What's 2013 + 50? 1969, of course!

What happens when the latest CentOS 6.4/RHEL/FreeBSD GnuTLS certtool gets used to generate a TLS certificate with a 18250-day validity period? Time travel back in...

Patch review vs diff review, revisited

I’ve been thinking about code review a lot recently.

Hackerschool tutorial at Jane Street

Maps, sets, and hashtables in core

The below post is mostly lifted from an email I sent to the Core mailing list. It explains the type hackery we employ in order...

Bootstrapping OCaml/async on the Raspberry Pi

On Friday morning I discovered a Raspberry Pi on my desk. The Raspberry Pi is a small single-board computer powered by a 700MHz ARM CPU....

Announcing OCaml Labs

Jane Street is deeply invested in OCaml and in the larger OCaml community, which we depend on both for the new recruits it provides as...

Jane Street at OUD

Jane Street gave a collection of talks at the collection of conferences colocated with this year’s ICFP. For me, the most exciting day was the...

Observer effect and YOU (NSLCD and GetPWNam()-a-plenty)

So, whilst rooting around on one of our servers’s /var/log/*, I noticed that nslcd was attempting to look up, as usernames, apparently just regular strings...

Repos, RPMs, and bootstraps, oh my!

Dell’s OMSA (Open Manage Server Administrator) tools are quite nice, but the 6.5.x (and prior) version’s installation process did not lend itself to being automated...

Speed Up

Sometimes we need to inspect a lot of systems at once and its annoying to have to wait a long time for a result. What...

Finding references to lazily unmounted filesystems

Just because a file system is lazily unmounted (or so claims the mount command and /proc/mounts), doesn't mean it is no longer in use. Here's...

OCaml for the Sysadmins

I sent a link to Yaron Minsky’s article OCaml for the Masses to some long time buddies of mine and one of them said that...

S-Expressions in ruby

We use a lot of S-Expressions at Jane Street. Almost every system written at Jane Street in OCaml uses sexps for config files, and we...

Linux disk crypto, now with ease

Imagine that you want to host a Linux machine outside of your own physical control. Imagine that it can get resold later to people who...

ML workshop

The upcoming ML workshop is September 13th in Copenhagen. The goal is to bring together users and researchers, with users particularly welcome to propose a...

Do you solve real problems with FP? Then come talk about it at CUFP!

The 2012 CUFP call for presentations is out. CUFP is the Commerical Users of Functional Programming workshop, and it’s a great place to interact with...

The adventures in NIC bonding

So. Had an interesting problem happen. On a CentOS 5.5 system (2.6.18-194.26.1.el5), an attempt was made to establish a 3-way LACP-style (aka 802.3ad) bonded NIC...

OpenLDAP, DBD, and you.

So, today we’ve had us a wee bit of an issue with our OpenLDAP servers – to LDAP clients, the server, on attempts to do...