Monthly Archives: January 2007

Watering the Net Roots | Linux Journal

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Blogging over at Linux Journal in “Watering the Net Roots,” Doc Searls suggests “On the one hand, you can look at Verizons dumping of rural New England business as a kind of red-lining.” That’s the view of the IBEW over at stop-the-sale.org: 3,000 CWA and IBEW Members Fight Rural Telecom Redlining In New England

“Verizon’s landline sell-off is yet another example of a race-to-the-bottom economy,” said Verizon customer service rep and CWA Local 1400 Vice President Mike O’Day, at a public forum in Burlington sponsored by newly elected U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. “It will adversely affect our jobs and the quality and reliability of local phone service throughout the whole region. Vermonters will be at the mercy of a small, highly-leveraged North Carolina-based company that will try to make a quick profit for its investors.”

In a recent NHPR interview, an economic development specialist stressed the importance of bringing more internet access to New Hampshire, especially the North Country, to develop local high-tech jobs to replace those lost as tourism and the snow season melts away.

New Version: WordPress 2.1

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Development Blog › WordPress 2.1 Ella: “On behalf of the WordPress.org community of commiters, contributers, and volunteers, I’m very proud to announce the immediate availability of WordPress 2.1 “Ella”, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. Here’s a sampling of what’s in the new version:”

Attempting to update to version 2.0.7, I noted that the links go to the brand-new (16 hours as I write this) version 2.1 and there may be significant issues with less-well-know plugins. If plugins are an important part of your blog, check out their list of compatible plugins first, then consider if now is a good time to upgrade. The downside I fear, though, is that the security flaws originally fixed with 2.0.7 may be getting exploited out in the wild. Darned if you do and darned if you don’t.

UPDATE: All looks fine here. My plugins appear to be working. Upgrade instructions (with lots of backups) worked just fine. If anyone notices problems, please don’t hesitate to add a comment below.

New Version: WordPress 2.0.7

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Development Blog › WordPress 2.0.7. I missed this first time it came around: a security-fix for WordPress, upgrading to version 2.0.7: “Recently a bug in certain versions of PHP came to our attention that could cause a security vulnerability in your blog. We’re able to work around it fairly easily, so we’ve decided to release 2.0.7 to fix the PHP security problem and the Feedburner issue that was in 2.0.6. It is recommended that everyone running WordPress 2.0.6 or lower upgrade to this new version.”

Things we wish we’d known about NAS devices and Linux Raid

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Thinking about deploying NAS? Before you do, you ought to read through Things we wish we’d known about NAS devices and Linux Raid by Daniel Feenberg of the National Bureau of Economic Reasearch, a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization boasting 16 of the 31 US’ Nobel prizewinners in Economics as past or present staff members. Having reliable data to work with is important to them. There are some interesting lessons learned in the humorous reviews of systems they have used:

“That turns 20 minutes of scheduled downtime to several days. I can only assume the motivation was to discourage the upgrade.”

“Later, NFS exports of snapshots were added at our request. This is the only time any NAS vendor was willing to learn anything from us.”

and

“I’d be very reluctant to put data on a proprietary system with no aftermarket support. Every vendor is in constant danger of being acquired, divested or turned around. When that happens you and your box are no longer “strategic”, and contract or not, requests for help are likely to be brushed aside. Even with an enforcable contract, the vendor can easily discourage calls for service by proposing solutions that don’t save your data.”

and

“In a crowded server room you won’t be able to tell which system is beeping, so some visual indicator is essential – but not generally provided. ”

Excellent pointers, worthy of review. There’s also some good discussion of the statistics and odds of disk failures and double failures. Well worth a careful review if you need to be thinking about storing a large amount of data reliably.