Fred Cirera

I am running two NTP servers for the project pool.ntp.org, one located in France, the second here in California. I am monitoring my servers with Munin. Munin comes with plenty of plugins to monitor the temperature of your computer, your disks, your CPU, etc, etc. It also comes with plugins to monitor your NTP daemon, but there is no plugin to monitor how much your NTP server is used. Since I am running open servers I was interested in finding out how much my servers where used.

This past weekend I was at the Santa Clara County Model Aircraft Skypark SCCMAS for the 2008 Airshow.

Yesterday evening, I was at the Firefox 3 launch party or as I call it a geek gathering.

Actually it was nice. There was some good BBQ, the “awesome bar” with a professional bartender making cocktails. And a lot of nice people from the community.

Also congratulations to the Firefox team for achieving more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours.

Apple has just released a new configuration guide to help the the users of MacOS to secure their operating system. This manual is available for MacOS desktop and server edition as well as for Leopard (10.5), Tiger (10.4), and Panther (10.3).

This guide has more than two hundred pages describing the MacOS X architecture, secure installtion, information on patching, protecting and securing the peripherals, securing user account, backups, certificates, vpn configuration, etc. This is a very thorough manual.

This manual is intended for IT, and specialists. Users can browse through it to find interesting information and increase their security awerness.

Download your Mac OS X Security Configuration Guides

Next week Steve Jobs will announce the new Apple products at the WWDC. One of the most expected new product is new iPhone with GPS and 3G as well as the new version of the iPhone OS version 2.

If we believe the rumors the new iPhone is ready for shipping. And right after Steve announcement you will be able download the new version of the OS and upgrade your iPhone.

Here is the list of the new features that should be available.

• smaller (thinner) and lighter
• available in new colors
• video recording
• video conferencing
• GPS
• faster network connection with 3G
• ActiveSync, allowing the iPhone to be compatible with Microsoft Exchange
• Cicso VPM
• Scientific calculator

New low end models with a price around $200 should be announced as well.

Half way through reading my first book on the Kindle, I felt in love with that device. I think there is space for improvement, but as it is the Kindle is very usable. The Kindle with Amazon service makes it as revolutionary as where 7 years ago, the couple iTunes + iPod.

For the few last day I’ve been working on a project to turn a Zonbu machine into a NAT Server for home and small business settings.

The Zonbu machine is a small diskless computer, with 512MB of ram, and six USB2 ports, sold by Zonbu, Inc. for only $99. For that price and the addition of a few external disks, you can make a nice little NAS Server, to store, and share your videos, music, and important documents.

The NAS appliance I am building is based on the latest FreeBSD version FreeBSD-7.0. I am planning to use ZFS for volume management. That will allow the user to configure their disk with any kind of RAID, from RAID 0 to RAID 5. You will be able to share these disks on the net with any computer from Unix to Windows.

I haven’t completely definitively defined all the features this home sever will offer yet. I guess I’ll define them ad the project advances and I get feedback.

The geeks who are interested in this project can view the configuration for the kernel I am using to boot my Zonbu machine.

10 minutes to install SpamAssassin on you FreeBSD box, and protect your small business, from spam.

Some people were having serious problems with their MacBook Air at airport checkpoints. When run through xray machines, the laptop doesn’t look like a laptop.

http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/update-bob-screens-apple-macbook-air.html

I am giving some of my resources and some of my time to the community. I have setup and I am now managing two times servers for the pool.ntp.org project.

One is located in the San-Francisco Bay Area [us.time.bsdhost.net], and the second one is in Paris France [fr.time.bsdhost.net].