John Adams’ views on emerging technologies, software engineering, and various hacks
Recently I had a need to log into a machine with no cdrom and I decided to use Damn Small Linux to get enough of a shell to access the machine. It’s a very small, 50MB distribution of linux that is not that easy to install if you don’t have a linux box to start [...]
I posted this in response to a post on GigaOM, but it was such a long comment, I felt that it was worthy as a post on it’s own. The workloads of social networking sites fall mostly into the ‘read lots, write once’ class (most of the web exists within this paradigm.) Regardless of the [...]
There’s a small interview with me in today’s O’Reilly radar, where I talk about some of the things that I’ll be presenting as part of my Velocity 2009 talk. You can listen to, and read the transcript here:
Often on our local network, someone will start using up all of our outbound Internet bandwidth, and this leads to the network administrator’s dilemma: How do we find the user in question so we can thump them on the head to make them stop? This is a basic exercise in information gathering. For the most [...]
On this page, Netgear releases Firmware version 1.0.30 for the WNR3500 router. In my previous Apple Macbook Pro to Local network host (Mac Mini) testing, my top connection speed was around 2.4 Mbps. After the upgrade, it’s between 4.65Mbps and 7.5Mbps. Nothing near the promised speeds of 802.11N (300Mbit/sec), but I suspect that this is [...]
At Twitter, we have many users which sign up for the service and mistype or enter invalid email addresses. Our product group doesn’t want us to use email verification, and for the most part, we cannot because we accept signups via mobile (through the 40404 SMS short-code.) If we bounce too many messages for any [...]
After building a new gigabit network here, we wanted to know exactly what our performance was like. I turned to CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, which has long been a provider of excellent network performance tools. Their research focuses on developing tools to measure the Internet in many amazing ways, such as this [...]
This afternoon was a chaotic adventure in upgrading my home network to Gigabit Ethernet. I upgraded my wireless hub from 802.11g to 802.11N, and our internal network from 100mbit to GigE so I can move videos and music around the network faster. From cabling issues to configuration problems, here’s some tips so that you never [...]
I’ve been experimenting with a few things this week while trying to wade my way through Twitter’s infrastructure. One tool that’s been of extreme help in digging through source code and an extensive set of configuration files has been ack! It’s the only piece of software I know of that has ‘–thpppt’ as an option [...]
If you’re responsible for DNS at your organization, I urge you to immediately download updates for your DNS servers and patch them, today. Dan Kaminsky and other members of the DNS community announce that they are releasing patches for an extremely serious cache resolver issue impacting many vendors of DNS software, including ISC BIND and [...]
