I suppose I should change the title; it’s unfair to blame the broadband provider^[0] and exclude the misdeeds of 3G/4G providers.

I have been at odds with the only true ADSL provider in the UK for some time. In fact, for as long as I’ve lived in the Capital.
I’ve lived in Lewisham (SE13), Aldgate (E1), and I’ve been living in Bow (E3) since July of last year and during this time I have achieved the average speed of 0.21Mb/s (yes, bits).

4G Rollout

During this time 4G was rolled out across London, and despite not having signal in my home, I can in fact, use this new technology.

However this rollout has been delayed by almost 2 years, there was an auction for the 4g spectrum from ofcom^[1], however, “EE” (formerly T-mobile and Orange) seem to have deployed nearly a year before anyone else. Whether that was ability or willingness I’ll never know. (my initial guess was that the company...

Today, I had to face the undocumented mess that is: adding a windows machine to our UNIX infrastructure.

Why

Where I work, we’re mostly UNIX and Linux, with UNIX on the backend for everything (solaris) and Linux for the e-commerce platform, along with the Customer Service computers. This is a stark contrast with people who are only accustomed to using Windows. Combine these factors (undocumented unix/windows + requirement to run windows) and the approaching April end of support deadline, and you have my heart racing and cold sweats.

I noticed that I can get some HP Prodesks (with windows 7 Pro) for less than the price of a Windows 7 license, so I bought one.

it was a modest machine with an AMD processor running 1.5Ghz and quad-core, but the improvements in CPU and harddisk design put it far above the other machines in the office for performance, which, shocked me somewhat.

As for...

Today, I’m going to tell you about the story of an obscure kernel bug, how we missed it, and how we’re still recovering from the effect

I should preface this by saying that, generally, I like virtual machines.
I have 5 actual servers doing actual things- everything else is a VM in a racked bunch of servers hosted at Telecity in east London.

Generally, these servers are catered for with two uncontested fibre-to-the-rack lines which are layer-4 DDoS scrubbed and redundant power from two seperate generators and dirty feeds. – believe me when I say, no expense is spared on that rack, it’s where 90% of my budget goes and as well it should, given it’s the core business of the company.
I should also preface this by saying ubuntu has held hatred of mine for some time- given we had a development server here in the office and it failed due to a name change of lvm2 to lvm in initramfs causing our...