Programs like fdisk , sfdisk , and even parted are really irritatingto deal with most of the time because they ask you too many nitpickingquestions. What I want is a partitioning program with a command oriented'shell' interface, with the core command being:

make N SIZE [TYPE]

This makes partition N be SIZE big (with the default units beingmegabytes), optionally making its type be TYPE (which can be in hex orin English). If N is 1 to 4, it is a primary

A recent Slashdot story pointed to this article onone company's more flexible approach to work hours. It hasthe line:

The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on outputinstead of hours.

My immediate cynical reaction is that this is a marvelous theorybut doomed in most practices. The root problem is the sameseductive thought in management that leads to excessive overtime : 'if my employee is getting all this done in Nhours now, think how much more work she could do in N+Y hours

Today, I had the distinct pleasure of discovering that /var/run mustexist on the root filesystem , even if you have a separate /var filesystem . If your root filesystem does not have such a hidden /var/run , you experience mysterious failures of various boot stuff,including an inability to bring up the network; for bonus points,nothing gives you any meaningful error messages.

(For bonus points, the default Ubuntu server startup sequence wipes out the console scroll buffer, so you can't scroll

In the traditional illustrated format:

; sdig ns aescorts.net.
ns1.bnmq.com.
ns2.bnmq.com.
; dig mx aescorts.net. @ns1.bnmq.com.
[...]
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
[...]
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
. 1 IN SOA . abuse.opticaljungle.com. ...

That's an interestingly grandiose

We made a small mistake around here a while back: we used VLAN ID 1 fora real VLAN. In fact, we used it for our 'management network' VLAN.

This is a mistake because many switches insist that all ports beuntagged members of some VLAN, and they pick VLAN 1 to be the defaultVLAN for this. The net effect is that unconfigured ports on many of ourVLAN-aware switches are by default on our management network.

(Not all of our switches are VLAN aware; edge