” and the associated risks.
It seems as if the vast majority of networks are set to use channel 1 – the very few routers set to “auto” or “channel switch” are bouncing between 4 and 6.
I’ve been using Ekahau Heatmapper for a while to walk the house and deck and check the signals. Two benefits – I can spot “who’s new” and what they are broadcasting on. Secondly I can tweak the settings for the two networks at home and make sure they are performing optimally.
by ezs | Jun 28, 2012 | Uncategorized
I still smile when I hear about “bug bounties” – and I always think back to this Dilbert cartoon from a long, long, long time ago.
Scott Adams – just spot on. This was on my wall at Novell for many years.
by ezs | Jun 26, 2012 | Uncategorized
Played Botanicula tonight with the kids. It’s the follow up to Machinarium – also known as The Robot Game – which we’ve loved forever.
Charming with lovely music – and some nice puzzles.
by ezs | Jun 25, 2012 | Uncategorized, wordpress
Updated to WordPress 3.4. Seven years since I started using WordPress. Time flies.
by ezs | Jun 25, 2012 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized
Finally it arrived. Unboxed; find all of the bits needed (Micro USB power supply, USB keyboard, 2GB SD card); download the beta bits; boot and it worked.
I’ve not done anything beyond this – just checking the darn thing worked.
by ezs | Jun 2, 2012 | Evangelism, Linux, patching, Uncategorized
The process and change control for the build/rebuild is pretty straight-forward now.
Updated the main archive server from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate. Looks great – some nice features – and it seems to be faster than the previous version.
Also this blog is hosted as a SUSE Linux web server running on top of Hyper-V on top of Windows Server 2012 RC. Performance is solid. No issues to date.
by ezs | May 29, 2012 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I’ve said it before – but hopefully there’s more to blog about again.
Less confidential stuff; lots more around Private Cloud and datacenter transformation.
by ezs | May 29, 2012 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized
Back to self hosting.
The blog has moved from home, to hosting at GoDaddy and up to Azure.
All had advantages – all had downsides. It’s the private cloud/public cloud conversation in a nutshell.
Ultimately GoDaddy performance let it down – especially for the database – was unacceptable. Their support was also pretty poor. As always “you get what you pay for” – but the bottlenecks for even simple, near static, WordPress sites were unacceptable.
Azure has a lot going for it – I am still keeping my eye on future features that are currently in beta. Performance was incredible; the process of getting apps updated was a little too cumbersome for me.
Self hosting really requires me to get dirty with the infrastructure and tuning – but the fact that I can lets me drive the performance. I’m also responsible for everything below the app – hardware, storage, network, connectivity, OS, security etc etc.
by ezs | May 29, 2012 | Uncategorized
I just noted that Fedora 17 has just been released. That took me right back to when Red Hat Linux spewed out RHEL and Fedora Core about nine years ago.
I clearly remember the debates within the Ximian team about which distros to support in Red Carpet Enterprise 2.x and moving forward into the ZENworks Linux Management platforms.
by ezs | Nov 14, 2011 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I have started looking at WordPress running on Azure – Microsoft’s public cloud app fabric. One area I am really interested in investigating is the performance and scalability of a PHP app – with particular reference to Gallery integration.
Notes and comments in the coming months.
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