Innate Ideas

Simple online security for non-techies - If your PC can't find the bad guy site, it can't download bad guy software

2011-04-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

On the internet the Domain Name System (DNS) translates web site names like www.facebook.com to a string of numbers that is the website's location on the Internet. For example, without DNS translating computer names to IP addresses you would have to type http://69.171.224.14/ in your web browser to get to Facebook instead of www.facebook.com. Normally you get DNS name translation from your

Simple online security for non-techies - know the threat

2011-04-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

Windows PC Security isn't simple, but here is a simple explanation of the threat. The bad buys have changed their tactics in the arena of viruses/malware/spyware over the years. No longer is it something that you notice right away as they delete your files and mess with your PC. Today when the bad guys get control of your PC they try hard not to be noticed. Because control of your computer is

Simple online security for non-techies - three simple steps to better online security; for Windows PC users

2011-04-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

1. Think before you click on email links or attachments. Don't click on links in emails from people you don't know, and Don't click on links from people you do know that you aren't expecting or have an odd sounding text in the message. Read that again, it's very important to follow. Why? Because this is the #1 way for bad guys to own your computer. 2. Keep Adobe PDF reader up to date. If it's

Watching Netflix Movies in VLC on Linux

2010-10-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

I wanted to watch Netflix streaming movies on my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop in VLC Media Player. This is generally prevented by Microsoft's "PlayReady" digital restrictions and Microsoft Silverlight. At this point in time you are required to have a Microsoft OS in order to watch streaming Netflix movies, hopefully that will change in the future. A number of people solved this problem by running

Out of memory killer

2010-05-15T19:12:00.000-07:00

I ran into an interesting issue the other day. Something I had not seen before and I thought I'd mention it here. One of the servers I manage was having occasional issues with processes being killed. Syslog entries indicated processes were being killed because the system was out of memory. This on a system that has 32GB of RAM and monitoring shows has several gigs of RAM free which had me a

System Entropy in Linux

2010-02-22T23:23:00.000-08:00

Entropy is needed by many applications, SSL and Java in particular can be heavy consumers of entropy. Linux makes the devices /dev/random and /dev/urandom available to applications to pull entropy from. These two devices contain entropy collected from several system sources. Wikipedia has a good page on /dev/random and /dev/urandom. Kernel.org has some good information here. You can check the

You can't manage what you can't measure.

2009-12-31T00:03:00.000-08:00

Server health can flucuate as it goes through the process of receiving, consuming, and sending data. But you won't know unless you monitor system health. Without collecting system health information over a period of time one cannot know what is a normal state of the system and what is an emerging problem. One of my favorite tools for system monitoring is Collectd (www.collectd.org). Simple and

First post

2009-08-19T23:09:00.000-07:00

The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it. ~~Mark Twain