Adobe flash won’t die on 2020, it’s been dead for years

Adobe just made the news by announcing that Flash plugin would loose support by 2020, effectively setting a deadline for all browsers to disable it definitely, and wiping it from the face of the Internet. Unfortunately, that’s simply the death certificate of something which happened long ago. People just forget to tell Adobe about it, and Adobe has since refused to bow to reality. No one can tell exactly when Flash died, but the conclusion that it is dead is unavoidable. Just looking at today’s internet describes how low it has reached. As it is obvious on the chart below: Until 2015 we …

USB3 Gigabit Ethernet performance on MacOS

This is the second part of the USB3 Gigabit on MacOS series. On the first post we discussed on how to choose an USB3 Gigabit adapter. On this post we try to answer to the following question: Does USB3 on MacOS supports gigabit speeds ? Read below to find out. To start with, let’s remember why it might be important for some users how does USB3 allows for gigabit ethernet performance: most recent MacBooks lack ethernet jacks. This means that, for power users, there are only a limited set of alternatives: Thunderbolt Gigabit adapters, for those laptops which support still …

USB3 Gigabit Ethernet adapters on MacOS: Orico Vs KY-688

Edit: This is the first half of a 2 part port regarding USB3 ethernet adaptors running on MacOS. The second part looks at actual performance. There aren’t a lot of good reasons why one would care about getting an USB3 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, and all start with “I need an extra wired gigabit connection”. And this may not be as weird as it seems as most MacBooks lack a single embedded wired gigabit interface. As an alternative you get the Thunderbolt adapter (in it’s native Thunderbolt port, or using the new USB-C connectors), USB3 adapter or 802.11 WiFi connection. Current state …

Creating your own PKI using Cloudflare’s CFSSL

For those looking for a strait forward PKI, here’s how to get it, using Cloudflare’s CFSSL. Why CFSSL? If you’re looking for a simple solution, this is as simple as it can get: install Go Compiler, compile CFSSL and your done. Drawback? There’s little flexibility in terms or library versions. You get what Go offers. Now, CFSSL isn’t the most well documented application over there and yes, some configuration items aren’t document at all, so see right below on how to create a PKI using CFSSL. Editor’s Note: This walkthrough was corrected to support the new “ca_constraint” parameter.

Authenticated Public NTP server howto

Configuring an NTP server is by far not the most strait forward nor best documenting activities while managing a data center. Adding authentication on top of it, just makes things worse, far worse. Fortunately, it’s something only done once. The end goal: Authenticated NTP. ntpdate -d -k /etc/ntp.keys -a 10 your.ntpserver.com 9 Jul 23:24:33 ntpdate[19359]: ntpdate [email protected] Fri May 28 01:20:57 UTC 2010 (1) Looking for host your.ntpserver.com and service ntp host found : 13.3.150.148 transmit(13.3.150.148) receive(13.3.150.148) receive: authentication passed

Radmin on Mac OSX

It’s been literally years since I (and others) requested Radmin to add Mac OSX to the list of operative systems supported by the client version of Radmin Remote control. Actually one can actually see posts requesting this feature back in 2005. So much for listening to user’s requests…. … Well, enough is enough and it’s time to leave the Windows virtual machine, and use Radmin on Mac OSX through Wine and all it’s native beauty. It take a number of hours, but at the end it’s well worth the wait. Install Macports This step is only necessary if you don’t already …

Using Memcached on QNAP QTS 4.1.x

EDIT: For QTS 4.2 onwards use this guide which includes the right package.   For too long I’ve been struggling against my Semantic Mediawiki performance running on a QNAP machine. Pages were taking 10+ seconds be generated and new pages could take around 30s. Although those were certainly not the most simple of wikis, judging for the number of semantic properties and templates associated, those times were simply unacceptable, even for an Atom based hardware. After trying to improve QNAP’s Mysql performance, and upgrading to the latest available php 5.5 on QNAP (which already supports OPCache by default), all without …

ownCloud 7 on QNAP QTS 4.1

EDIT: This procedure is working as of ownCloud 7.0.2. Both QNAP and ownCloud have evolved since the lat updates, but some of the news aren’t exactly good: QNAP no longer supports customised apache config files; ownCloud 7 updater removes any unknown files from onwCloud root directory. How to fix both? Well, as for number one, there’s no good alternative, but it can be altogether worked around. As for number two, the fix (and workaround for one) is the following: edit .htaccess file present on ownCloud root dir, and add the following lines on the <IfModule mod_php5.c> tag: php_value eaccelerator.enable 0 php_value eaccelerator.optimizer …

QNAP VPN access on Owncloud 7

One of the changes Owncloud 7 brought was related to security. Unlike Owncloud 6, version 7 added a configuration items which allows to select which domains can access Owncloud. This configuration is not relevant if you only want to allow access from your local network, but if you have QNAP serving as VPN endpoint (ou router) things need to be changed. This is due to the different addressing used by VPNs. For instance, local domestic networks are usually 192.168.x.y, but VPNs are often on the range of 10.0.0.x. On QNAP default values are 10.0.0.x for PPTP VPN and 10.8.0.x for …

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