For our backwards compatibility sins, we have plain POP3 exposed tothe general Internet. This morning, we discovered that our POP3 serverhad more or less locked up around 6:30 am, apparently because someonedecided to open up hundreds of connections to it and perform a bruteforce mass account/password attempt.

(In fact it took down our IMAP server too, because we're runningDovecot. This is one of the annoying limitations of Dovecot; there is acentral server process that has a

Courtesy of a nice little thunderstorm, I lost power for a bit, whichreminded me of why ATX power supplies are not my favorite thing. Theproblem is that they are too smart yet not smart enough.

In the old days of simple power supplies, when you turned a machine offit would stay off and if you turned a machine on it stayed on, and powerfailures didn't change this; after the power came back, the off machinestayed off and the on machine powered back up. In

It used to be that on a large memory 32-bit compute server, no singleprocess could run away and exhaust all of the machine's memory. On aneight or sixteen gigabyte machine, processes ran into the 3 gigabyte(max) or so limit on per-process virtual address space well before theycould run the machine itself into the ground.

(On a large enough machine you could survive a couple of suchprocesses.)

This is no longer true on 64-bit large memory compute

The more I look at Fibrechannel's competitors , the more attractive Fibrechannel looks. Afterall, FC's only real problem is that it costs a lot of money, and eventhat may be changing as FC vendors come to their senses; we recentlygot a quite reasonable quote from a storage vendor.

(Well, FC switch vendors are still insane, but if you are willing togo for second-hand equipment you can apparently get 1 and 2 gigabit FCswitches for quite cheap as people upgrade to 4