Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
This is yet another accidental purchase of a self-published book, although I think this one makes a lot of sense as a self published work. Writing a technical reference book isn’t a particularly lucrative pastime for most authors, and self publishing likely makes it more worthwhile than the traditional publisher route, especially if you can…
I’ve known for a long time that if you delete a file on Unix / Linux but that file is open somewhere, the blocks used by the file aren’t freed until that user closes the file (or is terminated), but I was left wondering about some other edge cases. Shaken Fist has a distributed blob…
I discovered last night that network bridges on linux have their Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) overwritten by whatever is the MTU value of the most recent interface added to the bridge. This is bad. Very bad. Specifically this is bad because MTU matters for accurately describing the capabilities of the network path the packets will…
I spent much of yesterday playing with KSM (Kernel Shared Memory, or Kernel Samepage Merging depending on which universe you come from). Unix kernels store memory in “pages” which are moved in and out of memory as a single block. On most Linux architectures pages are 4,096 bytes long. KSM is a Linux Kernel feature…
It seems obvious to me that videos of LCA 2007 are good. Specifically: IPTraf # Statistics for eth0 ########################################################## # # # Total Total Incoming Incoming Outgoing Outgoing # # Packets Bytes Packets Bytes Packets Bytes # # Total: 241091 228940K 96646 18025370 144445 210915K # # IP: 241091 225548K 96646 16655328 144445 208892K #…
I gave a talk on how Google deploys software configuration to machines at AUUG 2006, and this reminded me to put the slide deck and paper online. So, here they are: slides in PowerPoint and PDF, as well as the conference paper. Update: Now with URLs that are correct! Sorry for the cut and paste…
I just gave my Linksys NSLU2 hacking talk at AUUG 2006 in Melbourne, Australia. You can find the slides online (powerpoint and PDF) as well as the paper (PDF).
Here is the slide deck I used for the NSLU2 hacking talk when I gave it at LUV the other night: australia_melbourne_luv_nslu2.ppt.
This burning laptop thing is starting to get old.
Andrew Morton has been hired by Google.