Major Hayden over at Racker Hacker has a post on locking down SSH, and making it a little more secure, including some references to ssh keys, and how to set them up. A good read, and here are a few more ideas too…

These are my links for October 10th from 18:28 to 19:55:

• 7 reasons why High Availability will help you fail in even more spectacular ways than ever!
• HiR Information Report: It only happens once every 823 years!
• RIP Cheat Sheet
• Four ways to stop a shutdown or reboot
• My approach to problem solving
• I’m going. Are you?
• Camera Axe 4

Lori MacVittie has a great post titled “I, Cloud” where she takes on the challenge on whether Cloud technology needs three laws, like Asimov defined for robots. She does better than squishing the possible need for the three laws, but squishing the possibilities of IT and real people being replaced any time soon…

Every time a technological innovation has spurred automation – since the time of Henry Ford right up to a minute ago – someone has claimed that machines will displace human beings. But the rainbow and unicorn dream attributed to business stakeholders everywhere, i.e. the elimination of IT, is just that – a dream. It isn’t realistic and in fact it’s downright silly to think that systems that only a few years ago were unable to automatically scale up and scale down will suddenly be able to perform the complex analysis required of IT to keep the business running.

— Lori MacVittie

She goes on to challenge other reasons why computers won’t be able to simply replace us any time soon, data context, or information¹. She drops a great example of putting a number into context, as well as throwing in the effect of just depending on computers citing Facebook’s recent outage.

A post well worth reading, as are many of Lori’s posts. If she’s not in your feed reader, she should be.

These are my links for October 5th through October 6th:

• BBC News - Change to ‘Bios’ will make for PCs that boot in seconds -
• BBC News - ‘Laptop thigh’ skin rash warning -
• Facebook opens the walled garden door; Download your data -
• Facebook Gets Hip to Data Portability -
• Microsoft Windows Live Essentials 2011 released -
• An Administrator’s First Look at PowerShell in Lync Server 2010 (Communications Server ‘14’) -

Steve Lippert has a post on documentation, and expanding past the what to do, and remembering to include the why. This was triggered by an outage caused by not following his documentation. He’s updated his documentation now to include the why.

Whilst tinkering around this evening, FireFox told me there were updated plugins available, so I let it do its stuff. On restarting FireFox, Xmarks (the plugin that just updated) came with a sad warning…

Michael Pietroforte, over at 4sysops, has started a series of posts regarding the hosting of the 4sysops site over at Amazon’s EC2 services. He’s given an excellent breakdown of the costs on running 4sysops in EC2, as well as some of the benefits and disadvantages. Worth a read if you’re interested in considering the clouds for your services.

Kevin Bovis over on Ethereal Mind has an interesting post titled 10 Networking Books to Read Before You Die… He talks about how some books become relics, outdated, and useless, but brings up a list of 10 books he thinks should be on every network persons bookshelf.

After the last release, it was time to archive a few previous branches we had setup. This is usually a pretty simple operation, but becomes a lot more complicated when employees with active workspaces are no longer with the company…

Recently I’ve been working with one of our business units on content tracking. They’ve been trying to track how our site is used, and how popular certain features are. They had started rolling out an appliance that literally sniffed the traffic, and tracked the results. This is okay to a point, but leaves a lot of hard work tracking how the users are using the system. This is where Google Urchin comes in…