In theory I ought to be just the sort of person who has a GPG key; afterall, I'm geeky, quite aware of how easy it is to impersonate people onthe Internet, reasonably concerned about privacy, and so on. But inpractice I don't have one because I don't feel I could keep it secureenough for what people believe a digital signature implies.

As a system administrator, I get to be quite aware of all the waysthat a bad guy could attack the

Interactive VLAN configuration is done with the vconfig program. Thebasic usage is ' vconfig add eth0 6 '; this makes a new Ethernet devicecalled eth0.6 (by default; vconfig can change this, but you probablydon't want to). ' vconfig rem eth0.6 ' will then remove the VLAN.

A configured VLAN is up enough so that you can receive traffic on it. Ifall you're interested in is doing things like bridging virtual machinesonto the VLAN's

I have somewhat recently written a program that makes heavy use of Python's xmlrpclib module . While thexmlrpclib module is very nice, the whole experience has given me somestrong views on how it does exception handling.

The basic problem with xmlrpclib's error handling is that it doesn'tcapture exceptions from stuff that it calls, so they leak out to you.Fortunately I don't think xmlrpclib calls anything that can raise errorsexcept the socket module, but I'm not sure (so my program

It makes me nervous that my fingers appear to feel that the rightthing to type after ' find . type f -print | ' is ' xargs rm -f '.Sometimes they're quite insistent about it.

I am not sure where this reflex comes from, because I don't thinkI've done that particular operation that many times. It certainlymakes typing 'for all files' find operations a twitchy exercise, andI get to worry that someday I will, eg, accidentally delete all