Tag Archives: stupidity

ERROR 1305 (42000): FUNCTION eval does not exist

Posted on 26 July 2013 by stuff writer

MySQL cluster – a wonderful idea.  It’s really nice: you have a front end, and multiple redundant back ends, and all the data is loaded into memory, so things go very fast, even queries that inefficiently scan vast squabs of … Continue reading →

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , | Comments Off on ERROR 1305 (42000): FUNCTION eval does not exist

MD and LVM ate my file system … and gave it back

Posted on 28 April 2013 by stuff writer

So we have this computer that has two 250Gb disks. In the interest of keeping the data, for evah I set them up as RAID1 using Linux MD RAID. This was cool. Much as a proper technical person does not … Continue reading →

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on MD and LVM ate my file system … and gave it back

Not your regular bot driven UDP flood

Posted on 26 April 2013 by stuff writer

After weeks of battling Joomla/JCE sites that insist on running evil code and spewing denial of service traffic, we had a machine today sending UDP floods. This, it turns out, is not a hacked machine sending spews of botnet traffic … Continue reading →

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Not your regular bot driven UDP flood

Unicast flooding meets promiscuous routing

Posted on 29 June 2011 by stuff writer

To make a disaster, you need a perfect storm of mistakes. A single mistake is insufficient, but a stack of sub-obtimal configuration choices stacked together will give you rampant failure and poor network quality. For today’s mistake we have massive … Continue reading →

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Unicast flooding meets promiscuous routing

PHP deobfuscation

Posted on 21 May 2011 by stuff writer

One of the things that you see with depressing regularity when hosting crummy PHP scripts for others is this: eval&28;base64_decode&28;’aWYgKCFlbXB0eSgkX1JFUVVFU1RbInRoZW What’s that? Well it says to decode that gobbledegook into a binary stream (the base64_decode part), and then interpret whatever … Continue reading →

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on PHP deobfuscation

Floating to 0.999 on the MySQL cloud

Posted on 17 March 2011 by stuff writer

This code: REPLACE INTO loadtable (`hostname`,`load`) VALUES (‘server1′,2.093); didn’t work. It worked in my testing from my local machine, but I ended up with this when I ran it from a real machine: load host 0.309 desktop1 0.201 desktop2 0.172 … Continue reading →

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Floating to 0.999 on the MySQL cloud

How to change the oil on your car

Posted on 28 December 2010 by stuff writer

I changed the oil in my car. Not only that, but I also changed the air filter and spark plugs. It was great. Here is how you do it. You will need the following supplies. Most of these are readily … Continue reading →

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , | Comments Off on How to change the oil on your car

Vet your pet doctor carefully

Posted on 27 May 2010 by stuff writer

So we had this cat – it was called Nyip.  Having a cat meant that we did not have birds in our garden, which was bad, but more specifically, we did not have birds in our fruit trees, which was … Continue reading →

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Vet your pet doctor carefully

Mr van Sitttert, I presume

Posted on 20 March 2010 by stuff writer

The “problem”: On our Johannesburg roads, there is a grand tradition of tailgating. Big cars sit on the tails of little cars. Little cars sit on the tails of big cars. Huge hulking trucks sit on the tails of anyone … Continue reading →

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Mr van Sitttert, I presume