Using IRC – a write-up for my developers

[I wrote this for our developers to help them get on IRC.] You can get support from the open source community over IRC (Internet Relay Chat), live text-based group chat. I installed the “irssi” package from the RPMforge repository to get on IRC. Using IRC ======= Start irssi: irssi Connect to the Freenode IRC network,…

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Postgres 9.2 allows on-the-fly insight into query performance with pg_stat_statements

Postgres 9.2 includes a very handy pg_stat_statements shared library and extension which allows immediate insight into query performance. Installation: ———— 1. Add to postgresql.conf: shared_preload_libraries = ‘pg_stat_statements’ 2. Restart PostgreSQL. 3. Run create extension pg_stat_statements; to have access to the statistics and the helper functions. Use — — reset statistics select pg_stat_statements_reset(); — which query…

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ITU and WCIT’2012 summary by a Journalist

  With various mentions of the ITU and the WCIT this past week at LISA, here's a summary of the situation as seen from a journalist's viewpoint: In Internet freedom fight, why the ITU matters (for now) (By Danny O'Brien/CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator)  

How to redirect a single computer to a different IP using BIND

So a major webfilter vendor has a huge bug where they do not filter https connections that include an '&' in the URL. For a school district this is a very bad thing because we are not filtering any connections to google sites (e.g. images and videos are the big ones). The solution is to set up BIND to only redirect www.google.com to nosslsearch.google.com. This forces the connection to a non-https connection so the webfilter will work correctly. Continue reading

MacOS using AD logins and duplicate names

I work for a K-12 school district that uses Macs as the primary client machines. Currently our students log into the Macs with a generic account and use their AD account to attach to the file server. We are migrating our Mac laptops and desktops to use AD domain logins so the students can start logging in to the Macs with their AD account. One of our wonderful students decided to log in with their full name instead of their user id (student id) and it worked. Please note that you cannot login with the full name on a Windows machine joined to the domain so this is a Mac strangeness thing.
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lisa12

  Registered for Lisa12, looking forward to going to the conference.