Solaris Volume Manager (which I still call DiskSuite) keeps informationabout the state of its logical volumes in what it calls a 'metadevicestate database' (a metadb for short). You normally keep a number ofreplicas of this state database, scattered around the physical devicesthat DiskSuite is managing for you.When you are using metasets , all of the metadbreplicas have to be on disks in the metaset. This is a logicalconsequence of the DiskSuite tools needing to update the metadata toreflect which machine owns a

One of the nice things that you can do with iSCSI and AOE is use themto test how your system (volume management, filesystem, programs, etc)really deal with low level disk errors. All sorts of interesting issuescan come crawling out of the woodwork when you do this; it is veryeducational and occasionally rather alarming.

(Testing this sort of thing is otherwise fairly difficult, because fewpeople have controllable error-producing hard drives sitting around,especially hard drives that will repeatedly run fine for a while

A while back, the Gaim chat program got renamed to Pidgin forcomplicated reasons. Fedora duly released a pidgin package that saidit replaced the old gaim package, and I duly typed yum update on myx86_64 machine, and things came to a screeching halt with errorsabout file conflicts . It turned out that theupdates repository had both the i386 and the x86_64 versions ofpidgin, and yum was picking the i386 version, which depended on

Part of the peculiarities of the university environment is that universitiesare not businesses. Well, yes, of course. But consider one of theimplications: universities do not directly make money.

In a company, you can justify a more expensive thing on the groundsthat it never the less makes the company more money, either directlyor indirectly (through increased productivity, for example). Because acompany makes money, what matters is not the absolute expense but theprofit/expense ratio.

(It matters so much that