Modifying a Linux kernel configuration option can be an annoyingexperience, as you poke around the menus of ' make menuconfig ' tryingto find where the configuration option you want to change is hiding.Fortunately there's a less well known but much easier way.

The kernel build process stores configuration settings in the file .config in the root of the kernel source tree. However, it generatesother things from the file (and some options are interdependent), so youcan't just edit the file and go;

We've been having odd problems with backups for more than a weeknow. Problems with backups are often frustratingly hard to debug,since generally I only get one run a day and it really should work.

Our Amanda backup server still ran Red Hat7.3 for various reasons (including lack of disk space, which is a longstory). I had been planning to upgrade it to Fedora Core 4 just beforethe backup problems hit, then they pushed that back, then we workedout that they'

' Conditional GET 'is the HTTP technique used to save bandwidth by not re-fetchingunchanged pages. Using conditional GET is especially important forthings that fetch syndication feeds (RSS or Atom), because peopleusually check feeds much more often than they revisit web pages.( This is another good reference for syndication feed reader authors.)

WanderingThoughts has a lot of syndication feeds and the main ones are quite big. Recently, partly prompted by issues with MSNbot , I decided to take alook at what was fetching my