In reaction to comments on his entry The Other Way , MattPalmer wrote in part about my concerns about office switch uplinkbandwidth for sysadmin drops (in WiringForSysadminsII ):

[...] What I question is the need for constant, sustained gigabit overan extended period to another isolated machine such that you need adedicated link to them.

I sort of half-agree that sysadmin machines and drops don't needconstant, sustained gigabit bandwidth (although I'm not entirelysure about that). But what

In more or less reply to my last entry on wiring offices forsysadmins , I got a tweet:

@thatcks 2 drops is enough. Deskswitch per sysadmin + vlans and bob's your uncle

(I can't find the tweet in the person's public stream right now so I'mnot going to attribute it. Maybe I should paraphrase it instead ofquoting directly, but any paraphrase would probably be longer.)

I thought of this, but there are three reasons why this doesn't

Our office full of sysadmins has a network wiring problem: we don'thave enough. Watching how we've dealt with this problem has given mesome opinions on how you should wire an office area for sysadmins inspecific, as opposed to just general usage.

In a conventionally wired office area, all of the drops (networkports) run back to a big wiring closet (generally one to a flooror so) or even all the way back to your machine room. In the wiringcloset or machine

A while back I wrote about someone looking for long-term archivesof 10 to 20 Tbytes of data with the conclusion beingthat you shouldn't try to build archives, just a live fileserver. As ithappens, I have a theory about why the question was asked in the firstplace; I think that many of our sysadmin instincts about disk space aremiscalibrated for the modern world.

To put it simply, I suspect that a lot of sysadmins come from a timewhen 10 or 20

Last time, I talked about Python 3 from the perspective of a Unixsysadmin . Today I want to talk about Python 3 from theperspective of someone who has a not insignificant amount of currentPython code. I don't have huge (by Python standards) programs, but I dohave various things (not all large) currently runninglive, for real, doing things that I care about.

Recently I read Armin Ronacher's Thoughts on Python 3 , wherehe wrote (among other things):

Because

(Once again it's been a while since the last little script .)

One of the things that we do reasonably often around here is install andreinstall servers. When we do this, the server's SSH host key changes(either permanently or temporarily until we can restore its canonicalkey), and of course then ssh'ing in to the newly reinstalled servercomplains about host key mismatches.

A while back I got tired of having to deal with this by hand, so Idecided to automate it

Mark wrote a comment on my note about nssh :

A warning about 'StrictHostKeyChecking no' by default. I had the samethought as you did, and tested the behavior. When set to 'no', sshwill connect anyway if the host key changes and you're using publickey auth (it will print a warning, and disable password based authhowever), which doesn't prevent a man in the middle attack if theperson has access to your public key (which it's very likely

Here's an aphorism:

Any tragedy or political turmoil will be immediately seized on byadvance fee fraud spammers as part of their come-on messages.

Be it the invasion of Iraq, a tragic tsunami, a big airplane crash, orthe overthrow of the despotic Libyan government, you can be confidentthat soon your email will have messages from, say, the relative of aformer regime member who needs your help to get some money out of thecountry.

This is a fine aphorism except that once I started

Colin Percival's POSIX close(2) is broken points out this bit in the POSIX specification for close() :

If close() is interrupted by a signal that is to be caught, it shallreturn -1 with errno set to [EINTR] and the state of fildes isunspecified .

(The same thing is true for an IO error during close, so this is really'if something goes wrong, the state of fildes is unspecified'.)

Colin rightfully considers this crazy, because it means