Here is a rambling thought.

Back in the days of Usenet, most Usenet readers supported 'killfiles'for filtering your view of a newsgroup. As newsgroup after newsgroupdescended into noise, the common reaction of people was to get moreand more elaborate killfiles so they could preserve what they could. The long term problem with this wasthat new readers of a newsgroup generally had no killfiles, so theygenerally took one look at the unfiltered version and left.

If you've recently compared the versions of the web you

Generally the simplest way to handle making sure that system emailworks is to set your machines up with a'null client' mailer configuration that dumps all of their outgoingmail on a single designated smarthost machine. When you are settingthis up, it is natural to use the same machine and mailer configurationthat you have for users, with the exception that you don't requireyour machines to do SMTP authentication before they send email.

That 'with the exception' I threw in there is the sign of theimportant

We have a central log server , which as youmight imagine is a machine we care about a fair bit. Today wediscovered that one of the disks in its software RAID mirror for /var had failed. Perhaps you are thinking that it failed over theuniversity's just-ended winter break, so let me be more honest andprecise here: it had failed in late October. And we didn't so much'find' that the disk had failed as stumble over the fact more orless through

Today, one of our ZFS fileservers paniced.The panic itself is quite straightforward:

genunix: I/O to pool 'fs0-core-01' appears to be hung.genunix: ffffff007a0c5a20 zfs:vdev_deadman+10b ()[...]genunix: ffffff007a0c5af0 zfs:spa_deadman+ad ()[...]

The spa_deadman function is to be

It's pretty common for software to support setting various sortsof time limits on operations, often in extensive detail. You canoften set retry counts and so on as well. All of this is naturalbecause it generally maps quite well to the low level operationsthat the software itself can set internal limits on, so you getthings like the OpenSSH client ConnectTimeout setting, whichbasically controls how long ssh will wait for its connect() system call to succeed.

More and more, I have come to feel that

I have historically not had much love for extra access controlsystems layered on top of Linux, such as SELinux .We don't have very high opinions of Ubuntu's AppArmor system either and have mostly avoideddealing with it, but after recently having to do things with it Ihave to say that it's at least not particularly obnoxious.

What drove us to having something to do with AppArmor at all wasthat it keeps getting restarted every so often on machines wherewe let users run MySQL daemons (for

I have an enduring peculiar interest in new editors, or at leastthe nifty sounding ones. I tend to read about interesting soundingnew ones like kakoune ( via ), andI keep track of a few here and there, like vis . But increasingly often when Ido this I wind up feeling that I'm engaging in what is basicallyan intellectual exercise, not something that's ever going to havea practical outcome where I find a new editor I want to add to myenvironment.

There are probably

One day, I'm not sure exactly when, I stumbled over the standard readline binding of M-. for 'yank-last-arg'. The description you can findin your local readline manpage may be a little abstract, so here'sthe simplified version: M-. inserts whatever was the last wordon the previous command line into your current command line.

Did you perhaps type:

$ ls *some*[Cc]omplex*pattern

and now you want to grep through files matching

Go is generally a minimal language as faras both language keywords and features go. It's not quite down to Scheme level minimalism , it's farmore pragmatic than that, but it does try to be small. In amongthis smallness, one thing may stand out; I'm thinking of the incrementand decrement statements ,' i++ ' and ' j-- '.

There's strictly speaking no need for these to exist. Since Go makesthem statements instead of operators, they