http://www.briandowney.net/blog Technical musings of an entrepreneur. Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:53:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Almost 24 hours per day, The Linux Fix is inundated with FTP and SSH brute force attempts to our server farm.   This has compromised a few our our customer's accounts from time to time, and I decided it was time to come up with a solution. The problem is tricky--we must ... http://www.briandowney.net/blog/2009/08/20/firewalling-brute-force-attempts-with-iptables/ Being a polymath I tend to get asked questions on a lot of different things.   Over the years, I've often wondered how many wasted minutes were spent deflecting questions with a question regarding the original question.   Anyone in a support-type role knows what I'm talking about, but for the sake ... http://www.briandowney.net/blog/2009/03/06/the-art-of-asking-a-question/ Due to an overbearing Federal Government ignoring  the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, several states (including California and Michigan) have begun to declare their independence from the Federal Government to curb the use of unlawful powers not delegated to it (and there's plenty these days). Remember we're the United States of ... http://www.briandowney.net/blog/2009/02/05/states-delcaring-sovereignty/ On January 30th, 2009, I passed the FAA Practical Exam (aka "the checkride") to the satisfaction of my examiner.  I was a nervous the whole time, thinking I was unprepared.   The fact of the matter was that I was PLENTY prepared, but being nervous about the entire process ended up ... http://www.briandowney.net/blog/2009/02/02/checkride/ I PASSED!!!! I'll write up a play-by-play a bit later.  I'm too excited to type it out right now! http://www.briandowney.net/blog/2009/01/30/private-pilot-checkride/ Hey all.  Sorry, I haven't been posting much lately--much going on in business as well as our empty houses in Michigan.   Hopefully we'll be able be free of those soon. Anyway, the big event is set to happen on this Friday, January 30th.   After much hard work, a little under a ... http://www.briandowney.net/blog/2009/01/27/final-steps-to-becoming-a-private-pilot/ This is one of those "no way, that can't be true" type of events. Using Solaris' Dtrace functionality a systems engineer determines that noise is responsible for his intermittent disk latency problems.   Just wait for the last part of the video, it's worth it. http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/unusual_disk_latency Thanks to Greg for pointing that one out ... http://www.briandowney.net/blog/2009/01/02/disk-problems-your-dc-is-too-noisy/ ...depression setting in.   The only good news is that it won't last very long. http://www.briandowney.net/blog/2008/12/15/its-snowing-in-redding/ I usually don't like to cross-post between blogs, but this problem seems prevalent enough that it needs more exposure.   We've solved it at TLF, and here's how: http://www.thelinuxfix.com/blog/2008/10/24/trixbox-vpns-and-the-20-second-issue/ http://www.briandowney.net/blog/2008/10/24/trixbox-vpns-nat-and-the-20-second-dropping-issue/ So, I finally had a chance to play with VMware ESXi.   It's pretty much what I expected, a straight-up version of ESX.  Very, very nice... I'll start moving more servers over from VMware Server 1.x and report back on my progress. One of the things that annoyed me out of the ... http://www.briandowney.net/blog/2008/10/16/enabling-ssh-on-esxi/