A few weeks ago I discovered that only 220 different IP addresses sentus actual email over the course of a week. This naturally raises thequestion: was this just a slow week, or is this typical? The answerturns out to be 'maybe'.

On the system I usually run my stats on, I only have logs going backabout 28 days; looking at the entire time period, there was email from443 different IP addresses. Not surprisingly, the distribution of howmuch

A while back I wrote about FutureSysadminJobs and suggested thatpeople who wanted satisfying careers as system administrators overthe long term should develop the skills to be troubleshooters. Whichbegs the question: what are those skills?

The first and most important skill is: you have to find all thisinteresting . Enjoying being a curious packrat is not entirelyrequired, but I think it helps a whole lot, especially as you'llprobably need to learn a number of things on your own time.

Other than that, based on my

I can't call this a review or even first impressions of Fedora Core 4,because I haven't used it enough yet (and may not for a while). So thisis my first irritations with Fedora Core 4, gained from banging my headagainst it repeatedly in the process of preparing our new OS load fora planned late-August upgrade/reinstall of a bunch of workstations.

• The Anaconda installer is buggy .(Still with no sign of an update.)

• Once X starts, it kills

I've been telling people versions of this story for a while, so Ifigure I might as well write it down for posterity (or at leastentertainment).

When Intel started Itanium development work in the mid 1990s, it had astraightforward story: the x86 architecture was about to run into aperformance cap, because of all the ugly warts it had inherited fromits predecessors (a very limited supply of registers, a highlyirregular instruction format, etc). To get the