It's really simple: we installed the latest Ubuntu 6.06 kernel updatelast night, since it's a security fix. Today, our machines startedpanicing with 'kernel BUG at fs/nfs/inode.c:174' messages (threemachines so far, one of them three times), so we wanted to revertback to the old kernel.

Guess what: it wasn't there any more. Apparently Ubuntu feels freeto have (some) kernel updates overwrite your

There is a certain habit in applications these days of onlyallowing you to run one copy of themselves; for example, Firefox . I find myself more and moreirritated by this, because it is usually implemented sloppily.

A good implementation must hide the fact that it is not actuallyrunning a second copy of the application. Sloppy implementations failto completely hide this fact, generally by missing various differencesbetween the environment that the original version of the application isrunning in and the environment that the second copy is running in.

I want to note for the record that the combination of an Asus EEE PCand a wireless network in your machine room is a great idea. For bestresults, make sure that your wireless network does not depend on much ofyour overall infrastructure.

(Yes, we actually put a wireless access point in our machine room.Since the core wireless gateway is also in the machine room, this isfar less crazy than it might seem.)

Also, the Eee is smaller than my current lab notebook , which is

As I've mentioned in passing , at one point we gotso irritated with peculiar automounter issues that we wrote our ownreplacement that does what we want . It turned outto be fairly simple, because what we want is just to keep each system'smounted NFS filesystems in sync with a master list.

Since this is basically diff , you could clearly do this in a shellscript. I opted to write the core of the system in Python so that itwould be easier to handle an existing mount changing