I made a bugfix to our mail server's configuration today.

Size of the bugfix: 25 characters added to an existing line.

Size of the comment sort of explaining why the bugfix is necessary: sixlines.

(And a complete discussion of the issue would be much longer.)

Of course, this is not unique to system administration; programmingalso has that sort of bugfixes. I think system administration may bemore prone to it, because so few of our tools, especially the ones with complicated logic

Unlike many Unixes, Linux determines whether or not it does IPforwarding on an interface by interface basis, based on interface thepacket arrived on . While Linux has a global IP forwarding sysctl, net.ipv4.ip_forward , pretty much all this really does is (re)set thevalue for all of the interfaces and make it the default; you can stillchange individual interfaces later.

The fine controls are in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/ , where thingsgo like

When looking up names on objects, I really wishthat Python had a special attribute accessor for looking upattributes it was about to call, instead of only running them throughthe regular attribute lookup chain.

While this uniformity probably has little effects on mostcode, it complicates the life of things such as proxy objects thattrace and monitor access to objects, which sometimes want to behavedifferently for ' var = you.foo ' than for ' var = you.foo() '. You canfake this by returning