For reasons that do not fit into the margins of this entry, DWiki sometimes needs to get the current Unix load average. I developed DWiki on Linux, and getting the load average on Linux is really easy; you reada line from /proc/loadavg , split it into three floating point numbers,and you're done. So I wrote a get_load function that did that andforgot about the whole thing.

Then this server got changed from Linuxto FreeBSD, and suddenly that code didn't

Since I got asked this in a comment on my entry about clearing metadbreplicas , here is what I remember of how I managed toget a metadb replica so corrupted that it paniced Solaris 10u3 x86.

• I wanted to experiment with metasets on my test machine, so Ineeded a local metadb replica . Because Ididn't know about this I didn't have a spare partition, and becauseI didn't know any better I put the local metadb replica in thattempting slice 8

There is a movement for the default configurations of things like exim to defer sender verification to RCPT TO time;instead of reporting an error or a defer after the MAIL FROM , all MAIL FROM s are accepted and only later does the message start gettingerrors. I have recently come to a realization about why this is wrong,and I even have an example.

The problem is that when you give at least a 4xx error to an RCPT TO ,it makes the sending mailer think that there is a problem with