One of the things my earlier entry got me thinking aboutwas how differently people can see the issue of machine identity. Or, tomake it more concrete, when do you give something a new name (even ifthe name is only in your head, not related to the OS-level hostname)?

(I could try to justify it by talking about how it shows something abouthow people think about their computers, but really it's just the kindof thing that satisfies my wandering curiosity, like discussions

One of my DNS diagnostic tools is a program called nsdig ; it makesa query to all of the authoritative servers for a zone. This makesit convenient to both look for inconsistencies and see what theauthoritative servers are saying, as opposed to whatever is filteringthrough your local caching servers.

As another one of my little shell scripts , and asa practical example of how little utilities stack on top of each otherto everyone's benefit, here's nsdig and its component bits:

; cat nsdig#!

Since I currently have a semi-test system floating around, I decided tocollect some numbers on what sort of disk performance I can expect froma modern SATA-based system. The quick summary is that it's pretty good.

I'm only really interested in three numbers: streaming writes, streamingreads, and random IOs per second. Fortunately bonnie++ will give me those,along with a bunch of other numbers that I don't really care about.

My test system has two Seagate 7

In a bittersweet moment a week and a bit ago, I finally decommissioned mySGI R5K Indy. We got the machine in the summer of 1996, so it has beenprovided faithful, trouble-free service for just over ten years. That'simpressive longevity, especially for the hard drives.

It was a pretty good machine when new, basically the top of the line ofSGI's basic workstations; as a peon sysadmin, I was lucky to get it. Ispent several

The advantage of using vendor packages is that someone else worriesabout taking care of program , tracking upstream releases andbugfixes and security issues, making sure that it works, and (with adecent package management system) mostly handling upgrades from versionY to version Z.

This may seem petty, since after all it's easy enough to keep track ofsomething like Apache. The problem is that without vendor packages, it'snot just Apache; it's Apache and GNU Emacs and LaTeX and