Old Site Banner Images

As part of migrating this site to Hugo the old site banner images are being retired. Here they are for posterity.

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ASUS Zenbook Pro UX501V

I have recently been testing an ASUS Zenbook Pro UX501V with Ubuntu. It is a really solidly constructed machine and really does feel professional. It is not however without a few quirks that do rather spoil the user experience.

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Sky does IPv6

It is nice to see one of the big UK broadband providers finally starting to roll out IPv6. The latest press release from World IPv6 Launch specifically mentions that British Sky Broadcasting (AS5607) now has IPv6 deployed to 1.90% of its users. Looking at the latest measurements statistics show Sky at position 192 of 278 entries in terms of percentage IPv6 deployment. There is clearly a long way to go before the majority of the UK becomes IPv6 active but I suspect that things will start to snowball in the next 6 months. [Read More]

UK IPv6 Council

The slides and video recordings from the UK IPv6 Council meeting make interesting reading. It’s good to see that BT, BSkyB and Virgin Media all have well advanced plans to roll out IPv6 to their customer base within the next 12 months. I’ve always been very disappointed with the level of preparedness in the UK. I’ve been running an IPv6 network for 5 years using a variety of tunneling technologies but it will be good when full native support is finally rolled out. [Read More]

Life Member

I am honoured to have been granted honorary life membership of Durham Amateur Rowing Club. The members present at the 2014 Annual General Meeting granted me that right in recognition of the effort that I have put into the club in the time that I have lived in Durham. In the 21 years since moving to Durham I have been a member of Durham ARC for all but a few weeks. [Read More]

HE.NET IPv6 Certified Sage

Over lunch I completed the Hurricane Electric free IPv6 certification tests. Those nice people now class me as a Certified Sage!

IPv6 Certification Badge for oldelvet

Service Monitoring

A post about monitoring service improvements on the Mythic Beasts‘ blog made me think about all of the services that we monitor within the OldElvet family of systems. We use Icinga (formerly we used Nagios) to monitor our systems and for the most part we follow the traditional style of monitoring general server health such as CPU usage, disk usage and system load. That helps us to monitor what is going on within the system but there are a number of other things that we monitor to ensure that the services on the system are being good network citizens. [Read More]

Firefox link visited security feature makes CSS debugging hard

One of the websites that I look after voluntarily had an interesting problem where some links on the page were appearing in white on a white background. This only seemed to happen in Mozilla Firefox and the Firefox Web Developer Tools console (or indeed Firebug) suggested that the links should be styled in a totally different manner. Link visited CSS debugging In an attempt to diagnose the problem is set different CSS transient selectors to render the text in wildly different colours (see the bottom right box of the screenshot above). [Read More]

Migrate Laptop from 32 bit to 64 bit Linux

My laptop was factory installed with the 32 bit Ubuntu Linux distribution. This has served me well for a long time but I have been playing with the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and wanted to compile the distribution to test a fix to the Android emulator. Unfortunately the AOSP build process requires a 64 bit distribution and I was faced with the prospect of having to reinstall my laptop and rebuild my working environment. [Read More]

The Cost of Social Media Buttons

Yesterday I was examining Firefox memory usage when I noticed that social media buttons (you know the “like”, “follow” buttons) were using vastly more memory then the actual content of the page itself. Firefox about:memory The page itself uses 6.5 Meg with an additional 4.5 Meg for javascript. But the remaining 34 Meg of memory usage comes from the various social media buttons on the screen. [Read More]