To follow up my previous entry on iostat problems ,here's a rundown of the information you actually get from the Linuxkernel.

First off, you only get this from 2.6 kernels, or 2.4 kernels with theRed Hat disk stats patch (such as Red Hat Enterprise 3). In 2.6 thisinformation appears in /proc/diskstats ; in Red Hat's 2.4, it appearsin /proc/partitions with slightly more fields.

/proc/diskstats fields for

Every so often having comments on here really pays off. A commenteron my previous entry gave me a pointer to pca (Patch Check Advanced), anactual sane patch management program for Solaris machines; if you wantmore reasons to take a look, see my longer comments .

One of the nice things about pca is that it led me to the patchdiag.xref file, which is a big cross index of all of the Solaris patches, and to patches.sun.com in general. Patchdiag.xrefis

A very long time ago, I spent a year being an Amiga programmer as partof a small team writing an application. We wanted it to have a busymouse cursor (the general hourglass 'this is going to take a while'cursor good apps put up during long operations), but what with one thingand another, we wound up with two problems:

• we weren't actually sure what user actions would take a longtime.
• we got to 'implement a busy cursor' rather late in the whole