Fedora 18's texlive package has a problem. Actually it has at least twoproblems, one of which makes it our problem. The first problem is thatother packages require bits of it to be installed; this is the onlyreason I have any texlive packages installed. The second problem is thatthe TexLive package maintainers have chosen to split it up into a trulyabsurd number of sub-packages. Many of these sub-packages are small,only a few kilobytes (some are below a kilobyte),

One of the things that is more or less a FAQ in ZFS circles is why ZFSdoesn't need an equivalent of fsck and why people asking for it arewrong. Unfortunately, the ZFS people making that argument are, in theend, wrong because they have not fully understood the purpose of fsck .

Fsck has two meta-purposes (as opposed to its direct purposes ). The obvious one is checking and repairingfilesystem consistency when the filesystem gets itself into aninconsistent state due to sudden power failure or the

I recently took another shot at trying to get rid of my long-runningFirefox performance problems , which I hadnarrowed down to garbage collection stalls resulting from memorybloat . The good news is that I seem to havefound what was causing my memory problems. The bad news is that it'sin extensions that I more or less care about.

The first necessary disclaimer is that I haven't gone through thepainstaking work to test extensions in isolation (especially in mynormal browsing environment). What I can

On my work machine I have been very slowly migrating away from apair of old drives to a pair of new drives. For quite a while the only thing the old drives have been used forhas been booting from and holding /boot ; today I finally removed thesingle surviving old disk and moved to booting off the new disks. Itturned out to be somewhat more involved than I expected.

The initial state was /dev/sda as the old drive with /boot as aplain filesystems, /dev/

Pretty much all of the coverage about the recent DNS amplification DDoSattacks, including advice to sysadmins, has been about open recursiveDNS servers and how they are bad. I followed the issue enough to checkthat none of our subnets appeared in the recently-available databasesof open recursive DNS servers and otherwise ignored it.

It turns out that this is not good enough, because authoritative DNSservers can be used for DNS amplification DDoS attacks too . Attackersprefer open recursive DNS servers because it's easy to use them to

I am generally fond of OpenBSD's PF packet filter but every so often Irun across a seemingly arbitrary limitation that drives me up the wall.Today's limitation is on where you can redirect packets to as part ofNAT'ing and general address translation. I'll start by sketching out asimplified version of the problem I'm trying to solve.

Part of our complex networking setup is a scheme where specific internalmachines, sitting on 'sandbox' subnets in private address space, can bereached

I tweeted :

Dear every project that doesn't have an URL for their tarballs that iseasily wget'able: ha ha. Very funny. Please stop. #sysadmin

Let me expand on this a bit. First, I'll give a pass to everyone who hasaccess-restricted downloads; there is no good way to make them easilyfetched. This is for everyone else, all of the various projects thathave public downloads.

Here is the thing: sysadmins are not necessarily browsing your websiteon the

In light of what the listen(2) backlog parameter actually means , ie very little, you might sensibly wonder whyit has such an odd and basically useless definition. For instance, itmight be quite useful to be able to put a real limit on the number ofTCP connections that have been fully established but not accept() 'd byyour server.

The simple answer is that the listen(2) backlog is not about helpingyour program out, it is about limiting how many kernel resources can be