I still use Mozilla as my browser, built from the CVS source codebecause I use several custom hacks (hacks that the Mozilla Project isnot going to want back). However, I only upgrade my binaryperiodically. Today I had the unfortunate experience of trying toupgrade to the latest CVS source code version.

For those not current on the whole story, there has been a little bitof a fissure in the Mozilla Project community. When Firefox (andThunderbird et al) started getting good, it was decided

I am quite irritated right now, because Fedora Core 4 has the mostsignificantly buggy Anaconda installer that it has ever beenmy displeasure to have to try to make work. These are bugs that areboth serious and obvious, one of them even introduced because oflast-minute change. (Have people learned nothing from history?Hasty last-minute changes always have bugs; that's why you don'tmake them .)

• You cannot repartition drives, because Ananconda holds open areference to an old partition,

There's a lot of rules of running large-scale systems, with lots ofmachines. I'll probably be writing up my own version of them at somepoint. But they all really come down to one big trick:

Don't administer individual machines .

That's it. Everything else is in the implementation details. (Ofcourse, the devil is always in the details.)

But what does it mean ? More or less what it says: you should neverdeal with machines one by

A lot of what I think about and do is keeping large computer systemsrunning. In an online discussion recently I've (re)realized that thereare two different sorts of 'large systems', each with very differentchallenges.

One sort of 'large system' is large because it handles a lot, forexample a mail system that handles email for 25,000 people on asingle, beefy machine. Running a single large machine like this ismostly a matter of tuning, and it