War Stories

Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy mo...

Law Anything which can be measured, will be measured on the Internet. 1st Corollary Anything meas...

Law There's always an easier way. Corollary Things frequently get done sooner if you just do them...

This is a page which includes my thoughts on documenting a live, running network. It will be perp...

(7 September 2012) Poul-Henning Kamp writes about A Generation Lost In The Bazaar: Here is one e...

(24 January 2012) So years ago we get called into this small company working out of I don't remem...

(10 October 2011) Interesting results from an IBM study comparing the effectiveness of folder-fil...

Put five apes in a cage. In the middle of a cage is a set of steps, and at the top of the steps i...

Five User Experience Principles Keep it simple. But not simpler. Keep scalability in mind. End u...

(19 March 2012) Last year when I rebuilt my server I had the opportunity to see specifically what...

The question is usually framed as Is Hardware RAID better than software RAID? Well actually it's ...

(29 January 2008) I watched the Google Talk video about the Inbox Zero concept. It is long (about...

(2005/2006 era) Alex is at the age where Sesame Street is a frequent, if not regular, visitor to ...

(2015-03-10) Something which I realized a few years back and have not read anywhere before or sin...

(written back in 2005) IT Is A Utility For most companies, IT is just as much a utility as HVAC, ...

(5 October 2011) So a long time ago, the company I worked for at the time decided that the head o...

(2014-ish) What has been my best moment in IT? There have been several moments -- how about the o...

Problem Doing an rsync to a filer, the user gets gratuitous errors: rsync: mkstemp "$LONGPATH/$FI...

Problem Mixed-mode file systems suck. You'll have to be a bit more specific. Someone applied a CI...

Thou shalt above all, maintain the integrity of the network. Thou shalt have a long term strateg...

You have multiple places for problems to occur. Performance areas are: how fast can your disks (...

(May 6, 2010) Recent History At one of my customer sites, I have a pile of Sun X2200-M2 systems. ...

(2013-08-15) 11:03:49 < xdroop> I just pulled another private /24 out of my ass for overlapping u...

Get along with everyone. Strive to be welcomed by all: the sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bl...

(11 January 2012) There seems to be an almost-declared war on email going these days. I have read...

(2018 sometime) 15 years ago, I accidentally ran a complicated shell command that muffed a couple...

Why the fuck do PC guys think that they can "clean" infected PCs? I'm old-school unix -- if there...

or, It Will Happen To You Too, Kid (15 November 2011) I had to laugh the other week. Some Ubuntu ...

(12 January 2007) This is just a little story illustrating what happens when you use the best too...

Question: Why would anyone in their right mind build and install software from source code? (orig...

(21 September 2011) The Problem The problem with the Blackberry App (or AppStore App (or whatever...