I have a certain interest in the behavior of MSNbot, theMSN Search web spider. I'd like to keep track of what other people aresaying about it in blogs; the obvious way is a date-based [msnbot]search using Google Blogsearch.

If you do the search you can see why the results leave me less than enthused: it is full ofa cluster of spamblogs, mostly hosted at blogspot.com. They show upbecause they're mechanically including articles about search enginebehavior and search

One of the perennial programmer debates can be caricatured as a threeway fight between adherents of MySQL , PostgreSQL , and Oracle (or the big irondatabase of your choice). As an example, you can see a recent roundstarting itself up here and here (both arguing what could be called the MySQL side).

Some time back it struck me that one way to think about how programsrelate to SQL databases is that they can be doing it at threedifferent conceptual levels. (And now that I have a

As with Fedora Core 4 , I haven't beenusing Solaris 9 long enough to have given it a fair shake. So insteadof any sort of review, this is just a collection of things that haveirritated me about it on first exposure.

I'll start with a nice simple one:

# useradd -m -c 'Chris Siebenmann' cks
UX: useradd: ERROR: Unable to create the home directory: Operation not applicable.

This is on a default configured Solaris 9 machine, straight out of

The next time a salesman tells you that a server needs redundant powersupplies for reliability, ask him if the server also has redundant CPUfans.

By now, most everyone understands that extended warranties on consumerelectronics are just overpriced insurance (hence why the salescrittertries to get you to buy them, as they're great profit for the store).Redundant power supplies are getting to be a standard option in serverconfigurations, and while they're not necessarily pointless I have tofeel that a fair number of people

If you don't have the time to say hi to a passing cat, you need toslow down.

If you never have time to say hi to passing cats, you definitely need to slow down.

(Aphorism void where prohibited by allergies. Applications to thetypical sysadmin lifestyle are left as an exercise for the readers.)

Back in June, I wrote about how unchanging systems should be stable . There isan important consequence of this:

To control stability, you must control change.

(This clearly follows from change being the only thing can destabilizeyour unchanging stable systems.)

I think that this is subtly different from taking changes carefullybecause the changes themselves could possibly be broken. This is therealization that any change may perturb the overall system, requiringit to be restabilized; it is the need to control what one has definedas the

It turns out that I'm wrong about several things I mentioned in GetAllObjects , although the code there is still useful and as correct asyou can reasonably get. However, it does have a few limitations and maymiss objects under some circumstances.

First, gc.get_objects actually returns all container objects .In specific, it returns all objects that can participate in referencecycles; this necessarily includes all container objects (dicts, tuples,and lists), but also include other types as well. (My

This week we received 11,661 email messages from 245 different IPaddresses. Our SMTP server handled 49,500 sessions from 5,900different IP addresses. Email volume has held steady from last week , but session volume isdown.

Overall connections are actually up from previous weeks: 251,000, fromat least 41,000 different IP addresses. Our SMTP frontend hit 50simultaneous pending connections early in the week,

People who are considering setting up serial consoles for their Linuxmachines often wind up a little bit confused about what's necessaryand what sort of features are possible. A lot of this is natural,because the PC is fundamentally convinced that the console is the moreor less mandatory video display.

This results in a situation where there are many different consoles ina Linux system. I'll inventory them, in the order that they getencountered during booting a system.

1. where the BIOS output appears. Expensive servers (