One of the things that our frontend anti-spam system does is opt-in greylisting for people who don'tmind the downsides of it. One of the decisions you need to make withgreylisting is how long sending mail servers have to wait before you'llaccept their message; right now, our system is configured with a delayof an hour.

It doesn't have this delay because I thought carefully about it, or didresearch. It has an hour delay because that's the standard default

Suppose, as Phil Hollenback does , thatyou blog with a simple wiki environment not by augmenting it with blogfeatures but by outsourcing the chronological navigation to Twitter,Facebook, and the other social networking environments where many ofyour readers probably already are. After all of this, is there any realdifference between writing a blog and writing wiki articles?

My answer is yes.

(A disclaimer: this is a philosophical digression from what I believethat Phil Hollenback is doing, which is more or less using a simplewiki

To follow up on my earlier entry on this , it'samazing what you discover when you take the time go through mdb 's fullonline help. In particular, if you have an NFS fileserver you can easilysee all NFS locks that it knows about, complete with the remote hold andeven the full filename.

The basic mdb -k command we want is ::nlm_lockson , which doeswhat you might expect from the name. The state field values that Iknow about are '3'

I'm not very far along in my adventures with Django so far (which meansthat I spend a lot of time trying to make Django do things in wrong andnon-Django ways), but I've played around enough with Django's admininterface to have worked out one important thing: I could fritter awayendless amounts of time fine-tuning it to get everything just right .

I'm the kind of person who already fiddles endlessly with the finedetails of the output formats of my programs

To follow up on the last entry , what I amusing Django for is (re)writing our account request handling system.The simple version of how people get accounts here is a three stepprocess. The would-be user tells us at least their desired Unix login,their name, their email address, and which professor is sponsoringthem. We ask the professor if they actually want to sponsor the person'saccount; if the professor says yes, we create the account and email therequester with details

I've finally gotten to do something with Django , and naturally this has left mewrestling with schema design. This is the first time I've used an ORMand I find that I'm being pulled two ways, neither of which I thinkare right.

(I'll pause here to note that the data I have to keep track of inthis application is tiny, on the order of a few hundred rows intotal. I'm using Django's ORM support because this gives me

Through my Referer logs, I stumbled over this reply to my earlier entry on the FHS , which points out /srv as the answer to my criticisms. However, as the author of it notes:

[...] Then again I haven't seen any package management that doessomething to /srv [...]

Well, yeah. That's the problem; no one uses it. The FHS in theory mightinclude /srv to deal with my exact criticisms, but it doesn't

Back a month or so ago, Slashdot ran a story about how a lot of the people who are very positive on thin clientsdon't actually use one themselves and instead use what they call'fat clients' (ie, regular computers). That started me thinkingabout the general issue because it sort of applies here; we have athin client infrastructure, yet neither I nor any of my fellowsysadmins here uses it. In fact I don't use either a thin clientor what I consider a

I think that the FHS is a good attempt,and any standard like that certainly has to say something about whereprograms like databases and web servers should put their data filesby default. But at the same time it is stupid, and you do not want tofollow it in serious production; instead you really do want to relocatethe data directories of various programs to different places, even inthe face of things like SELinux.

(Of course I argue that the solution is to turn SELinux off .)

For a