I have always more or less ignored dump's -b argument, assuming it wassomething only relevant for output to tapes (which I never do; even ourbackups that eventually wind up on tapes get sent to standard output formangling by Amanda ).

Except today I was getting disappointing dump speeds from a system withfast disks, so I decided to experiment with it. And boy have I beenwrong.

Cursors on 'dumb' serial terminals blink because their location usually is the most important spot on the screen; it was where your typingwould go. Blinking made sure that you weren't going to lose track of it.

Cursors in terminal emulators blink because people haven't botheredto rethink this in the face of multiple windows. (I'm not sure thatthey've thought about it deeper than 'dumb terminal cursors blink, let'simitate them'.)

That's a strong statement

I have a machine that runs both a caching DNS server (to answer localqueries) and an authoritative DNS server; the caching server is bound tolocalhost:53, and the authoritative server to my-IP:53. Recently I wantedto let another machine use the caching DNS server.

The obvious general approach is to remap queries from the specific IP sothat they hit the caching nameserver instead of the authoritative one.I can see two ways of doing this with Linux iptables: DNAT and REDIRECT.

This week, we:

• got 14,794 messages from 260 different IP addresses.
• handled 20,016 sessions from 1,207 different IP addresses.
• received 186,129 connections from at least 47,733 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 37 connections being checked at once.

Volume is around that of last week ; Idon't know what to make of the increasing highwater. The volumedoesn't fluctuate