ftp.heanet.ie serves a huge volume of mostly static file downloads withApache on a single machine. This results in interesting Apache tuningissues, among other things.

• Scaling Apache 2.x beyond 20,000 concurrent downloads [PDF]; just the title alone gives you the flavour.
• Niagara vs ftp.heanet.ie Showdown (Niagara is the new Sun server box and chipset.)
• Niagara Benchmarks: Update

If this sort of thing is your cup of tea, much of Colm MacCá

I've mentioned quilt before ;it's a package for managing a series of patches. One of the things it'sreally handy for is modifying source RPMs (which themselves are mostlya series of patches on top of a base source tree, hence the good fit).However, there's a bit of arcana involved in the process, so it's usefulto have an example.

(Since my margin is only so big, I'm going to assume that you'rebroadly

That CSS isn't supported by lynx may sound like a peculiar thing tocall a limitation of CSS, but it does have one important consequence: If I want lynx to format something right, I can't use CSS .

(Well, I suppose I can use CSS in addition to non-CSS methods. But Ihave to have the non-CSS methods.)

As strange as it may sound, I still value looking good in lynx (and links , a related text mode browser). (

I read a lot of webcomics, and it's turned out that there's prettymuch only three sorts of them these days: ones that update every day,ones that have an RSS feed, and ones that I don't read. This is just ananecdote, but it's an illustration of how far syndication has wormed itsway into my life.

It's all the more startling because I haven't been using syndicationfor very long; less than a year so far. I

Consider the following command:

; grep 'gabba gabba hey' /var/log/messages | wc -l

This looks like a perfectly sane and sensible way of doing syslog loganalysis: fish out a pattern, then count or otherwise crunch it up. It'sjust the sort of thing Unix tools are built for, and I do it all thetime. (My howmany program often gets used here.)

Unfortunately, as I was reminded recently, this appealingly simpleapproach is not quite correct. It

Recently, I accidentally found out which of two options Solaris usesfor matching names in NFS exports. As traditional, I did this by stubbing my toe .

Given a name in an /etc/dfs/sharetab line, there are two possible waysof checking if it matches an incoming NFS request: you could resolve the sharetab name to its IP addresses and see if the request's IP addressmatched, or you could take the request's IP address and try to turn itinto a hostname and see if

What are variables?

In many languages, variables are just labels for storage locations,for a spot in memory. This ranges from pure machine level storage, inlanguages like assembler, up through storage locations augmented withsize and type information, such as in C, all the way to Perl, where the'storage locations' are actually fairly abstract. But they're stillthere, even in Perl, partly because it's a comforting way to think aboutit: variables are where you put things .

In

This week, we:

• got 12,120 messages from 254 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,527 sessions from 926 different IP addresses.
• received 119,314 connections from at least 38,574 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 17 connections being checked at once.

Volume is way down from last week ; in factit's back to the level I consider fairly quiet (although this volumestill has a lot

A commenter on an earlier entry noted that patchadd 's exit codes are apparently not documented because they'reconsidered an internal implementation detail that might change at somepoint. Unfortunately this is bogus logic.

There's a simple rule: once you explicitly expose something to users, itceases to be an internal implementation detail in practice no matterwhat you want (and no matter what you may claim in documentation,although Sun does not explicitly claim this in the patchadd manpage).

Solaris 9 manifestly exposes patchadd 's