Month: August 2010

My work laptop recently started randomly crashing on me.  The warranty is long since passed, and I’m the IT department for my little company, so I’m on my own.  The symptoms were “hiccups” in mouse movement, followed shortly by a total freeze,  followed in 30 seconds by a panic/reboot.  My first suspicion was a new video driver I’ve been trying.  It’s beta software, so problems aren’t that unusual.  In any case, the problem sequence was leaving no evidence in my system logs, so I had nothing useful to report to the developers.

My linux kernel is custom-compiled: although I have many debugging tools compiled-in, I didn’t have anything that could save the messages from my dying laptop.  Yesterday, I took the time to dig around in the documentation, and created a new kernel with netconsole turned on.  I configured it to send my console log to my office server.  As luck would have it, my laptop crashed about two minutes after I turned the remote logging on.  And the remote log worked.

Surprise!  It wasn’t a driver error!  My laptop’s dying messages were reporting corrupted transfers between my cpu and my memory chips.  Hardware.  For the specific failure, there are only three possibilities: bad cpu, bad memory, or bad motherboard.  First, I opened the case and swapped the two memory chips.  This appeared to help, as I didn’t have another crash for the rest of the day, nor overnight.  (My linux install does the virus-scan for my Windows partition every night, ensuring that any virus that does get into my Windows box can’t modify the scanner.)

But I’m not out of the woods, as it did crash one more time today.  I have memory chips on order, so I can definitively rule out memory issues.  If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll be shopping for a new laptop.

After the fold, I describe how I set up remote logging to accommodate my laptop’s road warrior use case.

Continue reading “Netconsole to the rescue!”

Hello  everybody. I am writing this post about my movie reviews. So, you’re thinking, about the new upcoming movie and its previews. About how awesome they look. So you look up the movie’s reviews, and you also look up the actual story. You see that the story is is making the movie come to life. So you ask your parents if you can go see the movie with their permission. They say ”Yes you may , but with us.” So you see the movie and you thought  in your fact  and opinion that it was awesome .

So here is my movie review about “AVATAR: The Last Air Bender”. To me it was the best movie seen in my entire life. It has great graphics in the movie, really awesome bending moves, and awesome characters. It had explosions, really cool scenes, and pretty awesome fights and battles. I also saw the actual cartoon series  that they use to have on Nickelodeon . It use to be my favorite t.v. show.

Second, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” When I saw that movie it was the second most awesome movie I have ever seen. It was cool  for  me and my dad. It was cool and has action to it. Really awesome graphics and lights, including electric forces. I recommend you see it.

Hey!  Hey!  What’s  up everybody?  Today I am excited about writing this post, right now.  So how do I feel about our new website?  I wonder how?  Well thanks to my dad, I got my own e-mail address. Yes, finally.  But, I am nervous about going to middle school.  But hey,  at least I get to have a locker.

You know, life is awesome, sometimes.  But that is because your parents are the most helpful people, ever.  You know why?  They help you, protect you from danger,  and they do anything  to keep you healthy and clean.  Your parents love you all with all their heart and you do to.  So stay tuned to hear about my next post.  See you guys later next time.

I try very hard to be careful with passwords, and to follow modern best practices: I use an encrypted password safe, with a master password known only to me.  I memorize only my login passwords and my master password.  I allow my browser to remember web passwords for me, also protected with my master password.  I use RSA keys with ssh-agent for remote access to my servers.  Everything else gets looked up manually when needed.

First, let me answer “Why do this?”.  The general public is constantly bombarded with advice on security.  A lot of it is focused on the use of passwords.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to follow it all.  “Memorize your passwords!”  “Don’t write them down!”  “Don’t use names or birth dates!”  “Don’t use dictionary words!”  “Mix letters and digits!” “… and symbols!”  “Upper and lower case, too!”  “Make a different password for every website or program!”

As Charlie Brown would say, Aaaaauuuuugggggghhhhhh!

Continue reading “The Gorilla and the Wallet”