I’ve been having trouble with my server running out of file handles recently (ouch). Cyrus and Apache and rtorrent all do their fair share of abuse of my server, lsof typically reports 20k open files and sockets. rtorrent kept crapping out with “can’t resolve host” and “can’t save torrent file” errors, related to running out of file handles. Very hard to determine why this was happening. Eventually google turned up the answer on gentoo forums – re-emerge curl with these USE flags in [/etc/portage/package.use]:

net-misc/curl ares -threads

All is full of light.

Here’s a snip from his June Crypto-Gram (you should subscribe to this!):

When I talk about “Liars and Outliers” to security audiences, one of the things I stress is our traditional security focus — on technical countermeasures — is much narrower than it could be. Leveraging moral, reputational, and institutional pressures are likely to be much more effective in motivating cooperative behavior. This story illustrates the point. It’s about the psychology of fraud, “why good people do bad things.”

Along similar lines, some years ago Ross Anderson made the suggestion that the webpages of people’s online bank accounts should include their photographs, based on the research that it’s harder to commit fraud against someone whom you identify with as a person. Two excellent papers on this topic: 1 2

This really resonates with me. I’d like to think, generally speaking, that there aren’t good guys and bad guys, just people with different perspectives on different situations and institutions, and that pretty much everyone has some form of moral code, even possibly overlapping in many areas. Isn’t that really our only hope as a species?

I recently bumped my primary email/database/webserver box up to date. Now all my gentoo boxes are past the annoyingly useless tweaks required for gentoo’s baselayout2. I love gentoo land, where every bit of pain is a lesson. This one included… (continued…)

Somewhere the AVG toolbar got installed on my laptop Windows install, perhaps without my permission when I installed PowerISO. You can remove it in Program Files, but afterwards it had still e.g. clobbered my home page. In case you need manual cleanup: (continued…)

I dropped my Macbook Pro laptop on the concrete sidewalk on the short walk to work a couple weeks ago. I had popped the messenger bag shoulder strap up off my shoulder to pull my coat out, and didn’t quite catch it on the way down. Blammo. Turns out that when push comes to shove, concrete retains its shape a lot better than aluminum. All the USB ports on my Macbook Pro 5.2 were instantly transformed into trapezoids, as the corner crumpled up like a soft soda can.

Those Apple folks know what they’ve got going, and do a good job of treating people with no regard for money well. $600 later I had a lot of heartburn, but also had a 50% brand new MBP that worked perfectly. Too bad the 50% included the hard drive. 🙁

Anyway… long story short -too late-… my clean hard drive emboldened me to finally install all the OSes I needed. What does it take to get my four favorite ones squeezed onto one fat-assed macbook pro? A little more pain than should really be necessary. The moral of the story is that this is the stuff you play with when you don’t really care if you blow all your data away. No, really. Back up anything you care about first. Technical details start up after the break… (continued…)