I remember that back in the day there was a movement to implement a distributed computing project (a la SETI at home) in order to crack the Xbox signing keys.

I guess there wasn't much support for it and other hacks were so very much available.

I think the parent's point only applies to products they intend to re-distribute, altho I don't see why. If it's in the kernel it must be GPL compliant and can be re-distributed.

Hell, yes! I'm gonna go one step further and turn off my mail servers. Good bye spam problem!

I once considered doing that. Instead I firewalled the whole network and the only way to ssh into a box is to access via VPN (with password policies enforcement instead of certificates) and from there ssh into the machine.

If the VPN is down, tough. I'll have to have someone onsite to fix things.

Of course, one size does not fit all. This is the way we chose to do this at my place of work.

Oddly I've never seen evidence of someone trying to brute-force a vpn connection.

Traffic court was on Thursday night. Every Thursday nights would show our tiny town hall (a historic converted 19th century one-room schoolhouse) with a line of people winding around several times outside. Processed quickly, cha-ching.

Unless you were a country singer, in that case you had to spend an evening singing at the Boar's Nest.

Judgind by the picture, the resort is located in the picturesque Uncanny Valley.

I DO my checklist EVERY time I fly, and I don't take off without knowing exactly how much fuel is on board, EVER

I'm not a pilot but I thought this was required by regulation.

I used to tease my pilot friends that they looked like they were praying when going over their checklists. Almost like a responsorial psalm.

Ultima V had NPC with rotating schedules (I think it was the first Ultima that implemented day/night cycles). At certain hours NPC would leave their post and go to eat or sleep or wander around.

A week later:
"Well since you have an infatuation with other women's asses, I'm leaving you for Ronaldo. At least HE says I have a nice ass!"

If you ever find yourself in that situation thank your lucky stars and feel pity for poor Ronaldo.

Depends on where you played. There are times when you feel there's almost no one else logged on. You could possibly have entire zones for yourself in the less populated servers.

I hope this move increases server population. This is a fun game (not groundbreaking, tho) even if you are not a Tolkien fan.

But those are my free bookmarkers!

And bring back the Clipper Chip!

I use puppet to monitor changes to a centrally managed version controlled zone database that is automatically deployed and signed any time it is changed. Bad changes are automatically detected and reverted to a known good state via the version control repository.

Did you roll your own solution or used third party tools?

I'm about to inherit responsibility for several unrelated DNS servers and I'm trying to find a way to centrally manage them.

Perhaps the googling itself is not the issue but being able to point fingers at someone else is.

But yeah. Sometimes you need to deal with software vendors that absolutely won't support you unless you are running it on one of the "enterprise" linux distro which usually means Suse or Redhat.

I don't know what's worse, the fact that you just sounded like a "why, back in my day we had *real* music/actors/sports/cars/whatever" old fart or the fact that I fully agree with you.

Kids these days...