I was recently reminded that Linux's iostat command is what I call'overly helpful'. It's not that it lies to you, exactly; it's that iostat is a little bit too eager to please people reading its output,particularly iostat -x output. There are a number of issues.

(The rest of this assumes that you're familiar with the iostat -x fields.)

The fatally flawed field is svctm , the 'average service time' forIOs. It would be

I spent a chunk of this weekend preparing a mirror for a high loadenvironment. The mirror only needs to serve a couple of largevideo clips , but they're going to be linked from a high traffic website , so we expect a lot of (simultaneous)connections and a lot of outgoing bandwidth.

I made a generic mirror url, using a new hostname that I had to put intoa new sub-zone in our DNS . Right now it has two A records, each with a five minute TTL

Hotmail had an amazingly good week this time around:

• 5 messages accepted.
• 2 messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail emailaddresses.
• no messages sent to our spamtraps.
• 6 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hitour spamtraps.
• only 1 message refused due to the origin IP address being in the CBL(and now in the SBL, as SBL34115 ).

Muting the happiness is the fact that the one CBL-rejected messagewas from a sympatico.ca address, and several