In my last post, I talked about the underpinnings of networking at the lower layers. This post is going to talk about NAT: network address translation. NAT is almost as universal as IPv4 networking, and is used nearly universally on home and small-and-medium-sized business networks—with good reason, too: Having more than one IPv4 address carries [...]

It boggles the mind what some people will actually do—to what ends they will go to try to “show up” someone or make themselves look better. What is even worse is when it is pure marketing bullshit. I am sure that there are people who do this in every single line of work. But what [...]

So, I have someone on Identi.ca (@flameeyees@identi.ca) discussing with me me about my views on FatELF. No biggie, but trying to continue the argument (pointless as it is) there is just too much work: the character limit does not permit real discussion on such a complex issue. So, permit me to address each of the [...]

Recently on a mailing list of which I am a member, the following comment was posted: We pay cash at restaurants especially ones of certain nationalities. The context of this quote is a discussion on credit/debit card usage, and this statement came at the tail end of how care must be taken to ensure that [...]

So for the past couple of weeks I have been doing work at a client’s place of business. This client—like many other small and medium-sized businesses—uses Windows on all of their desktop systems. They have a couple of server boxes that are running GNU/Linux servers, but they are not running GNU/Linux on the desktop at [...]

Every now and again, I come back to looking at device drivers and driver-writing, and I wonder why there is not some common interface for device drivers. What would the world be like if we could write a device driver for Linux, and be able to use it on FreeBSD without modification? There was a [...]

So back on this topic again today.  I am going to take a look at a few different statements here in this post, and then I’m going to go over them and explain why these statements are or are not correct.  Should you wish to verify any of my information, you’re more than welcome to [...]

So, this weekend was… interesting. Through something of a comedy of errors, the server suffered some strange software issues that prevented it from working this weekend.  There was a bug in a recent update to the server software (running testing software) and that caused longer downtime than it should have due to various interactions between things [...]

Of the many controversies in free software, this is one that I have long found to be interesting.  People seem to define things in different ways, which leads to confusion (and arguing) when one person calls a system a "GNU/Linux" system and the next calls it just the "Linux" system.  Too often, I have found people saying "You [...]

AllTray is a rather small project—for the moment, there is a single developer working on it (myself), and there aren’t a terribly great number of users, though the users that it does have are most excellent.  For a long time, the users didn’t have the ability to observe the development processes for AllTray, nor did [...]