I hate firewalls because every firewall between two machines trying totalk to each other is another place for things to go wrong, which meansanother place to check (somehow) when things do go wrong.

Stateless firewalls at least have the grace to have consistent andpredictable behavior; if something is wrong, it is going to be wrong allthe time. Stateful firewalls make your life exciting by varying theirbehavior based on an ever-changing flux of generally unpredictable andinaccessible information, so things can go wrong now and right

Filesystem consistency checkers have historically had three overlappingpurposes:

1. to patch up the damage done when a machine was shut down partway through modifications to the filesystem.

2. to find and fix up problems caused by corrupted disk blocks(whether they're caused by a dying disk, a controller error thatscribbled random data on a track, or whatever).

3. to check for and repair structural errors created by operatingsystem bugs .

Fixing inconsistent filesystems is mostly or entirely obsolete thesedays, due to people moving to journaled filesystems that never

An increasing number of Red Hat/Fedora machines are dual architecture:they run both 64-bit and 32-bit x86 programs, and thus need to haveshared libraries and RPMs and so on for both of them. This canexpose some interesting issues when installing and upgrading RPMs;one of them is the dual architecture file ownership problem.

There are a lot of RPMs that install both architecture-dependent fileslike binaries and shared libraries and architecture-independent fileslike header files and manpages. The