Here's a classical Unix tape gotcha:

mt -f /dev/st0 fsf 5

If you're lucky when you make this mistake, you were fsf 'ing thetape to read from it, and it is merely embarrassing and time-wasting.

The difference between normal and no-rewind tape devices is that onerewinds the tape when you use it and the other doesn't. More precisely,the tape is rewound when the tape device is closed for the last time(usually as the

I just finished filing Fedora Core Bugzilla #217080 . Betweendoing research to see if this was already a solved or known problem,gathering all the information, and actually writing everything down,it probably took me around three hours. (And I already have a Red HatBugzilla account and know how to use Bugzilla, or it would have takenlonger.)

This isn't particularly atypical; writing even decent bug reports issimply a lot of work, much of it tedious and/or

One of the little things that ssh does is that it checks and maintainshost keys using exactly and only the name you used on the command line;it doesn't canonicalize the name. (Well, not much; these days it willalso try the IP address that the name resolves to.)

The problem around here is that the names of machines can be specifiedin all sorts of different ways, because of domain search paths; oftenwe have bare name, bare name plus the subdomain, and then two

Sometimes I write little scripts partly in order toplay around with a command I haven't used before. Such is the case withtoday's script, which I have unimaginatively called bsearch-nums . Hereit is:

#!/bin/sh# usage: bsearch-nums START ENDlo=$1; hi=$2while [ $lo -lt $hi ]; do  mid=`echo $lo $hi +2/p | dc`  echo "try: $mid"

In the traditional illustrated form:

; metastat fs5/d40
metastat: sandiego.cs: fs5: set name is inconsistent

Almost all DiskSuite commands that deal with disk sets will accept fsN/dN to specify the set and the disk at once, and metastat itselfproduces output in this form. But metastat refuses to accept it asinput; instead you have to use ' metastat -s fs5 d40 '.

This isn't just a cosmetic issue. The fsN/dNN format is

This week, we:

• got 15,266 messages from 269 different IP addresses.
• handled 22,009 sessions from 1,693 different IP addresses.
• received 897,934 connections from at least 48,417 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 10 connections being checked at once.

Just like last time , that is not a typo (andnothing on the system was affected enough to make me notice it beforenow,

I just got yet another prompt about certificate issues on the occasionof visiting yet another website (I think because it had a self-signedcertificate, but who can tell with Firefox's dialog about it?). And allthis reminded me of how badly implemented SSL is in web browsers.

There are three actual good things that can be done with SSL: encryptingthe conversation, stopping man in the middle attacks, and certifyingthat the website is in some sense trustworthy. The web SSL experienceis so bad

Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces ismore or less what it sounds like. I could wish that the sarcasm wasmore biting, but that would probably be ungracious and besides, it'sfrom SAP.

(From Greg Wilson .)

Ah, the good old days, when Unix was Unix:

awk: record ` Continue reading...

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