Coming from an environment where we just put everything on shelves in racks , I have to say thatproper rack mounting is kind of neat, but rack rails irritate me. It'sall because of one simple little problem:

Why, oh why, can't people agree on a single sort of rails?

(Or at least a single sort of rails for things of each rack unit , so you'd have 1U rails and 2Urails and 3U rails and so on.)

We have

As far as I can see, the inevitable result of having several differentroot passwords across your systems is that a smart intruder whocompromises /bin/su on a single system will sooner or later collect all your root passwords.

(Or perhaps other people are better than we are at typing the right rootpassword at the current Password: prompt.)

(Please do not suggest sudo as the solution. For a start, we'd stillwant actual root passwords that are distinct from our own passwords.)

From a blog entry on the problem of email spam:

Charging even $0.0001 per message would make spam uneconomic, but aswith signing and other proposals, it seems socially infeasible.

There is a widespread attitude among computer people that it is a greatpity that their beautiful solutions to difficult technical challengesare being prevented from working merely by some pesky social issues,and that the problem is solved once the technical work is done.This attitude misses the point, especially in system administration:broadly speaking

One of the common suggestions for fixing the email spam problem isto charge a small (often nominal) fee for email. Ignoring all of theproblems with implementing such a scheme, and ignoring all of the peoplewho would be violently against it, we can ask an important question:would it actually work?

Let's turn that around and ask the reverse question: has charging forpaper mail stopped paper mail spam? Clearly the answer is no; mostpeople get lots of junk mail, despite the senders having

Lighttpd is a popular lightweight webserver I've been experimenting with; in the process, I've woundup stumbling over various things that I should write down this time around (I played around with lighttpd about a year ago but then forgot a bunch of this stuff).

• unlike Apache, lighttpd's error log is global; there's only one, notone per virtual host. If you accidentally set server.errorlog multiple times (perhaps in virtual host setups), only the last onegets

From Lawrence Oluyede's blog entry about recent Python SVN updates:

• urllib raises IOError if the servers response contains an invalidHTTP status line.

Augh. Wait, that's not strong enough, let me try again: AUGH .

In fact, it gets worse. To quote from the urrlib2 SVN sourcecode's comment about its URLError error class:

URLError is a sub-type of IOError, but it doesn't share any ofthe implementation. [...]

(urllib2 also directly

This week, we:

• got 12,348 messages from 259 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,799 sessions from 1,226 different IP addresses.
• received 171,239 connections from at least 53,794 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 28 connections being checked at once.

Somewhat to my surprise, volume is down again from last week , although the concurrent connections highwateris up a lot.

One of the more subtle advantages of full hardware virtualization isthat your virtualized hardware always stays the same, no matter whatactual hardware you happen to be running on. This is a real advantagefor license servers, which are often nodelocked with various crazyschemes that assume you are trying to cheat on them if you changehardware.

(Sure, the company might fix the problem for us. If they're still inbusiness, still interested in our business, still having anything to dowith that ancient version of the

From Robert Brewer comes You are what you code ,which has given me something to think about. I'll quote the opening:

Hey, you. Do you realize what you're writing? The long-standing ITjoke is that you always end up coding your own job out of existence.But what are you coding yourself into ?

(From Planet Python , where his blog isaggregated.)

Update: I apologize to my readers for putting a link here that doesn'twork without an extra,