Author Archives: mark

About mark

At work, been working on Tandems for around 30yrs (programming + sysadmin), plus AIX and Solaris sysadmin also thrown in during the last 20yrs; also about 5yrs on MVS (mainly operations and automation but also smp/e work). At home I have been using linux for decades. Programming background is commercially in TAL/COBOL/SCOBOL/C(Tandem); 370 assembler(MVS); C, perl and shell scripting in *nix; and Microsoft Macro Assembler(windows).

Snort – open source intrusion detection system

As my only site protections at the moment (excluding firewall rules so tight they cause me problems sometimes) are apache rewrite rules to automatically add ip-addresses to iptables drop rules (if an http request is for a page only a … Continue reading

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Plumbing was all fixed on wednesday, yippee

They expected it to take four hours to fix as they had identified the blockage issue was over 1.5 meters under the grass. But they saved time by bringing a digger. Had it all fixed in around four hours. Which … Continue reading

Posted in Home Life | Comments Off on Plumbing was all fixed on wednesday, yippee

If you store data in the cloud, it belongs to the US, so the judge says

Interesting article on Reuters. U.S. judge rules search warrants extend to overseas email accounts. A summary of the effects of that are covered in that article as well as getting a mention on the UK register site. Basically all those … Continue reading

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Changes I always make to WordPress

Posted for my re-use; so I can just cut/paste from this post after every WordPress update. Due the the number of access requests for wp-login.php from ip-addresses that are clearly not authorised to use my wordpress installation I always insert … Continue reading

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Private /tmp and /var/tmp directories under systemd

Who knew, well I suppose it is in a manual somewhere. Took me a while to figure out what this was. The answer was at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12206857/php-cant-read-file-on-var-tmp I have Apache rewite rules that run a bash script from /cgi-bin/ and write … Continue reading

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Blasted Fedora, the F20 release is still a mess

Well some of the update packages are a mess anyway. Did a simple ‘yum update’ on the VM host machine. Something in one of the rpm pre/post update scripts decided to destroy the network configuration completely. The host server plus … Continue reading

Posted in Unix | Comments Off on Blasted Fedora, the F20 release is still a mess

Decided to buy a new desktop to use as a server, Fedora can be a pain.

Was googling to find a solution to an issue I had a few weeks ago, and on the first page of the google results was my own website… and no it didn’t have the answer I was looking for; although … Continue reading

Posted in Unix | Comments Off on Decided to buy a new desktop to use as a server, Fedora can be a pain.

Multiple timers for mvs3.8J and more

Got my EVENTHUB macro working (well stable) at last to make MVS3.8J assembler coding a little easier. One simple macro (well almost 1000 lines now, but for a user to use a simple macro interface) to pretty much let a … Continue reading

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The endless loop begins

Was looking for suggestions for a resolution for an issue I had with some S/370 assembler code using the font of all knowledge, good old google. The search results threw up a link to some code on my own personal … Continue reading

Posted in MVS3.8J | Comments Off on The endless loop begins

What a disasterous morning, motivation dropped to zero

Was going to go to Carterton to make sure I can find the park the ballons launch from on Friday. But google maps showed me it’s off the main road so didn’t bother; besides going through featherston too often might … Continue reading

Posted in Home Life | Comments Off on What a disasterous morning, motivation dropped to zero