houk's comments

houk | 11 years ago | on: Fail2ban security update

that's assuming your use case for fail2ban is only blocking failed ssh login attempts. it's pretty handy for blocking malware scanners, x number of failed logins to wordpress/drupal/etc, and all that jazz.

houk | 12 years ago | on: How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system

Really? My experience has been the complete opposite.

Almost every time I've even been involved with or ran any medium/large mail infrastructures (200K active mailboxes) I've always found Dovecot to be a better choice.

houk | 12 years ago | on: Linux-Kernel Archive: RIP - dead harddisk

I use it like that. iTunes, development, documents, all sorts of things. Easily synced to a new machine if needed.

On top of that I pay for Backblaze, just for a little bit more protection.

houk | 12 years ago | on: How a sysadmin can become a programmer

there's more to ops than just deploying. it's about running a smooth environment from end to end. automation gets you 90% there and give you the time to focus on that much more involved 10%.

houk | 13 years ago | on: My beef with gittip

I like it. It's always been hard to give someone a stipend due since you might like a project but not have enough income to spare.

This way a number of people can make individual small payments that will add up.

houk | 13 years ago | on: Thanks to Quora, now you can’t read anonymously

Bullshit.

That quote is based on the (false) premise that privacy is there to conceal illegal/shady activities. It puts you in one of two groups; You're either guilty of something and have a reason to hide it, or you're not guilty and have no reason to hide anything. It doesn't include the possibility that you might not be guilty of something but may still want to keep something hidden. I'll give you an example. You might NOT want to give your phone number when you register on some social website because you don't want that data used for marketting purposes.

houk | 14 years ago | on: Any book recommendations for Back End Infrastructure

I'd start here - http://astore.amazon.com/possiboutpos-20

There's no one book telling you "this is how you should do blah". You have to research. You'll notice those books deal with scaling websites to millions of users but I always found the lesson they teach/preach to be really important.

Anyway, once you start covering those topics a lot you notice patterns and hopefully you can start to incorporate that sort of thinking into your own development.

One thing to remember. Good design/engineering is about simplicity and elegance. Those are two beautiful things.

houk | 15 years ago | on: How Western Diets Are Making The World Sick

healthy good DOES taste better. you've just been raised on rubbish so therefor you think that is how all food should taste.

I was the same. I hated peas, carrots, sweet potato, that sort of thing. A few years ago I was at a friends place and she grew all her own produce. It was the first time I had ever tasted fresh vegetables. Oh wow.

If (in Australia) the major super markets that advertise "We're the fresh food people" I'm sure more people would be enjoying something other than lollies (candy). As it stands at the moment any vegetable you buy from our two major players (coles and woolworths) are terrible.

Eating better? http://robbwolf.com/ try him.

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