So you've carefully isolated your management interfaces , making sure that packets can't leak fromone side to another because they literally can't see the other side.You're safe, right?

Well, not quite. While an attacker can't get their own packets across toyour management interface, they may still be able to trick things onyour machine into generating outgoing packets for them. There's a numberof cases:

• packets with a management origin to your management IP: this should

I admit that every so often the freakish superintelligence of the GNUversions of programs has its appeal. Consider, say, units :

You have: 7 feet + 2.5 inchYou want: mm        * 2197.1        / 0.00045514542

GNU date is another good one:

; date -d 'last sunday'Sun Apr 13 00:00:00 EDT 2008

Or even better:

; date -d

One of my little computer terrors is that someday I won't be able tofind good quality plain three button mice any more, because everyonewill have stopped making them. In fact it may already be too late to getdecent USB three button mice, which worries me; although I have a stashof PS/2 ones, I may someday have to migrate to a USB-only machine.

(Searching the web is basically no help in finding out, and since I havea reasonably large stash of suitable

Setting up isolated interfaces can seem like a lot of work that has relatively little point, butthere is at least one important case for them: management interfaces onmachines that route traffic.

Consider your typical garden variety routing firewall. Let us assumethat you do not want to make it directly accessible on its outsiderouter IP, because then the outside world could attack it, or any of itsnormal inside IPs, because then compromised machines inside your networkcould attack it. So you give it a connection to your management

We're not interested in the Eee as anything approaching a conventionallaptop; we're interested in it as what I'll call a sysadmin's walkaroundmachine, something I can take with me to get access to our real machines,troubleshoot problems, and plug into hardware. The Eee is appealing forthis primarily because it is really cheap and runs Linux; that it is alsosmall and light is an extra benefit.

(We care about really cheap because it makes it feasible to buy everyonetheir own

I'm quite familiar with Firefox's weird remote control because I've been exploiting it for years inmy peculiar environment (enough years that when I started doing it, Iwas using Netscape Navigator instead). As you might guess, the overallgoal of my environment is to keep the browser running all the time,because back in the days when I started doing this the browser startedeven more slowly than it does now.

To stay running, Firefox needs to have a window open, so I keep

Sparked by comments on a recent entry , it occurs tome that there are at least two cultural views of what comments on a blogare there for:

• comments as a conversation on or sparked by the original entry.
• comments as a convenient central place where people can put theirreactions and replies to the entry.

(There are undoubtedly other views that I'm not thinking of.)

I clearly tend to think of comments as the former, not the latter, butthe latter is a perfectly sensible thing too and

For a long time, I was not at all fond of XML. The grandiose claims ofuniversal document exchanges, universal editors, and so on were clearlybogus; as lots of people said, understanding the syntax gives you noclue about the semantics. It all smelled of hype and overselling, withXML the latest in a long line of next big things for the enterpriseymarket.

Then it struck me one day :

XML is a great way to not write a parser .

If you need to write and then read

I read (or sometimes skim) a relatively decent number of blogs, and assomeone who writes one too I wind up noticing various aspects of theexperience. One of the things I've noticed is that I am both quitepredictable and quite divided about reading comments on entries; thereare some blogs where I always read the comments and there are a lotwhere I never do, but there are almost none where I sometimes read themand sometimes don't.

In thinking about this, I think that there