In case you have been living under a rock, Firefox 3.5 came out today (well technically yesterday). I've noticed a lot of people wondering how they can get it running smoothly on Ubuntu. Never fear, after much trial and error (a lot of error) I've found what I think should be the easiest way to install the latest version of Firefox. So if you are just as impatient as I am, you can rejoice in the all the cool new features.
The company I work for has about 3,000 servers that need to be monitored in our Dallas datacenter. For the past few years we've been using a fairly standard Nagios setup. If you don't take the time to really learn Nagios and tweak the config files it'll run fairly well, until you are monitoring more then a few hundred servers. The reason that Nagios slows down when checking 300+ servers is that it stores all state/check information in a flat text file on the system's hard drive. When you have only a few servers and services to check it's not so bad, but when you the more you add, the more IOPS you'll see. At 3,000 servers disk IO is a huge bottleneck.
I've been running Ubuntu 9.04 beta on my desktop at home for a few weeks now, so I decided it was time to upgrade my laptop. I hoped that by upgrading, I'd be able to signifigantly reduce the time it took for my laptop to boot up. Unfortunetly, disaster stuck halfway through. My laptop overheated and locked up, leaving me with half new and half old packages. Needless to say, it did not come back online very easily. I managed to get it to a point where I could copy my data off to another computer, then I did a fresh install of Ubuntu.
Sometimes I like to stay late at work, I've got a nice desk, a decent computer, and a mini-fridge full of drinks right behind me. So even after I'm off work, I sometimes stay up here and work on side projects or just browse the web. Yesterday, I decided to do something a bit more creative, I decided to build a monster.
A while back, we got an e-mail from a customer who was concerned that terrorists might be using her site to plan an attack on the space shuttle. Please note, this is a real ticket that was submitted to our security department by one of our customers. Identifying information has been removed and replaced with asterisks (*). See the entire story after the jump.