Peter Baer Galvin’s Blog

This astounding snippet from David Byrne’s blog. (I’m a huge fan of all things David Byrne.)

Lastly: There are 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells in the human body. That means we are basically a means for bacteria to become mobile, to complete their life cycles and to procreate. We think they are living off us, but it is we who are living for them.

Sort of reminds me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the mice run the world by producing specific results from the mazes that we make them run in our experiments.

Just released at SysAdmin Magazine (both in print and on the web) is my latest column. This being part one of a two parter on virtualization. Here is the link. Also in this same issue of SysAdmin is an article by my colleague, Chris Page, about the cluster technology that is part of Oracle’s RAC product. Well worth a read.

Hi, just updated The “Best” Mac OS Resources page again. This time incorporated a bunch of feedback and added some stuff I use but didn’t include the first time around. Hopefully this version 1.2 one won’t need updating for a little while…

SANS has reported a verifiable zero-day exploit for Solaris 10 and beyond (Nevada et al). There is a vulnerability in telnetd that can allow attackers to login without a proper account and password.

Note that in recent releases of Solaris Nevada which are “Secure by default”, telnetd is disabled during installation. Earlier releases have telnet enabled and it should be disabled in almost all circumstances. The command to disable is

# svcadm disable telnet

Here is the Information Week article describing the problem and linking to SANS.

Hi, I just updated my list of the “best” Mac OS resources to version 1.1. I categorized the entries, color coded them, and corrected a couple of errors. I also added a section on the “best” web sites as well so now it’s generically named “resources” rather than “applications”. Finally, I gave it its own page for easy access. Check out The “Best” Mac OS Resources here. And thanks for all the feedback. I’ll create version 1.2 soon to incorporate all the recommendations.

Hi, I’ve renamed my list The “Best” Mac OS Resources and put it on its own page to avoid confusion. If you are looking for the original Essential Mac OS X Applications by MacSpecialists, check it out at MacSpecialists.