I’ve just read this article in the on-line edition of the New Scientist.

Of course, the “technique” which allows the contents of main memory to be held on the hard disk is not exactly new. Indeed, BSD derived operating systems had that as the default until the last 90’s. That is pre-allocating memory pages in swap and doing a copy them to disk on modification to them so that they’re continuously up to date. This has the downside that processes take longer to start up (as you have to set up the memory both on disk and in main memory) but has the advantage of deterministic memory+swap allocation so that a processes can be guaranteed that the resource is there when they actually use it. It also allows processes to be “swapped out” by merely invalidating their memory pages and not writing to disk at all.

However, as this shown in this posting from Alec’s blog, there is a rather serious downside to this when it comes to security and cryptography on a working system, notably, the unencrypted data will be left on the hard disk and it could be difficult to scrub.

Of course, I’m sure that’s just what any forensic investigator would like.. but it’s also what any malicious attacker would like as well.

So, which would you like, personal/system security or poor security for everyone so that detectives can gain evidence against a small minority?

It’s your choice… oh, sorry, it’s not, it’s the Xxxxxx Government’s (where Xxxxxx is the country in which you live). Somehow I think we’re going to have unsecure computers RealSoonNow(tm).

Having watched the first episode of the new series of Torchwood last night (after having my PVR watch it for me and remember it when it was broadcast) I was prompted to write a review. I had hoped that the new series would be better than the first….
Cut for spoilers.

The end of the week and the weekend were a continuation of the rest of the week, really.

New Year’s Eve was the day set aside to visit my friends Meriel and Chris. As usual much tea was drunk, cake eaten and rambling conversations took up the day.

Oh, and Happy New Year! 🙂

Nothing to see here, move along…

Well, let’s see what I did. Played with my Dad on the Wii, ate watched telly and wished that the weather would be nicer after Chrstmas Day.

That’s it, really.

And so it begins…

Christmas is here once again. How did that happen? It doesn’t seem five minutes since the beginning of the winter term at work.Anyway, on with the holiday diary bit:

Saturday 22nd.
I started off from home at just after 10am and it was stil frosty. The GPS traffic warnings were showing problems with fog on the M4. Thankfully, I didn’t encounter any real fog on either the M4 or M5. By the time I’d got to Taunton services the external temperature had risen from freezing up to 12C, quite a shock to the system. Also by this point the car was fully encrusted by black salt throuwn up by other vehicles. You could hardly see the lights.

Firther along the journey the weather changed yet again and by Bodmin I was driving through torrential rain. Talk about changable weather! And by the time I’d reached my destination the rain had stopped and the sun was on the horizon. At least the rain had washed the salt off the car.

After dinner I set up the Wii and my Dad and I had a brief play.. this could be a good purchase for all those days where there’s nothing on the telly!

Sunday 23rd.
Not a ot to report about today, really. After getting up late we popped into Tesco’s in Helston to stock up for the week. The afternoon and evening were just lazy.

I’ve been using the latest version of Apple’s operating system for about a month now and here are my views:

It’s been said by some that Leopard is Apple’s Vista-scale disaster area and is broken beyond usefulness. Well, on that side I would disagree. There are flaws and a coupe of rather major bugs but it’s not on the scale of Vista’s retrograde step.

So, what are the problems?

(1) User interface.

The dock is awful to use in its default form. It’s hard to see which applications are running. It’s merely eye-candy. Thankfully, you can change it into a 2D form which is FAR better using a command line setting.

Similarly, whoever thought that a transparent menu bar was a good idea should be put in stocks and pelted with tomatos. It will force you to find a background which will allow you to read it. Thankfully, again, there is a command line setting to change it.

Other than that (I don’t use stacks, which is the other thing people have berated, so I can’t comment on those) it’s fine. I would have liked a different default key combination to swap between “spaces” or a mini-view of the screen layout so that I could click directly on the virtual desktop I wanted but those are relatively minor things.

(2) Outright bugs.

The problems with the default version of the X server is well documented, i.e. broken cut and paste, especially with the 3 button mouse emulation (which doesn’t work at all) and a few other things. The build in the core Xorg server tree have fixed these, we’re still awaiting the Apple official update. It’s mostly an annoyance to be honest.

But rather more importantly….

The name service subsystem is REALLY knackered!

This is important if you’re going to use Leopard on the net. With every name look-up using the built-in hostname look-up system (not DNS) the likelyhood of the look-up will fail increases until you get to the point where most name look-ups will fail or give incorrect results (which is worse).

If you don’t believe me try it out; open a web browser, either Safari or Firefox will do, load up a web site which does a lot of look-ups, e.g. Facebook with a lot of apps loaded. Refresh page, repeat. Depending upon the number of apps and adverts it will probaby take 10-15 refreshes until you’ll start to see problems. Usually you’ll start seeing missing images. The mre you reload the more the problems will appear. Some of the adverts may appear as error pages. You can try closing the application and re-starting it, or try another browser or even maybe an e-mail client. The problem’s still there. If you open an xterm or terminal application and do an nslookup the failling look-ups will work perfectly but ping/traceroute etc. will pick up the wrong entry all the same. A reboot is the only fix.

So, there you have it. Other than the major name service bug, niggles really.

OK, I don’t know if this is the 547th post but my updates are sporadic at best.

So, what have I been doing over the last couple of weeks? Not a great deal really other than visiting people the last couple of weekends.

The Saturday before last I popped down to Rachel, Graham and Chris’ place for a nice, relaxing day with tea, crumpets and flapjacks.

This weekend, after drying out from the drenching I got cycling home, I drove up to Liverpool on Friday evening and was introduced to two cats by Lindsey and Andrew. Saturday was consumed by a museum visit, Christmas tree wrangling and decoration hanging. Whilst yesterday included human kite flying (almost) and a visit to a water powered cotton mill run by the National Trust before a drive back home again.

Hmm, what else? Oh yes, I’m now a proud owner of a 2.6GHz MacBook Pro, which arrived a week earlier than predicted. i.e. marginally less than a month after I ordered it rather than slightly more than a month. It’s very shiny, in a brushed aluminium sort of way and weighs the same as the iBook G4. It’s replacing, with the help of Bootcamp & Parallels, both the iBook and the Acer laptop, which I used for mobile Linux and, when down in Cornwall, as a games machine. I “merely” have to transfer all the data and applications now.

Oh, while I’m at it.. MacOS X 10.5’s great except for a few things:

1. Transparent menu bar… bad idea. What were you thinking Apple? I now have to pick a desktop background which makes the menu bar usable.
2. The X server’s partly broken.
3. Time Machine is unusable on a G4 Mac as it will take 5/6ths of the backup run pegging the CPU at 100% with zero data transfer. On a fast Intel dual core machine it’s fine as long as you don’t unplug the external drive as it will take an hour deciding that it doesn’t need to back up anything when you next plug the drive back in.
4. The application dock may be shiny but that and the glowing blobs to tell you that an application is running make it less useful.

Oh, and if you think that I’m being partisan about knocking Apple… Microsoft Genuine Disadvantage is the spawn of several devils as well.

This morning I went into work to perform a routine installation of patches on both our mail server and file server. I expected that because there were only a few patches which required a reboot it should only take about an hour. I started the process at about 10:45am…

All went well for the first set of patches and the mail server rebooted fine. The file server initially rebooted OK but needed a couple of patches in single user mode. Again, they SEEMED to go O.K… until the final reboot. The system came back up and but couldn’t fsck the UFS filesystem on a zvol device.. so I rebooted and booted with the “-r” option to reconfigure devices…. even more errors… then lots of programs crashed on start.. so I rolled back the patches and rebooted.

The system wouldn’t boot at all, other than in failsafe mode. Rebuilding the boot_cache made no difference.. but I did notice a fleeting message saying that GRUB couldn’t mount the root partition!

Hmm… So, I boot in failsafe mode again and run fsck. OH-MY-GOD! Huge numbers of duplicate blocks, corrupted directory entries and corrupted directories. After about 30 sets of fsck runs it wasn’t getting any better so I had to cut my losses and do a full re-install.

Suffice it to say that I eventually got the system back up and running. Zpool imported the data filesystems, the user home directory UFS filesystem checked out and when I NFS exported them the clients didn’t even have problems with stale file handles.

So, a job which should have taken 1 hour actually took 11. I’m off to bed in a minute without supper ‘cos I’m so tired and, as I didn’t get to Sainsbury’s, don’t have much to eat in the house anyway.

Well, it seems that I’ve not posted anything on here for nearly a month. So, what’s been happening?

Well, my parents have visited, I’ve worked lots and last Saturday I went to a party in London, popping into the Apple Store in Regents Street on the way.

The party was for John and Stephen Hillier, their 30th birthdays. I bought them a glass tankard each from “Engraving4U” on the net and had “I’m a Thirsty Something” etched onto them. The party itself was held in the events room of a pub near Borough tube station and was a jolly nice party, though there wasn’t any dancing this time.

That’s about it really. Other than my iBook is now running Leopard (MacOS 10.5) and I’ve ordered a new MacBook Pro which may arrive in early December, if I’m lucky.

At about 9am this morning the perl script which synchronises user creation and deletion on our mail server with the rest of the network went berzerk and deleted a great many of the users’ home directories (for mail storage only).

I’ve no idea what went wrong so I’ve commented out the deletion part of the script and am now restoring all the data from the central University Tivoli backup system (horrid interface) and then from the automatic back-up of the inboxes (which runs every minute) which isn’t affected by the synchronisation script.

This script has been running without any problems for 4-5 months now. Maybe it’s a NIS glitch, as it compares a previous list of users from “ypcat passwd” with the latest version. The strange thing is that if that did happen it should have re-created the directories on the next run, all be it that they would be empty. This didn’t happen.