Here's something that I want: I want a version control system (ideally adistributed one) that can preserve file timestamps. I'm looking for sucha weird feature because I happen to have created something that I want to put under version control where (some of the) filetimestamps are significant and need to be preserved.

(This is yet another hazard of using files as entries , albeit in a slightly different form.)

This is an uncommon feature in version control systems at the best oftimes

Wietse Venema's tcpwrappers is mostly used forcontrolling access to services run from inetd or your local equivalent,where you are not expecting high performance or high load. However, itcan be built as a library that you link your daemon against, and somedaemons are.

(At least on Linux, both OpenSSH and the portmapper are built thisway.)

It turns out that there is a small drawback to using tcpwrappers thisway in some sorts of high-performance applications, specifically inapplication where you expect a

There are two possible uses for Microsoft's attempt to make OOXML into an internationalstandard: documenting Microsoft Office's file formats so that thirdparties can more easily write programs that deal with them, and lettingMicrosoft claim with a relatively straight face that Microsoft Officeuses a standardized file format instead of a proprietary one.

As lots of people have pointed out at great length, examination of thedraft OOXML specification shows that it does not actually documentthe Microsoft Office document formats in enough detail for anyone to useit as

For my sins, I watch the SMTP logs on a relatively low-activity machine.Recently a number of machines started trying to send it email with theenvelope sender of support@PayPal.Inc.com , which to a human is aboutas clear a sign of phish spam as you could ask for (although computersare not that smart).

As it happens, all of the email (from all of those hosts) was rejected.Not because the mail system detected it as spam, but because there is

Or, more specifically, why sysadmins like programs written in interpretedlanguages. I say this because we do; it is one reason for the enduringpopularity of writing things in the Bourne shell, because in a sense theBourne shell is the platonic ideal of an interpreted language on Unixsystems.

Here's why I at least really like such programs:

• you don't need a different copy for every different sort of systemthat you have, because
• you don't have to compile your programs.
• thus there is

One of the things that you can do to make a complex webapplication perform better is to put a reverse proxy in front of it. On thesurface this seems counterintuitive, since you're adding an extra layerof software that does nothing but pass the traffic back and forth.

What's going on is simple: buffering. Namely, it's better to bufferreplies in the reverse proxy than to 'buffer' them in your applicationitself.

Your web application uses a certain amount of memory in the

One might perhaps accuse me of getting overly worked up about badsecurity patches . Is it really such a bigdeal if a security patch has a flaw?

My answer is yes, because there are a number of bad consequences whensecurity patches are untrustworthy:

• it discourages people from installing them. As we've seen repeatedly,having more insecure systems around endangers everyone, whetherit is on the Internet or behind your firewall.

• a broken but 'secure' machine is not really an improvement over afunctional but insecure machine

It's time to update my view of Ubuntu with my mostrecent set of feelings. Well, with why I feel my most recent setof feelings, which is that Ubuntu LTS is significantly inferiorto Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Ubuntu's LTS releases (Ubuntu 6.06 and Ubuntu 8.04) promise five yearsof support (hence the 'Long Term Support' label). This support is whywe're able to consider them, since we need more than 18 months of

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or equivalently CentOS) has any number ofthings going for it from the perspective of sysadmins, but one ofthings it does not have is user visibility. Ubuntu is the hot Linuxdistribution these days, despite its issues , withspecial acclaim for its desktop experience.

This user visibility matters, contrary to what some people believe(or would like to be the case).

A good part of why we run Ubuntu on ourcore servers is that research groups were already running Ubuntu ontheir machines