It's been quite a while since the last installment , but today's is an interesting although simplecase. Presented in the traditional illustrated format:

; sdig ns xing121.cndns1.dns-dns.com.cn.dns2.dns-dns.com.cn.; sdig a dns1.dns-dns.com.cn.127.0.0.1; sdig a dns2.dns-dns.com.cn.12

I am generally fairly negative on hardwareRAID; I feel that both in theory and in especially in practice, it isalmost never a benefit. However, today I realized that there is oneway that a hardware RAID card could have an advantage: avoiding PCIbandwidth limits during RAID reconstruction.

In the general case, RAID reconstruction has to read all of theremaining intact disks and then write back to the new disk. Withsoftware RAID, this data must cross the PCI bus, since it is theserver's

We have two categories of machines here; let me call them appliancesand systems. Systems are machines that users have access to or thatprovide complex, general services to the Internet; our login and computeservers, our IMAP server, and so on. Appliances are not user accessible,are more or less hermetically sealed, and generally only expose thespecific service that they're supposed to provide.

We keep systems up to date on patches. We have to; they're exposed. Butwe almost never patch