You might have noticed that I don't write much here any more; that situation will probably persist semi-indefinitely. However I have recently started writing some technical articles on Syslog, the Systems Research Group's new blog. You can find my articles here.

In this article I describe a problem which I and others have seen in the wild many times, whereby a single broken host will severely cripple the ability of other hosts on the local network to reach IPv6-capable (dual-stack) servers, regardless of whether the local network has deployed IPv6. This is primarily aimed at network administrators, ( Read more... )

Because this seemingly-inocuous patch (which postdates Android 1.5, and thus fixes a bug affecting several of the earlier Android phones) reveals an alarming mess.

Before that patch, making an emergency call on some networks (e.g. Rogers in Canada, and T-Mobile in the USA) would cause a system service to throw a NullPointerException, and the phone ( Read more... )

Last night I had an idea for a product. I think it ought to exist already; does anyone know where I might buy one? It's a USB virtual DVD-RW drive, in the same form factor as a pen drive. I want to be able use it exactly as if it were a USB DVD-RW drive permanently containing a DVD-RW disc; I should be able to write an CD/DVD image onto it (of, ( Read more... )

Is there any possible application for a male Micro SATA to female SATA + male Molex adapter? It could be used to plug a normal hard drive into a Micro SATA bay, I suppose, but only if you ignore the Molex. If you plug in both Micro SATA and Molex you'll be joining two power sources together ( Read more... )

I've been in Paris for the past nine days, nominally to present a paper on MOOSE at ITC 21's DC CAVES workshop. At least one of you has requested a writeup, so here goes, although this is as much for my own future reference.

Beware: behind the cut, this post is quite long and includes several photos. If you're reading this via RSS and don't see ( Read more... )

I have spent much of this evening (and, well, this morning) trying to convert a private Subversion repository into a public Bazaar repository hosted on Launchpad. This should be easy, and in a way it is, but there are a few pitfalls and alternatives which I thought I'd write up to save someone else the bother of figuring this out for themselves.

( Read more... )

I've spent the past couple of days dealing with a major security incident on the SRCF's main server, pip (almost exactly 18 months since our last such incident). Now that things have calmed down a bit, I thought I'd write something about it for those who expressed an interest in the details.

( Read more... )

As users of the SRCF are no doubt aware, the SRCF strives to be at the forefront of technological developments on the Internet. It is therefore with great pleasure that we announce today support for a new, cutting-edge distributed hierarchical document search and retrieval protocol: Gopher.

gopher://gopher.srcf.ucam.org/

Enjoy browsing ( Read more... )

I present Gigabyte EnergySaver as bundled with my new motherboard.

Disabled:

( Read more... )