A co-worker recently came to me with an interesting and mysteriousproblem. He was setting up a Red Hat Enterprise 4 based machine withMySQL, using a default setup except he'd changed the location of MySQL'sdata directory from /var to a different partition. Now MySQL wasn'tstarting properly.

The symptoms were really funny: the init.d script installed by thesystem didn't work, except if he ran it by hand with ' sh -x ', it did.So

SELinux is one of those things that have been cropping up on my radarever since I had to start telling the Red Hat installer not to turnit on. (I kept not enabling it because changing an entire securityarchitecture of a system is not to be done lightly, even when it'sa new system I'm setting up.)

SELinux is an imposing system with equally imposing documentation.Fortunately, recently Dan Walsh of Red Hat has been posting some veryuseful (to me) 'SELinux for beginners

I've been thinking about a question recently: why is installing mostLinux distributions so much easier and friendlier than installingSolaris 9 on a standalone machine? (I can't speak for Solaris 10, as Ihaven't tried to install it on anything.)

(It's not just an issue of comparing today's technology against Solaris9's 2001 or so era technology; I was doing Linux installs in 2001, andit was still much better back

One of the small controversies in Linux on the 'x86_64'architecture is where 'native' 64-bit libraries should go, versus where'legacy' x86 libraries should wind up. One version is what Fedora Coredoes, putting 64-bit libraries in /usr/lib64 ; the other version iswhat Debian does, where legacy x86 libraries go in /usr/lib32 and /usr/lib is for 64-bit binaries

No less a person than Google's Matt Cuttsrecently spoke up about herding Googlebot andmore or less recommend using the noindex meta tag on pages instead of nofollow on links to them (on the grounds that it's more of a surething to mark pages noindex than to make sure that all links are markednofollow).

I must respectfully disagree with this, because in one importantrespect meta noindex isn't good enough. The big thing that nofollow does that meta noindex can't do is that it

Speaking from personal experience: never, ever set up an out of officeautoreply that sends email to the From: address of incoming email.Never. Or if you must do this, unsubscribe from all of the mailing listsyou're on first.

If you fail to do this, the users of the mailing lists you are on willkill you. And shortly afterward, the managers of the mailing lists youare on will drop you with extreme prejudice, because the last thingwe want is for the active users

This week, we:

• got 13,932 messages from 204 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,417 sessions from 865 different IP addresses.
• received 161,727 connections from at least 52,444 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 50 connections being checked at once (hiton Friday).

This is about the same as last week ,allowing for random variation. The per day table is mostly butnot entirely flat

Yesterday I wrote about how sysadmins are overhead . One of the consequences of this is thatIT does not actually have real power. The real power accrues to thepeople who are doing the organization's work, whereas IT is just keepingthe machines dust-free.

Remembering this will make life less explosive, because the people withactual power can usually squash IT flat in thirty seconds if push comesto shove. Generally you don't want it to go that far.

(This is part of the core of

It's important to remember that system administration is prettymuch just overhead, much like the janitorial staff (but rather lessimportant; the university can run a lot longer without people tendingthe machines than without people taking out the trash).

The people who are important are those who are doing the organization'swork. The actual work of universities is research and then teachingstudents, so the people with real power here are professors (especiallyif they have grant funding ) and,paradoxically, students. (Students