I have a fixed personal opinion that systems should not spew kernelmessages in the course of normal system operation, and especially notover the console. As I am busy finding out, yet again, SELinux failsthis test in at least some circumstances on Fedora Core 5.

(Possibly the circumstances were odd, since my FC5 install hadn'tmanaged to run the 'firstboot' stuff due to the un-upgraded X servercrashing on this machine's hardware. Still, I brought it up in a normal

Here's my current thoughts on how big system filesystems (or partitions,depending on what you like to call them) should be for new systems. Thisassumes that you have lots of disk space to play aroundwith.

Also, note that I run non stripped down Fedora Core systems; in fact, Ihave a tropism towards installing most everything in sight, just so Ihave its documentation handy in case I need to poke at it. A strippeddown system would fit in much, much less.

One

When I was looking around the /var on my Fedora Core 5 scratchmachine to see where all the disk space was being used as part of the last entry , I was startled to discoverthat /var/log/btmp was a 100M file (and by far the largest thing in /var/log ). This was a surprise to me, because I had never heard of thefile before.

It turns out that btmp is used to record bad logins (some of youare already wincing

Recently, I've run into a situation where I have an ASCII stringrepresenting a time, expressed in UTC/GMT, and I want to convert it tothe standard Unix representation of seconds since the epoch.It turns out that there are some interesting issues involved (well,in my opinion).

Doing this for a time string in local time is a snap: time .strptime() will convert the ASCII time string to Python's version of C's structtm , and then time .