Our problem with USB keyboards on Dell 2950s neatly illustrates why I remain deeply dubious about USB keyboards.It isn't that something broke; it's that it illustrates how complexUSB is.

Specifically, USB keyboards require a pile of sometimes fragile code tobring them up natively, or trusting a large amount of magic BIOS codebeing run behind your back. However, I really want my console keyboardto be simple ; the simpler it is, the less likely it is for somethinggoing wrong

Courtesy of a pointer from the linux-kernel mailing list to the Gentoowiki entry ,here's two useful (relatively) new software RAID features:

• Normally, if a RAID array goes out of sync the kernel assumes everythingon the out of date drive(s) has to be rewritten. With write-intent bitmapsthe kernel keeps track of what areas actually got written to and onlyresyncs them.

  (This brings Linux up to more or less parity with an equivalent SolarisDiskSuite feature.)

• 'data scrubbing

As a system administrator, I spend a bunch of my time dealing withfiles made up of lines that are composed of fields separated by somecharacter. A classical example is /etc/passwd , with colon-separatedfields. These file formats are ordered lists with named fields, whichshould sound familiar , but they don't showup as Python lists, they show up as lines of text and they want tobe output as text; that we use lists to represent them is just animplementation detail.

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This machine had a planned twelve hour power outage today, so many ofthese statistics are really only for six days. Having said that, thisweek we:

• got 16,376 messages from 272 different IP addresses.
• handled 20,396 sessions from 1,270 different IP addresses.
• received at least 212,857 connections from at least 63943different IP addresses.
• hit a highwater of 5 connections being checked at once.

This