I happened to notice this today: if you go look at your garden varietythree prong power plugs, you'll see that the ground connector issomewhat longer than the two power connectors. Thus when you insert theplug the ground wire is connected before the power goes hot, even ifthings are a bit off-balance.

There's applications of this safe- before -engagement features in systemadministration; for example, Unix boot sequences usually configure IPfiltering before the network interfaces come up, not after.

This week we:

• got 12,292 messages from 221 different IP addresses.
• handled 16,875 sessions from 807 different IP addresses.
• received 125,999 connections from at least 41,642 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 11 connections being checked at once.

Nothing went wrong this week, thank goodness; no reboots, no SMTPfrontend restarts, nothing.Weekly volume seems to be back to the normal level when

One of the nice things about writing a blog is getting to say 'oh, oops,I was a dumbass, let me fix that'. Today I have to own up to a bigexample of this.

Back at the start of WanderingThoughts , I wrote an entry where I complained in part:

In theory the absolute URL should include the port (unless it's thedefault). In practice, every program I've tried gleefully adds theport itself if it is a non-standard port and