I recently read Drew Crawford's Conduct unbecoming of a hacker ( via ), whichargues that you should basically always accept other people's patchesfor your software unless they are clearly broken. Lest we bristle atthis, he gives the example of Firefox and illustrates how many patchesit accepts.On the whole I sympathize with this view, and I've even had somepragmatic experience with it; a patch to mxiostat that I wasn't veryenthusiastic about initially has actually become something I useroutinely.

Back when our fileserver environment was young,I built a number of local tools and scripts that relied on ' zpoolstatus ' to get information about pools, pool states, and so on. Theproblem with using ' zpool status ' is of course that it is not an API,it's something intended for presentation to users, and so as a resultpeople feel free to change its output from time to time. At the timeusing zpool 's output seemed like the best option despite this, or more

I've mentioned in the past that we rely on a commercial anti-spam systemfor our spam filtering. What I haven't mentioned is that it isn'tsupported on and doesn't run on any version of Ubuntu after Ubuntu10.04 LTS. 10.04 is now rather long in the tooth and with the impendingrelease of Ubuntu 14.04 it will fall out of support in a bit over ayear. This doesn't leave us completely up

My office workstation runs on two mirrored disks. For various reasonsthe mirroring is split; the root filesystem, swap, and /boot aredirectly on software RAID while things like my home directoryfilesystem are on LVM on top of software RAID. Today I had one ofthose two disks fail when I rebooted after applying a kernel upgrade;much to my surprise this caused the entire boot process to fail .

The direct cause of the boot failure was that none of the LVM-basedfilesystems could be mounted. At first

This is kind of a war story.

The whole saga started with a modern, sophisticated, Internet enabledprojector, one that supports 'network projection' where you use softwareto feed it things to display instead of connecting to a VGA port orthe like. This is quite handy because an increasing number of devicesthat people want to do presentations from simply do not have a spareVGA port, for example tablets. This network projection requires specialsoftware and, as we found out, this software absolutely does not workif

It all started with a tweet by @Twirrim :

DNS TTL records exist for a reason. For the love of all that is holy,honour them. Don't presume to think you know better.

On the one hand, as a sysadmin I'm in full agreement with this view. Icertainly want all of the DNS caches and recursive DNS servers outthere to respect the TTLs we set on our DNS entries and it makes meirritated when people don't . On theother hand I also have

Matt Simmons recently wrote Just what we need ... another packagemanager ,in which he has an unhappy reaction to yet another language introducingyet another package manager. As a sysadmin I've long agreed withhim for all sorts of reasons. Packagingand managing language 'packages' is an ongoing problem and in ourenvironment it also causes user heartburn when we have to turn downrequests to install language packages through the language's ownmechanisms.

(We have a strong policy that we only install official distributionpackages

One of our fileservers locked up thisevening for completely inexplicable reasons (possibly it had simply beenup too long). These fileservers are still SunFire X2200s and I wound updiagnosing the problem and rebooting the server using the X2200's builtin lights out management and remote console over IP functionality (oftenknown as 'KVM over IP'). While I could have power cycled the machinewithout the ILOM (it's on a smart PDU that we can also control

When I talked about how avoiding reboots should not become afetish I mentioned that I trusted rebootinga server more than bringing it to single user mode and then backto multiuser. Today I feel like amplifying this.

The simple version is that it's easy for omissions to hide in the'stop' handling of services if they are not normally stopped andrestarted. When you reboot the machine after the 'stop' stuff runs,the reboot hides these errors. If you don't quite completely cleanup /