When do I get crazy-assed bikini models with sexual addiction issues lurking in the bushes? I think I could handle that. Instead, I get this tripe.

Hilarious mailing list exchange in which John C. Welch, who suffers no fools, goes from being helper to stalker in just four moves. Keep reading into the comments to see the inevitable appearance of a lawyer-wannabe (and his subsequent about-face). A must read.

Because I’m a geek I thought it’d be “nice” to use GeekTool to tail -f my system.log onto my desktop. What an eye-opener that turned out to be.
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Using SSH as a proxy server (to avoid your company’s/country’s [firewall]): SSH has a built in SOCKS proxy that you can use in any program that can run over a SOCKS proxy. This includes Firefox (really, all browsers), Thunderbird, Pidgin/Adium (as well as almost all other IM clients like Google Talk, AIM, etc) and a ton of other networking programs we all use. Using SSH with the -D flag lets you create a dynamic ssh tunnel that acts as a SOCKS proxy, and sends all your traffic from the endpoint of your SSH connection.

And a small collection of other SSH secrets that are [fun][useful][illegal] (delete as appropriate).

A free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is particularly suited for web sites crawling under very high loads while needing persistence or Layer7 processing. Supporting tens of thousands of connections is clearly realistic with todays hardware. Its mode of operation makes its integration into existing architectures very easy and riskless, while still offering the possibility not to expose fragile web servers to the Internet.

Understanding computing history is very important because, if you look across the sweep of it from the 1940s to today, it’s much easier to see where we might go next.

There are a number of times in which you find yourself needing performance data. Unlike most monitoring tools that either focus on a small set of statistics, format their output in only one way, run either interatively or as a daemon but not both, collectl tries to do it all. You can choose to monitor any of a broad set of subsystems which currently include buddyinfo, cpu, disk, inodes, infiniband, lustre, memory, network, nfs, processes, quadrics, slabs, sockets and tcp. [via]

Fast & Security Conscious, High-Performance, High-Availability Unix Hosting on Redundant Server Arrays.

ARPWatch/Log Watcher — A tool that monitors your network activity and keeps a record of IP/Mac address pairings and firewall logs. It will give a warning when it notices any suspicious activity, like any changes in Mac address or any connection attempt to the firewall.

What we really need is networks with imaginative names. Names like “Vicious Evil Network Of Mayhem”.

This paper covers how DNS works: first at a high level, then by picking apart an individual packet exchange field by field. Next, we’ll use this knowledge to see how weaknesses in common implementations can lead to cache poisoning. [via]