This month, someone came to the local Unix group with an issue: they were using a CGIprogram to kick off a background process, but when they visited theCGI's URL in their web browser their browser just sat there, spinningthe little 'I am fetching the page' throbber. After the dust hadsettled and the right advice had been given (the background processneeded to have its standard input, standard output, and standard errorredirected to /dev/null ), I got to thinking about

It is possible to get a DiskSuite metadb replica into a sufficientlydamaged state that it will panic the system in early boot, whichis especially irritating when you aren't using it for anything . This can lead to you needing to clear metadbreplicas.

(If you get past boot by turning off svc:/system/metainit thesystem panics when you run metadb or metainit , which is nottoo helpful for actually dealing with the problem.)

If you don't care about leaving the actual bits intact for

One thing I assume about how our usersdeal with the local computing environment is that there exists asignificant body of oral traditions and folklore around (at least) thegraduate students. When you think about it, this is inevitable; whennew graduate students show up they are going to ask the people aroundthem for help, and that's the older graduate students.

(This gives you oral tradition; you get folklore because there's noguarantee that the information the older graduate students will passon is correct

A recent sysadmin discussion here wound up with one of the participantssuggesting that we deal with a particular issue by creating a newhostname, because after all names are cheap. This remark crystallizedsomething for me.

I disagree. Names are not cheap, they are actually expensive. Nameslook cheap because they are easy to create, but they create clutter anduncertainty (over what name is still being used by what) that makesthem expensive in the long run.

(Once you have enough names and enough uncertainty, you