Here's something important for file ownership on web servers:

The user that the web server runs as should not own anything that the webserver serves.

This means that the web server's user shouldn't own anything under thedocument root or in CGI areas, and there shouldn't be any writeabledirectories under either that it can use to put things in. Stronglyresist the temptation to have CGIs write data files under the CGI areaor in the docroot, even if they are normally blocked from being

For a long time, whenever we installed systems we didn't bother to beterribly specific about where they were located, which generally comesup when you get asked about time zones. For example, a lot of thingsdefault to 'America/New York', and since that's in the Eastern timezone a lot of the time we said 'sure, whatever' and went on.

The recent American DST rule change illustrates that this is nowhazardous; it is now important to actually be specific about

Many years ago, I went to a talk about a new object oriented operatingsystem (a research project, obviously). The presenter made a big dealabout how everything in, eg, their filesystem was an object, and sothings were very general and you could put anything in the directoryobjects, and as they went on I noticed something disturbing: while youcould put all those different things into directories, none of themseemed to have the same set of methods; in fact, the methods wereoften significantly

This week, we:

• got 11,321 messages from 292 different IP addresses.
• handled 18,443 sessions from 1,247 different IP addresses.
• received 176,017 connections from at least 61,753 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 7 connections being checked at once.

This is slightly up from last week ,especially the number of different IP addresses hitting us.The drop in email messages may be because we'

The simple answer: reporting spam to ISPs is not an effective way tomake the spam stop.

My job is to protect my users (or just myself) from spam, not tohelp ISPs police their customers and clean up their spam problems.Complaining to ISPs is no longer an effective way to do my actual job,if it ever was; blocking spammers, spam sources, and ISPs is, though.Once I have dealt with the problem, complaining to the ISP is at bestdonating my time and effort

I've now used Solaris 10 off and on long enough to have something of anopinion on it. I could write an entry along the lines of my reactionsto Solaris 9 , but I can summarize it simply:for me, nothing really fundamental or revolutionary has changed betweenSolaris 9 and Solaris 10, and the whole Solaris 10 experience leaves meonly a bit more enthused than I was with Solaris 9.

Or, in short: Solaris 10 is just a warmed-over, slightly tuned

One of the little hassles with hardware that can be managed over thenetwork is the bootstrapping problem: it has to somehow get an IPaddress so that you can manage it and give it the right IP address. Overthe years, vendors have come up with any number of solutions to this,such as the ever-popular 'give it an initial static IP address and it'sup to you to arrange a host that can talk to it'.

Recently we ran into a piece of hardware that has the

Here's a philosophical question: what do Unix errno values mean?

One possible meaning is that they are hints about why your systemcall failed. Another possible meaning is that they specify what wentwrong; in the extreme, a system call can only fail for certain specificreasons, each of which is associated with a specific errno value.

Errno as a hint is essentially the traditional Unix view. V7 Unix didn'teven document specific error returns for system calls, and Bell Labstook it to the logical

Once, long ago, I did a distributed computing project course where Itried to speed up a drawing program by moving its expensive floatingpoint calculations (I believe it needed to calculate square roots forsomething) to a machine with a much faster CPU and floating point. Weused Sun's RPC/XDR for this because it was both a great match for whatwe were doing and the obvious choice at the time, among other reasons.

Rather to our surprise the drawing program just didn't get much faster