I knew that Linux did dynamic network device naming , but one consequence of that only really sunkin recently. Dynamic naming is relatively predictable for interfacesthat are always on (especially when various distributions work hard to make them verypersistent), but where it can really surprise you (and your software)is when the interfaces are dynamic. Like, say, PPP interfaces.

Just like Ethernet interfaces, the first active PPP connection gets ppp0 , the second one gets ppp1 , and so on. But unlike Ethernets

The advantage of having blog comments is that they are the easiest wayfor people to, well, make a comment on an entry. The main alternativeis email, but blog comments are significantly easier than email in this modern age of spam and other problems, where notonly is it difficult to find the blog author's email address (because ifit was easy to find the spammers would find it), but it's difficult toknow if you can trust them with your email address.

(While writing

Once upon a time, Unix was very small and fit entirely in what is nowthe root filesystem, / ; hence, among other things, /bin , whichwas where commands went. This didn't last very long, and by the timeof at least the Third Edition in 1973, there was an additional /usr filesystem with a /usr/bin for 'overflow' programs that didn't fit onthe root filesystem any more.

(As I heard the story, the root