I like awk , and often use it for quick little log aggregation things(often on the command line, if what I am interested in is a one-off).But awk has a small problem: it likes printing large numbers inexponential notation.

The minor problem with this is that I find exponential notation fornumbers harder to read than straight decimal notation. '3.18254e+10'is just harder to understand casually than 318254405

As a result of the MSN search spider going crazy , Iam actually paying some attention to our web server logs for achange. This led to me looking up which URLs are responsible for thelargest amounts of bandwidth used.

To my surprise, the six largest bandwidth sources were some CD-ROMimages in ISO format that we happen to have lying around, the oldestone dating back to 2002. In the last week alone , there were eightrequests totaling 3.5 gigabytes of transfers. Who

We mirror the Fedora Core 4 updates area, and we use yum to installthings from it, and Red Hat recently released an extremely unsuitable(for us) update to xorg-x11 (as recounted in MoreFC4Problems ). So weneeded to take those buggy RPMs out of circulation and keep them out.

Fortunately this turns out to be pretty easy, because not all RPMs ina directory have to be in the repository metadata that yum uses. This let us continue to pull a full mirror from

One of those routine system management tasks these days ischecking to make sure that I'm up to date on vendor security releasesand other updates. And when I'm not up to date, I generally want toknow what's out of date; being out of date on diff is one thing,being out of date on a kernel or glibc is quite another. (For astart, I probably want to test the kernel a bit more before pushing itinto our local update queue.)

Since

Important update : the buggy RPMs have been superseded. See the end.

You may remember back to FC4FirstIrritations , where I talked aboutseveral X problems. Well, Red Hat managed to outdo itself recently, aswe discovered the hard way: their latest update to the xorg-x11 packages, 6.8.2-37.FC4.48.1 (released September 16th or so) nowcauses almost all of our workstations to explode.

Not literally exploded, but