Modifying a Linux kernel configuration option can be an annoyingexperience, as you poke around the menus of ' make menuconfig ' tryingto find where the configuration option you want to change is hiding.Fortunately there's a less well known but much easier way.

The kernel build process stores configuration settings in the file .config in the root of the kernel source tree. However, it generatesother things from the file (and some options are interdependent), so youcan't just edit the file and go;

We've been having odd problems with backups for more than a weeknow. Problems with backups are often frustratingly hard to debug,since generally I only get one run a day and it really should work.

Our Amanda backup server still ran Red Hat7.3 for various reasons (including lack of disk space, which is a longstory). I had been planning to upgrade it to Fedora Core 4 just beforethe backup problems hit, then they pushed that back, then we workedout that they'

' Conditional GET 'is the HTTP technique used to save bandwidth by not re-fetchingunchanged pages. Using conditional GET is especially important forthings that fetch syndication feeds (RSS or Atom), because peopleusually check feeds much more often than they revisit web pages.( This is another good reference for syndication feed reader authors.)

WanderingThoughts has a lot of syndication feeds and the main ones are quite big. Recently, partly prompted by issues with MSNbot , I decided to take alook at what was fetching my

We managed to waste a nice chunk of time today with a really simplemistake.

Our plan was to one of the two mirrored system drives in our Amanda backup server for a larger one, aspart of the process of upgrading its operating system. What weaccidentally did instead was to swap one of the extra spool spacedrives out. This did not work so well. (For a start, the system was abit upset about not being able to mount the spool partition.)

You may remember that last week

Here's an important Linux kernel configuration tip: always compile NATfor your kernels, whether built in or as modules.

I often build my own kernels on machines (usually so I can use stock kernel.org kernels). Some of these machinesare slow, and in general I like to leave out options I don't need. Inthe past, I have often looked at NAT and decided that I clearly wasn'tgoing to need it. (After all, none of these machines were going

This week we received 12,079 email messages from 226 different IPaddresses. Our SMTP server handled 44,167 sessions from 4,794 differentIP addresses. Session volume is up a bit compared to last week , but well within what I nowconsider normal fluctuations.

Because we rebooted this machine Monday evening, we're about 36 hoursshort on kernel-level and total connection volume stats (and I'm notgoing to bother with per-day