I buy a lot of gear from auction houses – this story does not surprise me at all. Most organisations have lousy data security and especially lousy decommissioning processes for their systems.

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Chatper 4 is progressing okay. It’s the one about the web console which is a tad boring but I’ve approached it backward and worked my way up the console pages from bottom to top and that has somehow made it easier. Think I should finish the first draft this week with any luck. Then it’s on to Chapter 5 and I’ll be almost 50% of the way through the book. Though the last five chapters will be harder than the first five – they concentrate on the more hardcore technical elements of Nagios and monitoring with Nagios.

Also I realised I haven’t posted my draft Table of Contents. I think it’ll look something like this – with some minor modifications. Chapter 5 for example is liable to change radically.

1. Installing Nagios
2. Basic Configuration
3. Administering & Securing Nagios
4. Using the Web Console
5. Monitoring Devices – Unix Devices, Windows Devices, Network devices
6. Advanced Configuration – Service / Host Dependencies, Service / Host Escalations, Extended Information
7. Advanced Monitoring, Alerting and Notifications
8. Distributed Monitoring, Redundancy and Failover
9. Nagios Integration – MRTG, Snort, SNMP
10. Modules & Plug-in development
11. Index

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As is the nature of these things karma came back and bit me totally in the arse. Yes. That’s right. I have scarlet fever. After mocking Ruth’s big red smarty look it appears she took her vengeance by infecting me also. I now also look like a giant red smarty. And somewhere a variety of divinities who I refuse to believe in are laughing their arses off.

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Saying sorry to the victim is a little tricky after shooting him five times in the head. Kind of makes the apology redundant. Of course there is the school of thought that says it was still justified. What is a few innocent lives if it saves some other innocent lives? The endless and disgusting justification of the doctrine of collateral damage and the truly offensive calculation of the value of human life. Is one life worth 10? 20? Is the life of a child worth more than an adult? Or a pregnant woman more than 2 lives? The whole concept makes me sick to my stomach.

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Oh yes. Had forgotten to post this but must say a good bye to my favourite Star Trek actor – James Doohan who died several days ago. Him and Leonard Nimoy made the show for me. May he rest in peace.

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This item is very interesting. Especially this line: “including taking citizenship away from people of bad character”. Bad character? And how do we judge bad character? Do we base it on a classified ASIO file? Does it need to be proven in open court? Do we base it on statements made? Or actions?

Does anyone remember other governments doing this. But of course those countries are both different cases – nothing like Australia. After all in those other bad countries they did it for immoral reasons and in illegal ways – either without any judicial oversight or based on falsified or classified evidence or because of someone’s religious, political or social beliefs… Oh.

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I regularly rant to people about the merits of university and college educations and especially about how crap some of them are. This is consistently true of my field – humanities – where weak teaching, easy grades and appalling subjects that teach total rubbish seem to be becoming the norm. This essay/post on the issue of whether a university/college degree is worth doing is well worth a read.