One of the ways that Solaris does not make me happy is that they donot seem to have changed various system defaults since, oh, 1996, whenmachines were much smaller than they are now. As a result, we haveaccumulated a set of NFS server parameters that we have had to change inorder to get decent performance and functionality.

(This set is not particularly novel, which is part of the irritation;pretty much everyone winds up making many of these changes sooner orlater. But

Presented in the traditional illustrated form:

; cat arootcks; cat brootcksabc; comm -13 a b >/dev/nullcomm: file 2 is not in sorted order

If your comm doesn't do this, don't be surprised; this behavior is newin the very latest version of comm , from coreutils 7.2 (as installedon Fedora 11; Fedora 10 didn't have it). This behavior is turned off bythe new --nocheck

Here is something that I've alluded to before : email is quite intrusive (well, at least in my branch of the world).For both technical and social reasons, email messages are far more like(work) phone calls than they are like paper mail.

On the technical side, you get a lot more email than you do paper mail,and it's harder to scan and sort your email than your mail. For example,most paper mail is loaded with cues as to what sort of

Suppose you have a piece of hardware where the mapping between BIOSdrive numbers and Linux device names is not straightforward, and youwant to figure out just what the mapping is (at least for your currentdisks). If you use GRUB (and you probably do), there's a relativelysimple way of doing this.

GRUB has two important attributes for this: it can read Linuxfilesystems and tell you what's in them, and at boot time it is workingwith the BIOS drive numbering. So