Recently, we had an interesting fire drill that actually winds up beingthe first decent argument for periodically rebooting good servers thatI've seen.

We have a number of very important servers, the kind of importantservers that are active all the time and that have their downtimescarefully scheduled well in advance. Recently, we (and by this I mean 'aco-worker') had to patch the OS on a couple of them in the pack. Thiswent fine.

As part of patching the OS,

The SMTP listener crashed and was restarted around Wednesday at 2am,so some of the statistics are short this week. That said, this weekwe:

• got 12,378 messages from 234 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,251 sessions from 822 different IP addresses.
• received 87,872 connections from at least 29,223 different IPaddresses since Wednesday at 2am.
• hit a highwater of 6 connections being checked at once, since

One of the under-appreciated areas of writing systems documentation istesting it. And I don't mean proofreading it (although that's necessarytoo); I mean making sure that it is things like comprehensible, clear,correct, and complete.

Testing is vital, because documentation that is incomplete or incorrectis often worse than no documentation at all. Documentation createsconfidence, which means that bad documentation lets people go wrongwith confidence, turning a small mess into a much bigger one. ('Butthe

In another nutshell :

# apt-get install fvwm...Suggested packages:  fvwm-themes m4 menu wm-icons imlib-progsRecommended packages:  fvwm-icons imlib11...

So I abort the apt-get when offered the chance, because I wantthe useful bits too.

# apt-get install fvwm fvwm-icons imlib11 fvwm-themes m4 menu wm-iconsimlib-progs
[...]
Package fvwm-themes is not available, but is referred