Good SSL for your website is absurdly difficult in practice
It all started with a tweet by Thomas Ptacek which Ireplied to .That inspired me to take another run at configuring my personalsite so that it had a top-grade SSL/TLSconfiguration.
I failed. Which leads to this rant. In order to have good TLSon your website, here is what you need (in the abstract):
- You need to know what the current state of the art is in recommendedTLS settings and attacks, both for things to actively support(such as perfect forward secrecy
Making switch configuration changes is not as easy as it looks
In theory one of the advantages of the virtual approach to networkdrop wiring is that all you have to do tochange a drop's networking is change your switch configuration forits port. But I feel that this ease is often somewhat of an illusionand I've come around to the view that switch configuration changesare not as easy in practice as they look (at least in many smallerenvironments).
To put it simply, making the change on the switch itself is the easypart. If the switch
The physical versus the virtual approach to network wiring
I was recently reading Matt Simmons' The Cyclical Nature of Academia ,where he talks a bit about the network wiring that they do. Thissparked a thought about the two different ways to do network wiring(or at least the two main ways).
If you have a collection of VLANs and a collection of ports and a setof mappings between these two that stubbornly keeps changing, you canset up your wiring closet in what I'll call physically or virtually.The physical approach is simpler to describe; you
What (and how) I use HTML tables for layout here
I'd like to say, to start with, that I'm not particularly opposed tousing CSS for layout as an alternative to tables. It's just that I findHTML tables easier to write in practice and as far as I know, CSS lacksthe features that would make it really work well for this. Today Iwant to talk about three specific uses I make of tables in WanderingThoughts .
The first is my most common use of tables for layout in general:aligning form labels and form
The current weak areas of ZFS on Linux
I've been looking into ZFS on Linux for a while as a potential alternative to Illumosfor our next generation of fileservers ( FreeBSD is unfortunatelydisqualified ). As part of that Ihave been working to understand ZoL's current weak areas so thatI can better understand where it might cause us problems.
The following is the best current information I have; it comesfrom reading the ZoL mailing list (and at one point asking theZoL mailing list this exact question).
The weak areas that I know about
A little bit more on ZFS RAIDZ read performance
Back in this entry I talked about how alllevels of ZFS RAIDZ had an unexpected read performance hit: they can'tread less than a full stripe, so instead of the IOPS of N disks youget the IOPS of one disk. Well, it was recently pointed out to me thatthis is not quite correct. It is true that ZFS reads all of the stripeof a data block on reads; however, ZFS does not read the parity chunks(unless the block does not checksum correctly and needs to
Simple availability doesn't capture timing and the amount of warning
Here is a mistake that I have actually kind of made : a simple availability or 'amount of downtime'number does not fully capture your availability situation. In real lifeit matters a lot both when you go down and whether or not you haveadvance warning. To put it simply, an hour of planned downtime at 6pm isqualitatively different from an hour of unplanned downtime at 6pm (or at11am on your busiest morning) even if they have exactly the same effecton your overall availability numbers
HTML quoting as I currently understand it
Since I was just doing some work with DWiki where I needed to refreshmy memory of this, I want to write down what I know, remember, and haveworked out before I forget it again. First off there are effectivelythree areas where you (or at least I) want to quote and escape textin HTML:
- When outputting things that are not supposed to be interpreted asHTML, such as in a form