Red Hat 7.3 came out in the summer of 2002, but much to various people'shorror you can still find it on servers (along with Red Hat 7.2, anotherperennial favorite). I think that there are at least two reasons forthis, and they work together in combination.

First, Red Hat 7.3 was the last Red Hat release until Fedora Core 2where you could run a stock kernel. From Red Hat 8 through FC 1, youneeded a

This week, we:

• got 12,325 messages from 286 different IP addresses.
• handled 19,040 sessions from 1,240 different IP addresses.
• received 170,841 connections from at least 51,674 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 17 connections being checked at once.

This is slightly up from last week ,which just means it's within normal fluctuations. The per daytable is flatter this time around

One of the things that you hear over and over again is thatorganizations, including universities, often prefer to buy commercialsoftware instead of using open source (or building somethingthemselves). Often the ostensible reason is that when you buy from acompany, there is a legal entity that will provide support, or be heldaccountable when something doesn't work, or the like, and open sourcedoesn't have that.

System administrators often find this laughable, peculiar, andidiotic, and cannot understand why the

I would feel a lot more positive about vendorsupport if I didn't wind up wanting to grindmy teeth most times I had to interact with it. And one of the mostteeth-grinding aspects of it is the almost invariable feeling that thevendor support people are interacting with me not to solve the problembut to pawn me off with some (formulaic) answer.

One of the most glaring ways that this shows up is the generalassumption by front line support people that I don't actually have a

One of the charms of blogging is that you get to make mistakes inpublic. So, I'll start off by saying that I have to retract some of whatI said in CSSvsTables , because a CSS column-based layout can be moreaccessible than a table-based one in some situations.

This is because one important part of accessibility is putting theimportant or changing content first in your raw HTML, and yournavigation and other boring stuff second (so that screen readers andother things that more or less

According to the ZFS documentation for the current official Solaris 10release (I don't know about the state of OpenSolaris builds, and they'renot of interest to us anyways), you cannot make a storage pool that is amirror of RAID-Z2 pools.

(You can indirectly construct a mirror of RAID-5 pools, by building theRAID-5 pools with the Solaris Volume Manager instead of ZFS itself.)

We want some form of RAID-6 instead of RAID-5 because

A lot of people like Google Mail, and it's not hard to see why; theyhave the best webmail interface, offer lots of storage, and so on. Sowhy not just cut to the chase and make our users happy by outsourcingour email to Google Mail?

The answer in a nutshell is that we'd like a Google Mail Appliance, butthe university is not in any position to make Google Mail our emailprovider.

There's a bunch of pragmatic reasons why outsourcing email would be

It's an article of faith in modern web page creation that using tablesfor layout, especially column-based layout, is an evil hack and thatusing CSS instead is virtuous, proper, and accessible. (These peopleprobably turn up their noses at WanderingThoughts ' table-based layout,which has its reasons .)

I have news for these people: it isn't so. Using CSS floats for layoutis still using a hack. In fact, it's using a worse hack; at least

Presented in the traditional illustrated form:

# chkconfig ntpd || echo not runningnot running# chkconfig --add ntpd# chkconfig ntpd || echo not runningnot running

I like Red Hat's chkconfig , but its --add option is so badlymisnamed it winds up irritating me half the time I use it. Oneindication of how bad it is is that the chkconfig manpage needs touse a paragraph to half explain it, and the explanation is exceedinglytechnical.

Part of the problem is that chkconfig is