We managed to waste a nice chunk of time today with a really simplemistake.

Our plan was to one of the two mirrored system drives in our Amanda backup server for a larger one, aspart of the process of upgrading its operating system. What weaccidentally did instead was to swap one of the extra spool spacedrives out. This did not work so well. (For a start, the system was abit upset about not being able to mount the spool partition.)

You may remember that last week

Here's an important Linux kernel configuration tip: always compile NATfor your kernels, whether built in or as modules.

I often build my own kernels on machines (usually so I can use stock kernel.org kernels). Some of these machinesare slow, and in general I like to leave out options I don't need. Inthe past, I have often looked at NAT and decided that I clearly wasn'tgoing to need it. (After all, none of these machines were going

This week we received 12,079 email messages from 226 different IPaddresses. Our SMTP server handled 44,167 sessions from 4,794 differentIP addresses. Session volume is up a bit compared to last week , but well within what I nowconsider normal fluctuations.

Because we rebooted this machine Monday evening, we're about 36 hoursshort on kernel-level and total connection volume stats (and I'm notgoing to bother with per-day

Dear Internet marketers: affiliate marketing schemes that pay money are dead, killed by spammers. Please get overit and find a marketing technique that doesn't cause spam and attractspammers. (And if you are actually a spammer hiding behind'affiliates', sorry, no one believes that any more.)

Affiliate marketing pays people for traffic. When people are beingpaid for traffic, spamming becomes the most cost effective way ofgenerating it. So people spam. Anyone who opens their eyes can seethis all over

The If-Modified-Since header in HTTP requests is used as one way ofdoing 'conditional GET' requests, where the web server can give you anice bandwidth-saving '304' response if the URL hasn't changed sincethe version you already have. In theory the header has an arbitrarytimestamp and the server will 304 the request unless the page haschanged since that time.

In practice, the HTTP RFC strongly recommends that clients treat thevalue as a magic cookie, just