links for 2010-07-26

Chris Siebenmann continues to have cogent blog entries about system administration. I have to agree with him — replacing a distribution package with your own is a very complex operation. I usually encourage app admins to just build from source if they can't use a distribution's software, because "./configure –prefix=/app/dir" is a heck of a lot easier than building a package.

Jeremy Zawodny (jeremy.zawodny.com) linked to this — I am definitely going to try this. Freakin' airport "$14.95 for one hour of service" portals suck. On the other hand, I'm making sure my own wireless networks aren't susceptible to this…

I love bonnie++ — not the most in-depth tool for storage benchmarking (iozone is better for comprehensive testing) but gives you a great idea of what your performance might look like. This is a good tip.

What I find interesting is the fact that GE actively was pirating this software. Not that I don't think for a second that MGE was an upstanding vendor, but I like that the ridiculous use of the DMCA has been curtailed a bit. Besides, vendors who use dongles should all be shot.

A tweet today complaining that VMware doesn't change SIDs led me to finding this again. Mark Russinovich talks about why duplicate SIDs aren't a big deal anymore, and why Sysinternals retired NewSID as a result. If you do Windows deployments (and who doesn't?) you should know this. You still might need to sysprep, but maybe you can get out of some work…