Matt Fahrner’s Blog
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Ubuntu Jammy ate my homework
This site needs a lot of updates and a ton of spring (multiple springs’) cleaning. However, it’s a particular mess right now because I updated my Ubuntu server to Jammy and its newer PHP destroyed my (dated) WordPress theme. So… Lot to come there along with updating pages et al. Please forgive the ensuing mess.
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Signing the “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter”
I have joined the other signatories of the “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter“. Like any declaration of its breadth, I have varying opinions about points within the statement, but in broad strokes it captures my concerns. Note that I do not in any way limit this to OpenAI’s efforts only, but all machine […]
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Resurrection
Been quite some time since I’ve posted to this site, in part because I had to debug a plugin issue, but also because I’ve spent too much time on Twitter, and (no small deal, and by far the best part) had a son to shepherd to adulthood. Some updates since: Look forward updating this site […]
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Equifax
Being in the industry, I understand how difficult it is to secure an organization, so I have some sympathy for Equifax. As an ex-NSA colleague noted (paraphrasing), “A defender has to protect everything, an attacker only has to find one hole.” That said, their business is PII, so there is a higher standard there. In […]
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VMware virtual or not?
Depending on naming, in a VMware environment you may not actually be sure if a Linux system is VMware or not. Here’s a quick command to find out: [crayon-6484c76061f94284212912/] which will generally output “VMware, Inc.” if VMware. On older systems you may find “-s” doesn’t work, in which case just pipe “dmidecode” through grep looking […]
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Installing Plixer’s “Scrutinizer” NPMD
Plixer makes a good “Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics” (NPMD) application called “Scrutinizer“. NPMD, as Gartner calls it, mostly omeans, collecting, aggregating, and reporting on Netflow data. Plixer provides a VMware OVF for installation of a virtual appliance. I, however, ran into a few issues with the installation: I couldn’t get the install to work […]
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I was but the learner, now I am the “Radar Technician”…
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Ubuntu package commands
Because Ubuntu has a mix of utilities to manage packages I constantly seem to be forgetting the options I need when I go to do basic package management. Mostly for my sake are the ones I use most regularly: List installed packages: [crayon-6484c760629af725530369/] List names of available packages (including those not installed): [crayon-6484c760629c8084384699/] Tell what […]
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Good basic email advice
Professor Alan Woodward from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Surrey via The Register: “Educate users not to open files that they are not expecting. Practice your ABCs – Assume nothing. Believe no one, and Check everything should be drummed into users – personally I preach ABCD – if in any doubt […]
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Fix Apple Bonjour with Cisco autonomous APs
I purchased some used Cisco C1140 autonomous access points for my home network (autonomous meaning not lightweight or requiring a WLC). While everything seemed to be fine at first, later we noticed that printouts to our Canon laser printer were no longer working from our Macs. After some research I realized that the Macs were […]
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