In the old days, we had a mail system with two problems: receiving SMTP mail took a couple of processesper connection, and the SMTP server had no timeout. The result thatour central mail server would slowly accumulate more and idle SMTPsession processes waiting on zombie PCs that had just yanked theconnection away, all of them chewing up memory, swap space, and so on;at the height of things, we might have more than a thousand idle SMTPconnections.

(Specifically, there was a process per

A while back I talked about why SSL and name-based virtual hosts don'tget along , and a commentator pointed me at the 'ServerName Indication' (SNI) SSL extension to deal with this. The approachSNI takes is for the client to send the server name(s) it wants to talkto as part of the initial handshake; a SNI-aware server can use this topick the right server certificate right away.

(The whole thing is described in RFC 4366 and

I just got through registering with yet another website. It was a pain,because they made me pick an account name.

There's two problems with account names. First, they matter becausethey're public identities; they say something about you to onlookers,so you care what your account name is. Second, at least for me, they'rehard to come up with.

My first and second choices are almost always taken; three letter namesusually go fast, if the system even allows them