One of the little things that ssh does is that it checks and maintainshost keys using exactly and only the name you used on the command line;it doesn't canonicalize the name. (Well, not much; these days it willalso try the IP address that the name resolves to.)

The problem around here is that the names of machines can be specifiedin all sorts of different ways, because of domain search paths; oftenwe have bare name, bare name plus the subdomain, and then two

Sometimes I write little scripts partly in order toplay around with a command I haven't used before. Such is the case withtoday's script, which I have unimaginatively called bsearch-nums . Hereit is:

#!/bin/sh# usage: bsearch-nums START ENDlo=$1; hi=$2while [ $lo -lt $hi ]; do  mid=`echo $lo $hi +2/p | dc`  echo "try: $mid"

In the traditional illustrated form:

; metastat fs5/d40
metastat: sandiego.cs: fs5: set name is inconsistent

Almost all DiskSuite commands that deal with disk sets will accept fsN/dN to specify the set and the disk at once, and metastat itselfproduces output in this form. But metastat refuses to accept it asinput; instead you have to use ' metastat -s fs5 d40 '.

This isn't just a cosmetic issue. The fsN/dNN format is

This week, we:

• got 15,266 messages from 269 different IP addresses.
• handled 22,009 sessions from 1,693 different IP addresses.
• received 897,934 connections from at least 48,417 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 10 connections being checked at once.

Just like last time , that is not a typo (andnothing on the system was affected enough to make me notice it beforenow,