With remoteable KVMs and power outlets that can be remote controlled,there is only one important missing bit until I can give up visitingmachine rooms almost entirely: a remote-controllable DVD drive.

The easiest way to do this would be with a USB device that pretended tobe a DVD ROM drive, but was actually a big pool of disk space with ISOimages. You'd give it an Ethernet connection so you could control itremotely to 'switch' the 'discs' and so on.

(Since Linux

Coming from an environment where we just put everything on shelves in racks , I have to say thatproper rack mounting is kind of neat, but rack rails irritate me. It'sall because of one simple little problem:

Why, oh why, can't people agree on a single sort of rails?

(Or at least a single sort of rails for things of each rack unit , so you'd have 1U rails and 2Urails and 3U rails and so on.)

We have

As far as I can see, the inevitable result of having several differentroot passwords across your systems is that a smart intruder whocompromises /bin/su on a single system will sooner or later collect all your root passwords.

(Or perhaps other people are better than we are at typing the right rootpassword at the current Password: prompt.)

(Please do not suggest sudo as the solution. For a start, we'd stillwant actual root passwords that are distinct from our own passwords.)

From a blog entry on the problem of email spam:

Charging even $0.0001 per message would make spam uneconomic, but aswith signing and other proposals, it seems socially infeasible.

There is a widespread attitude among computer people that it is a greatpity that their beautiful solutions to difficult technical challengesare being prevented from working merely by some pesky social issues,and that the problem is solved once the technical work is done.This attitude misses the point, especially in system administration:broadly speaking