Theoretically, the usual way to set up your dual-headedsystem on a modern machine that uses the modern XRandR extension is to run xrandr onceyou've logged in to set things up. Suppose that you are not happy withthis; you want your system to be properly dual-headed from the momentthat X lights the display. This means that you need to have RandR set upin your xorg.conf .

(Alternately, you can hope that your Linux version has a graphical Xconfigurator that understands how

The problem with ' mount -t nfs ' is that it can't make up its mindabout what NFS mount options it lists. Is its purpose to list all of theNFS mount options, or is its purpose to list only user-supplied ones?Right now the answer is some peculiar mixed blend; most of the timeit lists only user-supplied options, but sometimes it will also listadditional ones.

I care about this because I have programs that parse mount 's output to seeif we

The problem with the simple approach to scrubbing your ZFS pools (justdo ' zpool scrub ... ' every so often) is that ZFS pool scrubs putenough of a load on our systems that we don't want to do them duringthe week and we don't want to do more than one of them at once (well,not more than one per fileserver). And we certainly don't want to haveto manage the whole process by hand. So recently I wrote a script to

I discovered recently that I missed a case in my writeup of whenbash sources your .bashrc , or technically I didn'tmiss a case because bash has an inexplicable omission: bash doesn'tsource your .bashrc when you ssh in with a pty. That is, if youdo:

ssh -t host command ...

Your .bashrc is not sourced. Neither does bash source your .login (well, of course).

This was an unpleasant surprise when I found it out recently, since

It turns out that I can get something that more or less does what Iwanted sshmenu to do (per yesterday's entry ).In email Dan Astoorian pointed me at the Gnome 'Command Line' appletand that it has macro capabilities; you can define a pattern and acommand to run (using bits of the pattern) when the pattern matches the'command' that you type. Thus, you can hijack it into a 'ssh sessionlauncher' with suitable patterns.

The current patterns and commands that

There's a hot debate about whether VCSes should allow developers to'rewrite history' ( in the git sense ). The usual wayto frame the options can be wrapped up as a question: should the VCSallow developers to rewrite history, or forbid it? Put this way, a fairnumber of people will incline towards 'no'.

But this is a misleading and wrong question, because it quietly assumesthat the VCS can actually stop people from rewriting history. Thisis incorrect; no VCS that has

I don't use Gnome on my primary machine (it runs a peculiar, entirelycustom environment), but I do use it on a number of secondary machinesand I keep making more or less the same customizations each time. So I'mwriting them down, if only for my own reference on the next machine.

• I disable gnome-terminal's blinking cursor .

• I turn CapsLock into an additional Ctrl. This is in the Keyboardpreferences area, Layout tab, 'Layout options' button, and

I recently ran across MC/S vs MPIO , which is about why iSCSI's 'multipleconnections per session' feature is apparently considered a bad ideaand is not likely to be implemented in Linux, the short summary beingthat it is an iSCSI specific duplication of generic multipathingfunctionality. Unfortunately, I sort of disagree with this in practice.

In theory I don't care about how my multipathing is done, I just wantsomething that makes general iSCSI multipathing work right. In practice,right now generic multipathing

Suppose that you have a 'sender stores message' email system, and thatyou protect yourself against the sender rewriting the message after it'sinitially sent by sending and verifying a secure hash of the messagebefore you show the message to the user. To follow up a recent entry , here are the social and technical issuesthat I can see with this hash protection scheme.

First and largest, you have a social issue; users are going to reactbadly to 'this message is (minorly) corrupt so I