Many places have password policies. And they often prescribe that your password MUST include things like:
The problem is: That advice is wrong.
Or at least: the advice guides people towards difficult-to-remember passwords and it does not increase security.
The single …
A post about some maths homework caused some consternation and confusion on one of my local facebook groups:
Lots of people seemed to think this was far too advanced for a 9-year-old, or that solving such puzzles would have no applications in real life.
I beg to disagree.
Yes, I …
The spammers who try to flood my inbox must be getting desperate - they're offering to stop if I pay them!
From: "Admin" <admin@secureserver.eu>
Subject: I will stop spaming you
I'm sick of sending spam...
If you send me $10 USD worth of XMR / Monero I will remove …The other day I came across a new English word. This is not a new thing for me - it happens on a annoyingly regular basis. But it made me stop and take notice: BLURPLE !?? Why hadn't i ever heard that before?
OK - so it sounds some combination between blue and …
A Californian woman is allegedly suing her own parents because she is ugly!
At least that is what the article claims... It is hilarious and plays into our biases about people from the USA to be litigious and generally a bit weird.
Alas, it is fake news. Or to be …
The scenario: Your server is not working right: You cannot start new processes! Simple commands like "ls" fail:
yourname@yourserver:~$ ls
-bash: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable
This is a symptom of the kernel reaching the maximum number of processes. On most systems, this is 32768 processes, and on 64-bit …
The wolderful flexibility of being able to mount file systems at any point in the file system comes at a small cost: You can end up hiding files - usually by mistake.
For example, imaging having the following file systems:
The situation: df (which shows disk usage) disagrees with du (which shows disk space taken up by files). So you have disk space which is "used", but it is not taken up by any files!? What gives!?
For example:
root@xps:~# df -h /tmp
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted …When investigating disk usage issues on a very full disk, the investigation may actually be hampered by the lack of disk space. For example:
du -x -m / | sort -nr | head -25
can fail if you have a lot of directories and your disk is completely full: sort will only process …
Sometimes your disk usage does not add up - for example:
karl@someserver:~$ df -h /
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 52G 49G 243M 100% /
So what gives? 49Gb + 248Mb is definitely less than 52Gb !! This is a sizeable discrepancy of at least 1.5 …