From my previous entry on our DHCP portal , I mayhave left you with the impression that it sprang into existence one day,fully formed and ready to go. I regret to inform people that this wasnot at all the case; instead, our DHCP portal is the end stage of along chain of evolutionary steps.

It goes like this:

• in the beginning, there were not even Points of Contact ; there was just a general computing supportorganization. Users contacted us directly to get their machineson the laptop

You might wonder how we actually found our ext2 locking issue . That is a war story too, but fortunatelyit's a relatively short one.

First, we tried to use magic SysRq commands to dumpvarious information. Let me save you some time: this doesn't work inany meaningful way. When you have several thousand processes, askingthe kernel for a magic SysRq task dump is functionally equivalent torebooting the machine, and sometimes it was literally equivalent to it.We extracted essentially no useful information