In a comment on my entry on software RAID's advantages I was asked what I thought about sofware RAID'slack of battery backup units, as you can get on better RAID controllercards. To answer that, I'm going to start by asking my traditionalquestion: how does having a BBU RAID card improve your systemperformance?

A RAID card with a battery backup unit effectively turns synchronousdisk writes into asynchronous ones, by buffering such writes in itsbattery-backed RAM and immediately telling the host OS

I've written about interfaces before, orat least what I mean by the term (and how it relates to inheritance ). To summarize, 'interfaces' are a way offormally expressing 'is-a' relationships; when you say that a class or atype implements the String interface, you mean that it is a string.

One of the things that jogged my mind about the whole issue was Go , which has things that it calls 'interfaces' (okay,technically they're called interface

Shortly after I wrote my first ipsCA entry , Igot a comment on the entry recommending a specific other SSL vendor.At first this didn't strike me as unusual; it was the kind of helpfulnote that might be left by one of my readers (or just someone who sawmy blog entry on Planet Sysadmin ). ButI have a hair trigger with spam, one that not infrequently makes meunreasonably suspicious, so I ran the poster's IP address through areverse DNS lookup just to make myself