While taking part in a storage install the last few days, including creating and deleting quite a few RAID groups and so forth, I've had to click on quite a few "Are you SURE?!" dialog boxes, even for completely idle, never-used LUNs. Here's an idea for storage management folks: keep a bitmap of recently-accessed LUNs. Specifically, keep two; every five minutes zero the old one and flip them, then set a bit in the active bitmap for each LUN when it's accessed. Then pop up an extra "You've accessed this LUN in the last five minutes! Are you SUPER-SURE?!" scary box if someone tries to delete or in some other way imperil one of those.

I've been reading the long thread kicked off by Luke Kanies's email about the state of system administration as illustrated by the current tools. A minor subthread touched on why there aren't more books about system administration theory, what that theory is, and so forth. A couple of mathematical topics were briefly mentioned, and it kicked off some associations for me, so I started a list of mathematical or theoretical things I've found more or less relevant or helpful or just interesting, in no particular order:

• Nyquist sampling theorem
• Queueing theory
• Human-computer interfaces
• Computer architecture (in the Hennessy & Patterson sense, not the "administrator" vs "architect" sense)
• Channel codes, ECC, turbo codes
• Weibull equation/distribution
• Protocol design -- I don't honestly know much about the theory, but I know there is a fair amount of it
• Cryptography, of course, and security in the broader sense

Of course none of these would be described as "system administration theory" by its specialists.

If you've ever run into this error while using Solaris's lucreate to create an alternate boot environment and trying to exclude some directories:
foo# lucreate -m /:/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3:ufs -x /u01 -x /u02 -x /u03 -n s3
INFORMATION: path </u01/> filter specification '-' overridden by 'x'
...and then it copies /u01 to the alternate BE anyway...
or as more thoroughly described here:
http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/sunmanagers/2004-March/029737.html
then I have the fix, straight from Sun and tested!
Use the "-z filter_list_file" option, as described in the manual page,
but the first character on each line should be "x", not "-" as that page says:

DCOP is KDE's interprocess communication protocol. Conveniently enough,
developers are pretty good about exposing interfaces to it, and there
is even a shell binding. There are some awfully neat things you can do
with it from a shell interface. This script lists the URLs of all the tabs
in my Konqueror windows:

Like most sysadmins, I make heavy use of email. I actually run
a Cyrus IMAP server on my desktop and use fetchmail
to grab mail from the company server, filter it through procmail
for things like analyzing cron job output and emailed logs, and then
hand it to Cyrus's deliver program, which processes it through
filters built using the "sieve" language. Cyrus also has a dandy
indexer, so that it's easy to search through a considerable
amount of email. And doing email filtering and indexing server-side
upon delivery means that the filters don't depend on my mail client,
so webmail, local X GUI mail, and pine or mutt all show the same filtered results,

A different kind of tagging! If you're getting home from LISA and have some of those spiral-bound paper tutorial notes, it'll be easier to find them on your bookshelf and refer to them in the future if you "tag" them. I write the title and year and sometimes the author on both sides of one of these strung white paper marking tags and string it onto one of the spiral loops. If you have more than one booklet, stagger the height of the tags. Credit to Shoshana Abrass, an original SAGE organizing group member, for making me realize how useful these tags are.