When we talk about 'support', especially things like 'vendor support',I think that there are actually two general things that are gettinglumped under the same label: issues that you could have dealt with onyour own if you knew enough, and things that are broken.

Although I don't have really good names for them, let's call the firstsort of issue 'troubleshooting' and the second sort 'support'.

Unless the vendor dropped the ball on their documentation (which iscertainly

I had another Solaris 9 learning experience today: I came in to findmy ssh sessions to my Ultra 10 test machine dead, because the machinewas powered off. This was more than a little bit disconcerting, sincethe last thing I had left it doing was installing the current Solaris 9patch set. (It took sufficiently long that I'd had to go home before itfinished.)

Powering the machine on showed not a normal boot sequence, but amessage about restoring the system. This caused me

I have a certain interest in the behavior of MSNbot, theMSN Search web spider. I'd like to keep track of what other people aresaying about it in blogs; the obvious way is a date-based [msnbot]search using Google Blogsearch.

If you do the search you can see why the results leave me less than enthused: it is full ofa cluster of spamblogs, mostly hosted at blogspot.com. They show upbecause they're mechanically including articles about search enginebehavior and search

One of the perennial programmer debates can be caricatured as a threeway fight between adherents of MySQL , PostgreSQL , and Oracle (or the big irondatabase of your choice). As an example, you can see a recent roundstarting itself up here and here (both arguing what could be called the MySQL side).

Some time back it struck me that one way to think about how programsrelate to SQL databases is that they can be doing it at threedifferent conceptual levels. (And now that I have a

As with Fedora Core 4 , I haven't beenusing Solaris 9 long enough to have given it a fair shake. So insteadof any sort of review, this is just a collection of things that haveirritated me about it on first exposure.

I'll start with a nice simple one:

# useradd -m -c 'Chris Siebenmann' cks
UX: useradd: ERROR: Unable to create the home directory: Operation not applicable.

This is on a default configured Solaris 9 machine, straight out of