To elaborate on an old entry a bit, let'ssuppose that you have important system data files that you expose to allof your machines via NFS, and that you need to re-generate and updatethem every so often.

When you regenerate files locally, you need to make sure that there'salways a version of the file present, and that the file's alwayscomplete. When you add NFS there's a third, subtle requirement: youcannot immediately remove the old version because a

Here's an ironic thing: basic switches these days are now too smartfor their own good, or at least for my good. The issue is that eventheoretically dumb switches are VLAN aware, which means that they willonly pass VLAN tagged packets if they've been told about the particularVLAN is tagged for.

The problem this creates is that it is now impossible to have ageneric traffic monitoring switch. What you'd like to have is asmall switch that's pre-configured with a

Every now and then I try a comment spam precaution and it backfires on me. So let me amend myprevious remarks: it turns out that refusing comments from people thatare on the XBL is a bad idea.

It's a superficially attractive idea, which is why I implemented itway back when; the XBL is (theoretically) listing addresses ofcompromised machines and open proxies, and I have seen comment spamattempts from XBL -listed IP addresses. But the XBL itself containswarnings against this sort of usage

In ExploitingPolymorphicWSGI , I talked about how I use the flexibilityof WSGI to run DWiki as either a CGI or a SCGI server by using a smallfrontend CGI program. Because there are some subtle bits to how thisworks, I thought I would write down how the CGI frontend works.

The overall logic is:

• try to talk to an existing SCGI daemon.
• otherwise, check the load and try to start a daemon if the load isbetween a minimum and a maximum, and then talk to it.
• otherwise, if