To stereotype, there are two models of operating your storage: longterm storage , where you evolve your storageover time without the users noticing, and run it into the groundstorage , where you just buy the best thing ofthe moment and replace it when it's too outdated. So, what are thetradeoffs between the storage models, or in other words when shouldyou pick one or the other?

My thoughts so far on this is that there are a number of issues:

• what sort of downtimes can

In addition to the stuff in AutomationCosts , there's another problem(or cost) with custom sysadmin tools: they're almost always at leastnot-good software, and sometimes they're outright bad. They pretty muchcan't help but be because of how they're created.

The typical custom tool is written by at most a small group of people(who are often not actively practicing programmers), is not looked overby very many people, and on top of that is often written

In the old days of V7 Unix, directories weren't quite files butthey were close enough that you could open and read() themdirectly, and they had a simple enough structure that there was nolibrary routine to parse their contents; programs like the V7 ls just did itthemselves. A good part of the reason for this was that filenames wereshort (14 characters max), so directory entries could be fixed-sizedobjects.

In 4BSD, Berkeley expanded the maximum length of