It turns out that if your firewall is a full Linux box, adding IPv6 is relatively easy. I suspect that the main barrier to consumer adoption is the prevalence of crappy home routers.

Rule of thumb: if you have a working computer, you shouldn't replace it with one that's less than twice as fast.

If Moore's Law held true, then that means you can spend the same amount every 24 months and double your speed. Turns out, Moore's Law isn't true. Kinda. Sorta.

If you are the sort of person who wants to know about the performance of one or more computers, you should know that lots of people share your desires. As a result, there are many software packages that do one or more of gathering information, storing it, graphing it, displaying the graphs, and perhaps generating alerts based on the information received.

Most of the time, though, you can skip researching all those and go directly to small, medium or large.

Let’s quote a Debian Developer, who I will not name:

“Oh, and by the way, systemd bloody works on my system. I can’t even remember when I switched to it. It Just Worked.”

The problem with systemd is that he’s got one system, not five hundred, and he somehow thinks that makes it a representative sample.

I don’t have any such confidence.

HOT hot HOT startup needs Rock Star dev! Only apply if U R THE BEST! Work hard/play hard! 120 hour weeks but we have kegs in the break room and four subwoofers in the game room! Just like college but no classes, except Java classes, amirite?

No, thanks.

Demanding a rockstar is a sign that you don’t know how to accomplish your goals and you want Superman to bail you out.

What does a good employment ad look like?

I’ve been in charge of IT at my employer for the last eleven years, and that means I’ve been in charge of moving the infrastructure of HQ four times. (Cambridge office space is a vicious market.) In that time we lost no employees because of the moves.

I attribute this to a few simple things.

I decided that my next firewall would not be a home wifi router thing, even running OpenWRT – I wanted something that I knew I could upgrade and configure to handle whatever comes down the pipe next.

And I wanted it to be fast.

And I wanted it to be cheap.

Sure, you have a system which automatically filters incoming mail into appropriate folders – most of these are for mailing lists, a few from specific companies or people – but you still have mail that comes in to your inbox specifically because you want to see it and deal with it.

After you’ve read it and done something about it, you want to archive it, because storage is cheap and more reliable than your memory. Do you throw it all in a pile?

Let’s say you install a new Debian system using the Jessie release, which will become the next stable release in a few months. And let’s say that you would prefer not to be enmeshed in systemd.

Too bad.

However, you can remove it.

An IP address does not identify a person. It does not reliably identify a computer. It does identify an organization, but that’s rather nebulous.

But in the short term, when someone on the internet is poking at your systems and trying to get in – and that’s happening right now, to you, and to everyone else – the source IP address does represent something. Think of it as a temporary alias for a bad guy.

Today or tomorrow you’re going to start hearing about “ShellShock”, a vulnerability in approximately all UNIX, Linux, and Mac OS X systems, and probably a few Windows systems.

Is it a big deal? Yes, definitely.

edited later that day