Please test your error paths
One of my peculiar traits is that I test error paths, sometimesobsessively. If I write an error check into my code, I am not happyuntil I have induced the error and watched the error check firecorrectly. Judging from some of the code that I've seen this makes me ararity, but it shouldn't be this way.
In fact, I sometimes think that explicitly testing error paths is moreimportant than explicitly testing regular code paths. It is usuallypretty obvious when regular code paths don
A gotcha with the automounter and loopback mounts
On Solaris, there is a combination gotcha with the automounter and mountson the same host. It goes like this:
- your fileserver normally has /dev/whatever mounted on /export/foo.
- your generic automounter configuration mounts fileserver:/export/fooas /foo.
- you need to do some maintenance to the filesystem, so you unshareand unmount /export/foo.
- after you're done you try to remount it, but you get a message thatthe mount point is busy. The only mention of
On storing source code in some non-text format
Every so often these days there is some agitation that program sourcecode should not be stored as text but instead in some more intelligentand more abstract form, and just presented as text by editors.
This is the programming language version of the web's 'semantic markuponly' movement, and it fails for the exact same reason that only a smallfringe writes in purely semantic markup: the appearance of the text is important, it is not an afterthought. Programmers care not justabout the meaning of their code but
Why ZFS's data integrity is less important than Solaris's usability
The bottom line is that Solaris is hard to administer (yeah, it's afair cop), so server data is just going to have to suffer. Hopefullysome day Solaris will be as easy as redhat, or debian, or ubuntu, or
. Some day. Meanwhile, I'll choose dataintegrity over ease of administration. The problem with this is that quiet disk corruption is not currently abig issue for most people; it just don'
Paying for security exploits
Somewhere out on the Internet, there is probably someone waxingindignant right now about how companies generally now have to payrelatively substantial bounties for security exploits in their products.After all, why do the security researchers now demand payment for theirresearch work?
I thin that there are two reasons: the obvious reason and the deeperreason.
The obvious reason is that companies are competing for new securityexploits with the criminal groups exploiting security vulnerabilitiesto do various bad things. Said groups pay well for new vulnerabilities,because there is
Weekly spam summary on May 26th, 2007
Unfortunately, our SMTP frontend restarted sometime Friday, so I onlyhave some statistics up until Friday morning. That said, this weekwe:
- got 10,439 messages from 277 different IP addresses.
- handled 18,746 sessions from 1,402 different IP addresses.
- received 137,918 connections from at least 49,448 different IPaddresses up until Friday at 4am.
- hit a highwater of 9 connections being checked at once.
The risks of spam filtering (part 1)
While spam filtering is 'dangerous' in that it can trigger on legitimateemail, incorrectly classifying it as spam, there are different levels ofdangerousness depending on what you do as a result of things triggering.In increasing levels of danger, there are three general things that peopledo:
- reject the email message during the SMTP conversion.
- discard the email message.
- bounce the email message back to the alleged sender.
The danger of the second option is obvious: the sender of a legitimateemail message receives no indication that their
If you want work done, you need to pay for it
It's not news that if you want work done you usually need to pay peopleto do it; there are not that many selfless volunteers and sooner orlater you stop being able to trick people into doing it for free. Ofcourse, the open source movement is a clear demonstration that you don'thave to pay people in money; people find any number of things rewarding.But you do need to give people a reward that they find meaningful.
(You can argue that a certain amount of open
Firefox preferences settings that I use
In the spirit of my Firefox extensions , and since Ijust went through this exercise today, here are the Firefox preferencescustomizations that I currently use. At least some of these are onlypresent in relatively bleeding edge Firefox builds, and you will needto use
about:configto enable at least some of them.(I have not put everything in here, just the stuff that I always forgetand that irritates me when it's missing.)
browser. backspace_action 1 Scroll the page up on backspace
The danger of a web server writeable document area
Once you have CGI programs running through your web server, you might rationally ask why allowing them to writeinto the web server's document area adds any extra danger: after all, ifa CGI program is compromised, the attacker gets to run all the code theywant anyways.
Well, in theory. The flaw in this theory is that there are differentkinds of vulnerabilities.
In practice it turns out that 'file dropper' vulnerabilities, wherea CGI program (especially PHP programs) can be tricked into writing
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