Sysconfig's Blog

It might be just me, my misperception, or the fact that I haven’t quite understood yet what “support” means in this country (I think it might be arguable if it means anything at all). But I have the feeling that ISPs in the UK have no clue what they are doing! Let’s hope they don’t do that on purpose…

When I moved in a year ago, there wasn’t a broadband connection in this house, but there was a phone line — with BT apparently. So I went for the option, which I hoped would be the quickest (in terms of getting connected): BT. 8meg sounded ok to me, and I didn’t want to use 3G all the time (although I had a lot of traffic allowance on my contract).

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That’s one of the most stupid controversial questions I’ve ever read on Twitter. (Ok, I haven’t used Twitter for a long time yet, so I’m prepared for worse questions.) It shows that 140 characters cannot transport any substantial information really. The funny thing is that people indeed try to answer that question on Twitter — with 140 characters — recommending one or the other operating system to the one who asked. Total madness.

First of all, questions like this, which do not tell anything about the author’s aims and intentions, are not answerable. One could as well ask: Ferrari or Landrover? I’d suggest taking the Ferrari for the next cross-country rally, whereas the Landrover is definitely the best choice for the F1 track. Anyway, you got my point.

This blog post has potential for flamewars between the lovers of BSD and Linux, and also between lovers of either of the Linux distributions. So let me emphasize that this is my personal opinion.

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Somehow, all the features and increasingly popular services become more and more confusing.

Ok, everyone has Facebook (at least in English speaking countries people would rather ask if you are on Facebook than what your phone number is). And then there’s Twitter, another way of keeping friends or customers or whoever informed about what’s going on. Plus, you need to share you favourite URLs with digg, del.icio.us, or any other social bookmarking service of your choice. And of course, you need your own blog! And a Flickr account for your photos. Did I cover all of the services a modern Web 2.0 person has to have? Probably not. But now the core question: How do you manage to keep everything up 2 date? I mean as someone who’s already got a full-time job…

Comments, suggestions, URL appreciated!

Did you ever receive spam mails which seem to originate from your own mail address? Or did anybody else complain about you sending those emails? Then you should take a look at SPF. In a nutshell, it plugs the holes in the SMTP protocoll, which does not allow to verify if a sender (or anybody who pretends to be that sender) really may use a particular mail server to transmit their mails. Unfortunately, SPF is not yet very wide-spread. Almost everybody (including me) has come across this abbreviation and/or heard that it might protect misuse of mail addresses. But most people (including me) cannot be bothered to implement it.

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To be honest, three months ago I could not imagine that I would fall in love with Mac OS and/or Apple’s products. I considered them way too expensive and did not understand the hype, because technically they do not differ much (any more) from i386 hardware. But as my new employer offered to provide a MacBook Pro for my daily business, I thought: “Why not?”

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Yes, another more or less useful blog, I know

In fact, this blog is not about one certain topic only. It will represent “snapshots” of my work and experience as a Systems Administrator, clearly focused on Linux/BSD and Mac OS X (the latter rather from a user’s than a Systems Administrator’s point of view). I should have started this blog years ago. Anyway, it is never too late to contribute to the community. If there are any other bloggers out there, who are interested in linking this blog, please let me know.