* Posts by ScottXJ6

11 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2009

Job application scam fleeces company of $150,000

ScottXJ6

Another way to avoid.

I recently had a relative become slightly paranoid about online banking. After a few minutes of racking my brain, a linux 'Live CD' was the obvious choice.

Read only media, no system changes to existing setup, minimum of fuss. Boot from the CD, log into your bank, pay your bills etc, then just shut down. Whilst exploits will be known as the live CD ages , if you stick to just visiting the bank website, then your pretty safe...

I realise that might not be so usuful to businesses who need to access to other documents at the same time etc, but its was an elegant workaround in my eyes.

Diary of a server failure

ScottXJ6

lol

At this scale? he is talking about a handful of 300gb drives, hardly big scale? most geeks home fileservers are many times larger...

Battery backed cache is needed because of the raid 5 write hole issue. What happens if your raid card goes down? bet you cant hotswap the data in the cache to another card!

PCI bus saturation is an issue which should be considered when specing your server... Again, ZFS can utilise any sata ports from any controller on any busses and assuming the system can keep up, the performance is accrued across all devices. software raid is superior in this respect in a way that traditiona; hardware raid cannot begin to cope. Its not like you can 'SLI' 2 identical raidcards to get twice the throughput for 1 array.

ZFS really is the future.

ScottXJ6

ZFS FTW Again...

Big problem here is proprietry raid format preventing the moving of data from one system to another due to the controller lock-in.

ZFS being software raid doesnt mean your locked in to any particular controller/system.

Rebuild times with ZFS, because the file system and volume manager are combined (not seperate like RAID card and FILE system ontop seperately), means rebuild times are equivelant to the amount of data on the disk. Rebuilds are also top down from the file system structure meaning most important data is rebuilt first (and thus available first). Not having to wait for every block to be re-done before even the probably good blocks are available...

admittedly it wouldnt have helped againt the WD uptime problem of 59 days, but it would have been easier to restore, wouldnt have needed a 'rebuild', and would have been back online much quicker.

my home atom (passively cooled) 6tb raidz atom 400quid home server could pull 1TB over the lan in just over 4 hours.

Can scrub it once per week aswell to ensure no data loss or data coruption that other filesystems wouldnt even notice.

oh and dedupe, and tiered caching to SSD, and so on...

Its painful to get emails from IT about lack of space on a 1tb file server when storage is now so cheap and accessable.

MS drops drive pooling from Windows Home Server

ScottXJ6

ZFS FTW!

built my own 6tb atom powered opensolaris box.

never looked back :P

How I built a zero energy cost, zero carbon home server

ScottXJ6

excellent article

It does make you realise that a lot of 'servers' are indeed overkill, with power consumption not normally thought about until the leccy bill comes in.

I built my homeserver on a pinetrail atom board, 4 disks for storage and a solid state for OS (open solaris), but the usage is still 60w, but with further optimisations might be able to get that down.

any kind of delayed file system commit is dangerous with respect to powercuts, but if your UPS'd up its a nice way to save some power.

I thought about using a seperate array of USB sticks as a temp buffer and commit its contents to disk at designated disk spin up times, but was quite happy with 60w in the end. ZFS makes errors on flash storage ok (got about 10 sticks lol)

what i wasnt happy with was 15w for a vodafone sure signal (even when not in use) and another 12w for an ADSL 2 router...

Kudos for downsizing though!

Attack reads smudges to retrieve Android password patterns

ScottXJ6

reading further

they say that randomised number positions are available in android 2.2...

still, if your photographed with the screen turned on, then no better than before really.

Perhaps some sort of accelerometer based 'signature' could be utilised aswell on compatible devices?

Further still, how about multi touch without the swiping, that way the 'smears' do not indicate a sequence of numbers, making the smears even more worthless. So instead of CTRL+ALT+DEL to unlock, its 3 + 4 + 7, but the numbers are different locations each time? still, someone snapping you whilst unlocking would reveal the relative numbers. Would blend in more with the 'noise' from normal phone usage aswell.

more research needed!

ScottXJ6

easy fix for that then

just randomise the numbers on the screen each time, so that the smudge has no resemblence to fixed number positions, making the smudge worthless even if captured...

that said, the android lock screen doesnt use numbers, perhaps it should?

Beeb deploys ISS as unit of measurement

ScottXJ6

erm, havent you all missed something?

The innacuracy in 'about 2mm' when talking about the hieght of the space station is huge (small error multiplied millions of time over = big error)

Would be much better to stack 100 of them, measure, and go from there. Then you may find the reported multiple more correct?

I for one welcome our coinstacking, space station measuring, wealthy overlords.

O2 and Be Broadband speeds dip

ScottXJ6

BE rule ok!

BE pro, 500m from the exhchange, 21mb down, 2.5mb up, never fails to impress and if the mood takes me can download at over 2mb/sec all evening long and upload over 200k/sec...

(someone came round to take advantage, repopulated their steam catalogue) downloaded over 25gig that evening lol. no caps or shaping.

Cant agree with the stats behind these articles much. Perhaps if all ISP halfed their 'upto' speeds, then acheived percentage of users would go upto all round, but moreso on larger ISPS who are the one who tend to do the worse due to contention and not adsl sync issues.

Probably people with the poorest line quality are the people who most change provider for the higher 'upto' packages, so drag the average down over time, after hearing good reviews from people who did their research and realised that they would get a fairly decent mb out of 24 :)

Fasthosts martyrs relive email FAIL (again and again)

ScottXJ6
Heart

poor show...

it might cost the reseller peanuts, but i bet he re-sells it onto these small businesses (just a few mail boxes and simple static site), at a much higher 'management' price, then has an awful sticky few days when he says he 'cant' fix it, because he is just reselling ofcourse, but they dont know that.

Still, a poor show from fasthosts for continued outages.

Heart image = clue to solution to problem, vote with your feet lol

Lotus details meths-drinking hybrid e-car engine

ScottXJ6

thats the inlet.....

Thats quite clearly the inlet manifold bolted to the head, as its got a throttle body mounted on it (the blue bit).

Dont forget this engine is probably going to packaged differently for its intended use, so dont assume thats the exhaust :)

The honda insight thing has a similar arangement with exhaust manifold cast into the head i think? another all aluminium 3 cyl small engine. Saves heat being wasted by the engine.

Im quite intrigued as to how you make a head/block all in one combo though, as a cast item...