Monthly Archives: March 2012

National Bank SSL Cert Fail

Got to wonder about your bank when they manage to upload the wrong SSL certificate to one of their webservers. :-/ Every sysadmin has their bad day, but I would have thought a bank would have had a bit more … Continue reading

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Travel Plans: Wellington Easter

I’ll be coming down to Wellington this Easter from Thursday 4th until Monday 9th of April to catch up with family and friends. I’m planning one main “catch up” event to meet up with lots people, this naturally calls for … Continue reading

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Porting to 2degrees

Having been a long-suffering victim of poor experiences with performance on Vodafone’s data network in NZ and expensive pricing, I’ve now shifted to NZ’s third and youngest mobile provider, 2degrees. Two major incentives – firstly unhappiness at Vodafone’s 3G data … Continue reading

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Introducing Smokegios

Having a reasonably large personal server environment of at least 10 key production VMs along with many other non-critical, but still important machines, a good monitoring system is key. I currently use a trio of popular open source applications: Nagios … Continue reading

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Delicious Cookies Recipe

I don’t do anywhere near as much baking as I would like to, mostly due to time limitations and the fact that the kitchen in my Auckland apartment isn’t particularly big. One thing that is pretty quick and easy to … Continue reading

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Google Search & Control

I’ve been using Google for search for years, however it’s the first time I’ve ever come across a DMCA takedown notice included in the results. Possibly not helped by the fact that Google is so good at finding what I … Continue reading

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Takapuna Beach Low Tide

As part of my regular exercise routine, I wander along Takapuna beach – the size of the beach will vary a lot depending on whether the tide is in or out, but the amount it varies is quite dramatic. This … Continue reading

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Paranoia Justified

It’s human nature to be friendly and trusting, we want to assume people are generally good, and we want to help out others where we can. However this makes us prime for social engineering attacks – from calling up pretending … Continue reading

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Mozilla Firefox “Pin as App”

In a moment of madness, I decided to RTFM the latest Mozilla Firefox Feature List and came across this nifty ability called “Pin as App”. It’s pretty handy, I’m using it to maintain tabs of commonly access websites or web … Continue reading

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Incur the Wrath of Linux

Linux is a pretty hardy operating system that will take a lot of abuse, but there are ways to make even a Linux system unhappy and vengeful by messing with available resources. I’ve managed to trigger all of these at … Continue reading

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