You may have noticed that as of late there's a bunch of spam (usuallyadvance fee fraud spam) coming from various university webmail systems.(When it has real IP origin information, it is often from the usualsuspects.)

Until now, I thought that this was because spammers had workedout how to compromise webmail systems. It turns out that it isworse than that; phishers are specifically targeting universities.And these are not your run of the mill ordinary phish attacks,where you get email about

The usual way of presenting availabilitynumbers is to cover how much (or how little) downtime you have per year.As another way of understanding them, let's turn that around and ask howmuch less downtime you have as you move from one availability level to ahigher one.

Here is one of the best things you can do to improve your ability tofind and fix problems:

Get statistics .

Over and over I have seen statistics be a big part of solving problems.Not infrequently they are a big part in identifying the problems;sometimes having a reliable way of telling whether the problem ishappening or not is half the battle.

(There is a world of difference between 'sometimes the NFS fileserversare slow' and 'sometimes the new RAID controller has average IO servicetimes of over a