Arik Yavilevich's blog

Restarting while expanding a RAID can get your server to get stuck at boot 3

Oct

27

2014

The ability to do an online RAID capacity expansion is something we had for some time. Still, every time I do this I feel like I am doing something amazing and state-of-the-art. The idea that you can expand an existing volume without losing any data and without downtime is almost magical and requires some clever ...

XSA-108 hitting AWS EC2 makes me speculate

Oct

24

2014

You might have heard of the massive September EC2 virtual machine reboot on the Amazon Web Services cloud. Right away it was speculated that this is due to a security bug in Xen, the hypervisor platform used by EC2. On October 1st, the embargo was lifted and the suspicions were confirmed. The bug, XSA-108, can ...

How we fell for a SORBS SPAM trap because we are such nice guys 13

Aug

11

2014

A few days ago our IT teams got a support ticket from an employee, who sent an email and it bounced. The explanation for the reject states: “This message has been blocked because it is from a FortiGuard – AntiSpam black IP address”. Naturally it was quite a surprise for us. A quick check with ...

“Closing credits” – Measuring third-party effect on your page load time

Apr

22

2014

A few months ago I was at the ClickTale Forum, an amazing ClickTale customer event in NYC. At the event I got a chance to have many interesting discussions; a theme that repeated in some of them was customers’ concern of adding third-party services to their sites. Who can blame those customers? It is widely ...

Is Adaptec’s latest 7.4.0 (build 30862) firmware bugged?

Apr

21

2014

Update (5/2): This was resolved. Adaptec worked with me directly on this issue. The issue was confirmed, identified and a fix was found. The fixed firmware will be released in the next official release which is promised to be delivered later this month. For now I recommend you don’t use builds 30612<x<=30862 of the firmware. Glad ...

Study shows technical individuals choose better passwords

Nov

12

2013

A research at Carnegie Mellon University tested how likely a password is to be guessed, segmented by the faculty of the password owner. The news were covered in Ars Technica. To me this is scientific proof that technically inclined individuals care about computer security more than non-technical ones. I would go as far as to ...

IO Performance Benchmarking 101 3

Sep

20

2013

Introduction There are 4 parameters that are important for any storage setup. They are, in no particular order: Performance – speed of reading and writing data at various usage patterns [measured in bytes/sec or operations/sec for each pattern] Capacity – how much space you can use [measured in bytes] Cost – $ per GB [measured ...

Why use – PingInfoView?

Aug

31

2013

In this first “Why use?” post, I will tell you about PingInfoView, a freeware utility from NirSoft that makes it easy to monitor ping to several servers overtime. In the “Why use?” series I will review interesting software products and services. PingInfoView is a utility by Nir Sofer, a powerhouse of Win32 utilities. I have ...

DLNA or who the hell needs a “smart” TV? 1

Aug

10

2013

Most consumers prefer integrated solutions. A gadget that does everything and the more the merrier. I think that most of the time, you can get a better solution if you integrate top-of-category components yourself. Especially if, like me, you love technology and are not afraid of integrating. A few months ago, when I was shopping ...

Is one good “First post” on the blog better than two epic “First posts” in the head?

Aug

1

2013

I think that, most often, doing something good is better than not doing something amazing. This is a motto of mine that I learned from experience. Most people will procrastinate, while working to make the deliverable better. While in reality, not making a deliverable at all. With this though in mind, I am writing “first ...