I received a cute email today. It has the usual traits of bad spelling, incorrect information, and other amusements. I wonder if the ID badge is genuine, but I doubt the name matches the pictured individual. Received: from h1.flipio.ro (unknown [128.140.228.99]) by [WITHHELD] (Postfix) with ESMTP id B85CF94065; Tue, 3 May 2016 04:16:57 +0200 (CEST) […]

Read More → More fraud at the expense of the U.N. and the U.S. Department of the Treasure

Brandon J. Wandersee’s recent post on the FreeBSD Questions mailling list pointed me to Matthew Fuller‘s BSD vs Linux. Enjoy! You should replace every mention of “CVS”, “CVSup”, and “pkg_*” with “Subversion” (SVN), “SVNup”, and “pkg *”, respectively. I.e., the command pkg_add becomes the command pkg add (with no underscore), etc.

Read More → BSD vs Linux

I spent some days last week converting our 32-bit AMANDA server to a 64-bit counterpart using spare but aged hardware. The former AMANDA server ran on very aged hardware in comparison. Going 64-bit also ment turning to ZFS-based storage. Today, I replaced the two 320 GB first generation SATA drives with two 1 TB third […]

Read More → Replacing drives on AMANDA server

Stack Overflow recently published the results from their “Developer Survey 2016”. I thought about giving them some feedback. I went to the top level, clicked on the feedback link and navigated to their What else should we ask developers? question. Next, I needed to create an account. That being done, it turns out I need […]

Read More → Stack Overflow and its user unfriendliness towards newcomers

… Windows machines try to request two URLs (www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt and ipv6.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt, the former over IPv4, the latter over IPv6) to ascertain whether a given network is routed to the Internet and if there is a captive portal in the way (NCSI stands for “Network Connection Status Indicator”). Ref.: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/ See also: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/networking/2012/12/20/the-network-connection-status-icon/.

Read More → Network Connection Status Indicator (NCSI)