There are two general approaches to coping with the various environmentsof Unix accounts that I've seen people adopt. The first is taking thedefault environment that each system comes with (perhaps with minimaland easy customization for stuff that really bugs you); the second isbuilding a completely customized personal environment that you then drageverywhere.

(To stereotype, people who follow the first sort feel that life is tooshort to spend futzing with your environment when the one that someoneelse worries about works well enough, while the

Something that you can do on a modern Linux system by accident:

mount -t nfs -o hard,intr,rw localhost:/ /

(instead of mounting it on /mnt , as I had intended.)

It is surprisingly hard to recover from this. In fact, I don't think Isucceeded, and I wound up having to reboot. At the same time, I don'tthink anything broke, so I theoretically could have kept on running themachine like that.

(Why you

We got email today from a machine called 'server1.ghettowebhosting.net'(IP address 72.29.85.194).

It was advance fee fraud spam. Truth in advertising strikes again!

(I have to wonder about the mindset that makes anyone name theirbusiness something like that. Especially when they are apparently abranch of 'Complet-Inet', and say they have multiple data centers withOC-48 connections; this doesn't sound too 'ghetto

I've run into a few websites that do some of their input validation onforms and the like entirely in Javascript. If you are tempted to dothis, please don't; not only is it dangerous to you, it's annoying tousers.

It's annoying to users due to what can happen to innocent users whotry to use your forms with JavaScript turned off; if your forms arestill submittable, the user can wind up unintentionally creating baddata in your system. This is usually

One of the peculiar things you find atuniversities (and probably almost nowhere else) is expensive hardwarewithout any sort of maintenance contract. This is usually not the resultof insanity combined with cheapness, but instead the result of companiesdonating hardware to researchers.

Computer makers love to donate hardware, because the cost to them isjust the manufacturing cost (at most), but they get credit (probablyincluding tax writeoffs) for the full list price, even if no one isactually buying the hardware at that price.

I have a fixed personal opinion that systems should not spew kernelmessages in the course of normal system operation, and especially notover the console. As I am busy finding out, yet again, SELinux failsthis test in at least some circumstances on Fedora Core 5.

(Possibly the circumstances were odd, since my FC5 install hadn'tmanaged to run the 'firstboot' stuff due to the un-upgraded X servercrashing on this machine's hardware. Still, I brought it up in a normal

Here's my current thoughts on how big system filesystems (or partitions,depending on what you like to call them) should be for new systems. Thisassumes that you have lots of disk space to play aroundwith.

Also, note that I run non stripped down Fedora Core systems; in fact, Ihave a tropism towards installing most everything in sight, just so Ihave its documentation handy in case I need to poke at it. A strippeddown system would fit in much, much less.

One

When I was looking around the /var on my Fedora Core 5 scratchmachine to see where all the disk space was being used as part of the last entry , I was startled to discoverthat /var/log/btmp was a 100M file (and by far the largest thing in /var/log ). This was a surprise to me, because I had never heard of thefile before.

It turns out that btmp is used to record bad logins (some of youare already wincing

Recently, I've run into a situation where I have an ASCII stringrepresenting a time, expressed in UTC/GMT, and I want to convert it tothe standard Unix representation of seconds since the epoch.It turns out that there are some interesting issues involved (well,in my opinion).

Doing this for a time string in local time is a snap: time .strptime() will convert the ASCII time string to Python's version of C's structtm , and then time .