Ain’t gonna happen. Time to clean house. I’ll dump the most interesting ones into a few posts & cull the rest.
Obviously tracking this sort of thing would be better served by a bookmarking service, but I’ve decided that my professional Internet presence will be Google and Google related apps. I use a combination of Yahoo &Live.com for things that I don’t want associated with my professional presence, and I try hard not to mix them. The only interesting bookmark service is a Yahoo property (for now, at least) so I don’t have a public bookmarking service. Lame? Yes. I don’t have Twitter or Facebook accounts either. Really lame. Maybe even lame2. I still would rather read blogs posts than tweets. Is that lame3 ?
Disclaimer – most of these links are more than a year old, but they’ve survived periodic culling, so maybe they are good links?
Here goes:
A read-once-for-sure and re-read-once-a-year post on the Anatomy of Security Disasters [Edit:2019-01-04 broken link] by Marcus Ranum describing …ummmm… the anatomy of security disasters, I guess. Good read.
I saved this DailyWTF post because it shows a bad security device implementation (and what I believe is a bad choice of identifiers). My luck the clowns would store my fingerprint un-hashed. One revocation down, nine to go.
Here’s a good ‘Sysadmin Principles’ list from Steve Stady and Seth Vidal [Edit:2019-01-04 broken link]. It’s in plain text, so those of you who surf the web with curl and less can read it too. I like reading what others think are the core system administration principles. To me, doing it ‘right’ has value, and I don’t appreciate people who shortcut just because they are lazy or in a hurry. They get by today, but someone else (probably me) will have to clean up after them later.
It’s possible that we’ll eventually end up migrating from Solaris to Linux. This post [Edit:2019-01-04 broken link] by ‘The Unix Blog’ reminded my why I like Solaris. Until Oracle fscks it up anyway.
I read and bookmarked a whole lot of articles about the Heartland breech. The most interesting one is Heartland Sniffer Hid in Unallocated Portion of Disk [Edit:2019-01-04 broken link]. Cool, unless you are Heartland or one of it’s victims. I’m a fan of network segmentation and bi-directional default deny firewall rules. I hope it makes a difference, ‘cause it sure is a lot of work to maintain.
A saved a few snarky anti-windows links, mostly written by the blind [Edit:2019-01-04 broken link] for the purpose of feeding the trolls. I don’t think that Unix is superior to Windows in every way. In some ways, like patching, I’d much rather have Windows/SQL than Solaris/Linux + Oracle. Microsoft has an really good patch management suite. And no, I don’t think Open Source is automatically bug free, cheaper, faster, easier to manage. My Firefox is on .13 right now. That’s not impressive. It’s annoying.
Speaking of the Microsoft stack, Todd Hoff’s High Scalability blog had a post on scaling StackOverflow. Buy vs. rent, scale up vs. scale out, all the good stuff.
Here’s a couple more related links:
Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out: Hidden Costs by Jeff Atwood
On a slightly different theme, Michael Nygards Why Do Enterprise Applications Suck [Edit:2019-01-04 broken link] was a good read. It’s hard to keep up the energy on backend apps.
I’ll close with a quote from the comment section of this InfoQ post on scalability worst practices:
Marcos Santos:Don’t worry, there will be more.
The Great Knuth said:
Early Optimization is the root of all evil
But Marcos Eliziario, who is a poor programmer, known of no one, said at 2 AM after two sleepless days:Reckless regard for optimization is the cube of an even greater evil
