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On Nominet’s price rise
Nominet has announced that it is to increase its prices for UK domain names. The announcement states in essence that prices will rise from a minimum of GBP 2.50 per year per domain (i.e. GBP 5.00 for two years – the same per annum for longer periods) to a minimum of GPB 3.75 per year… — read more
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Determining if an SSL private key and public key match
A quick note on how to do this, partly so I don’t forget. I used to think (and Google says) that the answer is to compare the output of the following two commands: cat /path/to/public/key | openssl x509 -noout -modulus cat /path/to/private/key | openssl rsa -noout -modulus Links may suggest md5sum on the output to… — read more
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Testing sparse files on filing systems
I had an interesting situation today where qemu-img create performed oddly when using one particular NFS filer. The symptoms were: with -f qcow2 it worked as expected, and a 500G image is approximately 1MB with -f qcow2 -o preallocation=metadata, the image took hundreds of gigabytes This is not meant to happen. The files are meant… — read more
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Net Into Dire Muck (an anagram of Nominet Direct UK)
I’ve written before (here, here and here) on Nominet’s proposals for registrations in the second level domain. That means you can register example.uk rather than example.co.uk. Superficially that sounds a great idea, until you realise that if you have already registered example.co.uk you’ll either have to register example.uk (if you even get the chance) and pay Nominet and… — read more
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Changes to QEMU’s timer system
This article explains a little about how the timer system works in QEMU, and in particular the changes associated with the new timer system I’ve contributed to QEMU. What to timers do? Timers (more precisely QEMUTimers) provide a means of calling a giving routine (a callback) after a time interval has elapsed, passing an opaque… — read more
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Algorithm puzzle: Elves, Cakes and Gremlins
A locker room contains a number of lockers (L), and a number of elves (E). The elves are attempting to put cakes in the lockers, cake by cake, to feed cake-eating gremlins (obviously) that have access to the lockers through a rear door. We can assume E << L, and that some external entity is… — read more
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Rant: Why your email is not high priority after all
Once upon a time, someone with a sociopathic tendency invented an email header field called X-Priority, a derivative of the widely ignored Importance: header. Ranging from 1 to 5 it is meant to convey the priority of the email, with 1 being the highest priority, and 5 being the least. A priority of 3 (or… — read more
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Direct UK is dead, long live Direct UK?
Nominet‘s ill-thought out proposals for .uk (since apparently expunged from their web site) appear to have been scrapped. The highlights: Following our Board meeting yesterday, we are not proceeding with our original proposal on ‘direct.uk’ … It was clear from the feedback that there was not a consensus of support for the direct.uk proposals as… — read more
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Direct registrations in .uk (again)
A couple of days ago I wrote about Nominet’s plans to allow registrations in .uk. Apparently it’s not just me that thinks the ideas are misguided. Every person I’ve spoken to who has any significant dealings with Nominet doesn’t think much of them. Even the UK chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC), hardly known for… — read more
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Nominet “Direct UK” consultation
Nominet announced a little while ago a consultation on allowing domains to be registered directly within .uk rather than in .co.uk. So, for instance, you can register example.uk rather than example.co.uk. In itself this is an interesting proposal worthy of consideration; I think the arguments for and against are pretty balanced. But Nominet has mixed it up… — read more