September the 9th month (Eighth Layer's 10th month) from Septem the Latin for seven
CONTENTS
Eighth Layer News
Not in The Fine(?) Manual
Oracle SQL trace
BIND 9.0.0
AFS Open Sourced
IT Business in the South West
We Want ADSL
South West Interactive Media
Recommended Web Sites
The Intelligent Hacker's Choice
Subscription Details
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Eighth Layer News
September has been a bad month for Eighth Layer - mainly
down to me being too ill to fulfill one of our larger
contracts.
The web site overhaul - a journey of a thousand miles -
started with the single step of adding a search facility
courtesy of the Google search engine. This took all of a
few minutes (seconds?) to do, every web site should have
one.
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Not in the Fine(?) Manual
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Early steps in Oracle performance Measurement
Tuning the performance of an Oracle database is best
approached in a layered fashion. Addressing issues such as
server file system, and disk bottlenecks, before diving
into the Oracle side.
Once in the Oracle side a great tool is Oracle's SQL trace
facility. As promised last month, here are some UNIX scripts
to help you trace that all too well hidden SQL.
http://simonwaters.technocool.net/eighth/knowledge/operf1.htm
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BIND 9.0.0 Released
BIND is the most common name server (the programs that
convert readable domain names like www.wretched.demon.co.uk
into the IP addresses used to send packets around the
Internet).
BIND 9 has been rewritten to cope with the demands of the
modern Internet. Simon will be taking a closer look at BIND
9 at a future date.
BIND is maintained by the Internet Software Consortium
http://www.isc.org
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IBM Open Source AFS enterprise file system
IBM have announced their intent to open source the AFS file
system under the IBM Public License during September 2000.
Advanced file system features such as those supported by AFS
have been slow to win acceptance in the market place.
Whether making this product open source will change
anything, time will tell!
http://www.transarc.com/News/press/opensource.html
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IT Business in the South West of England
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We Want ADSL
A campaign has been started by Eclipse, one of the largest
ISP's in South West England to encourage BT to ADSL enable
the telephone exchanges in the South West.
If nothing else, they offer to notify you when your exchange
is ADSL enabled, something neither BT or Demon would do.
http://www.wewantadsl.co.uk/
NB: Members interested in the issue of rural access to
telecommunications services may also want to check out the
OFTEL web site (www.oftel.gov.uk) as they are reviewing the
Universal Service Obligation. That is the obligations
placed on BT and Kingston Telecommunications to provide a
minimum telecommunication service. Hot issues include
whether to change the "bandwidth" guarantee, currently you
have a right to expect only 2400 BAUD from your phone line.
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South West Interactive Media Ltd is a representative body
for the Interactive Media industry in the South West of the
UK, and may be of interest to our readers. Thanks to Faye
for drawing this one to my attention.
http://www.swim.org.uk/
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Recommended Web Sites
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The Intelligent Hacker's Choice?
Over the years I have occasionally exchanged e-mails with
a character called Len Rose. This exchange started after I
found a web interface to "nslookup" on the netsys.com web
site to help solve a minor DNS problem.
Recently netsys.com has undergone something of a face lift,
with discussion forums, and lots of articles on Solaris,
Linux, DNS and security issues.
http://www.netsys.com/
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Subscription Details
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Copyright Eighth Layer Limited 2000.
Archive copies are kept on the website
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