Sun killed one of my systems the other day. It was very simple: Iinstalled the latest patches (that had passed testing on my testsystem), rebooted, and the ssh daemon failed to come up. Bang. Dead inthe water due to:

ld.so.1: sshd: fatal: libxfn.so.2: open failed: No such fileor directory

Since this machine is accessed only via ssh, that's all shewrote. (For extra fun, outgoing ssh from the

This week, we:

• got 14,343 messages from 220 different IP addresses.
• handled 18,078 sessions from 864 different IP addresses.
• received 140,437 connections from at least 48,849 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 50 connections being checked at once (hit onTuesday).

Unlike last week , we don't seem to havebeen hit with any particular spam fireworks for this Canada Day;volume

The Virtual Furniture Police is ultimately an unflattering view of how IT departments too oftenattempt to have a great deal of control over user desktops. The openingparagraph summarizes things nicely:

This is a review, of sorts, of the book Peopleware: ProductiveProjects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Then a segueto explain how typical corporate IT policies contravene some of theexcellent advice in this book.

And the title is lovely; I think I have a new catchphrase.

(From a comment here .)