One of the machines I help look after is an open, read-only Usenetserver (details here ; the openaccess is a 'because we can' thing). You might be surprised to knowthat the server logs only minimal information about NNTP sessions, andthis is a deliberate action that required hacking the software a bit.

When I was setting up the machine and planning open access foreveryone on campus, I found myself thinking about how I'd feel if, forexample, some day a department

Here's a little bit of magic, demonstrated in the Python interpreter:

>>> from record import Record>>> r = Record()>>> r2 = r.a.b('abc').c>>> print r2a.b('abc').c>>> print r.d.e(r2, t=20).f()d.e(Record().a.b('abc

One of the things that makes universities such peculiar computing environments is grant funding.

The straightforward effect is to inject uncertainty into the year toyear budgeting process, since few grants have a sure renewal. Evenwhen the total amount of grant funding stays more or less the same,who gets it (and thus what projects are funded) can vary a lot, withthe attendant localized lurches. (The uncertainty of grant money maybe one reason that people are often far more willing to pay forequipment and consulting than to

The usual explanation of how network interfaces get their names isthat they're named based on what's in /etc/modprobe.conf ( /etc/modules.conf if you're still running a 2.4 series kernel).You'll have lines like:

alias eth0 sk98linalias eth1 3c59xalias eth2 e100

And indeed this usually works, and when your system boots nicely the3Com 'Marvell' gigabit card is eth