There are a number of situations where you might want to do somethinglike build a stock kernel.org kernel withthe same configuration options as a normal Fedora RPM-installed kernel.Alternately, you want to compile a Fedora kernel with a slightlydifferent set of options. These days, how to do this is slightly lessthan obvious and there is a gotcha or two.

First, you need kernel source. Fedora no longer ships an RPM withtheir kernel source all set up for you, so you have two options

Following on to NetbootProblems , there's one final problem with usingnetboot to install machines: everyone does network installs differently.With CD/DVD based installs, you throw the disc in the drive, boot themachine, and follow the installer's directions. With network installs,well, it depends; there is very little commonality on how you get tothe 'follow the installer's directions' stage.

This is the real attraction of virtual DVD-ROMs : likethe old math joke, they reduce

It is generally an article of faith that once you switch to (properlydone) CSS, you can do significant layout changes without having tochange your content. Unfortunately I believe that this is somewhat ofa myth in practice.

In practice, what you can do with CSS alone is limited to how yourcontent is structured and tagged with things like CSS classes and ids.And the problem is that generally, people do not obsessively structureand tag their content; they mark it up and tag it for what their CSS

Every so often, a vendor's support people tell me something like 'we arenot going to investigate your bug report merely because you are runningan unsupported configuration'. And by 'unsupported configuration' theydo not mean 'something explicitly documented not to work', they mean'some set of hardware and software not in our narrow list of supportedsetups'.

(Nor are the products labeled as being so fragile that they work onlyin certain limited configurations.)

There are two things I hear when vendors

There is a vital thing to remember about computer security: securityis not math, security is people . Thinking that security is math getsyou mathematical perfection and white hot disasters.

(These disasters happen for much the same reason that firewalls aredangerous: people think that they are completely protected once theyhave math on their side and thus don't take any further precautions.)

You can create the most mathematically perfect computer security systemknown to humanity and people will misuse it, or bypass it. If you makeit

Lots of Unixes have some form of 'loopback' mounts, where you can mounta bit of an existing filesystem somewhere else; they're called loopbackmounts by analogy with the loopback interface. The general idea behindthem is that they are a more efficient (and easier to use) version ofdoing an NFS mount from localhost .

(I suspect that Sun originated the idea, but I'm not sure.)

Linux's bind mounts (so called because they are done with mount--bind ,

This week, we:

• got 11,805 messages from 264 different IP addresses.
• handled 19,470 sessions from 1,321 different IP addresses.
• received 170,583 connections from at least 62,048 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 11 connections being checked at once.

We had more sessions and more IPs connecting to us this week than last week but less total connections,and your guess is as good as

Every so often, one of the places I read will have the 'what's in yourclipboard?' meme pop up. I never take part, because I have a reallyboring answer: nothing.

One of my little twitches is that I reflexively scrub my X selectionunless I'm actively using it for something, to the point where it makesme actively nervous to have a 'loaded' selection. In fact, selecting aspace in xterm and then canceling the selection is one of my littlefidget

Today we discovered that we'd accidentally done a stupid switch trick tocheat ourselves out of some link bandwidth: we'd accidentally configuredsome untagged ports on one of our top-level switches to also carry sometagged VLANs.

(Normally you configure switch ports in one of two ways: either theycarry one untagged VLAN and nothing else, or they carry some taggedVLANs and no untagged traffic.)

This is effectively invisible, because the regular traffic is stillflowing, and nothing complains about the extra stuff.