Author Archives: David

SEC and SolarWinds – An opportunity to do better?

About a week ago the SEC charged SolarWinds and its CISO with fraud and internal control failures. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-227 There have been many comments from the security community, specially from CISOs that find outrageous to have a CISO charged for failings in security. I think that this is a dangerous oversimplification. What we know for sure… Read More »

Ubuntu: apt upgrades failing with “Cannot initiate the connection to ports.ubuntu.com”

While doing a distro upgrade with I kept getting failures half-way stating The errors showed several IPv6 addresses that couldn’t be reached. My router supports IPv6, but not my ISP. Somehow I was expecting that the router would be doing the translation or DNS resolution between the two but this wasn’t the case. Disabling IPv6… Read More »

ZFS: Setting up ZFS storage on Ubuntu

If you are new to ZFS, I would advise doing a little bit of research first to understand the fundamentals. Jim Salter’s articles on storage and ZFS are very recommended. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/zfs-101-understanding-zfs-storage-and-performance/ The examples below are to create a pool from a single disk, with separate datasets used for network backups. In some examples, I might… Read More »

Linux / Ubuntu / hdparm: Identifying drive features and setting sleep patterns

Preparing the storage Install hdparm and smartmontools Install hdparm and the SMART monitoring tools. Identify the right hard drive Make sure you identify the correct drive, as some of the commands will destroy data. If you don’t understand the commands, then check them first. You have been warned. Identify the block size Knowing the block… Read More »