I spent a large part of today upgrading my office workstation fromFedora Core 6 to Fedora 7 (I wanted to go straight to Fedora 8, buteither I am too impatient or the Fedora 8 installer stalled duringdependency resolution). As usual, I did this by sticking in theFedora 7 DVD and telling it to do an upgrade install.

The problem with this is simple: an up to date machine running an oldFedora can have more recent versions of packages than are on the installmedia for the newer Fedora

You read here and there that in IPv6, IPsec is mandatory; depending onwhich side of the firewall divide you're on, this either sounds great oralarming. But what does it actually mean? Recently, I got curious anddid some digging, and it turns out that it is less than it sounds.

The summary:

A conformant IPv6 implementation must be capable of IPsec, but doesnot have to use it for anything.

The IPsec RFCs spell out the mechanics of IPsec; how you go

I just rebooted and recovered one of our Linux machines that had hit apanic and then locked up in an endless cycle of ' soft lockup detectedon CPU #0 ' reports. I did all of this from home, through the magic of aserial console, a console server, and Linux's magic SysRq key support.And as far as I'm concerned, one of the best things about this is thatit took hardly any bandwidth and no Java .

(While I'm currently on DSL at