9/20    How do I change my shell? chsh says "Cannot change ID to root."
        \_ /usr/bin/chsh does not have the SUID permission set. Without
           being set, it does not successfully change a user's shell.
           Typical newbie sys admin (on soda)
           \_ Actually, it does: -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 37552 Feb 15  2011 /usr/bin/chsh
	...

5/8     Hello everyone!  This is Josh Hawn, CSUA Tech VP for Spring 2012.
        About 2 weeks ago, someone brought to my attention that our script
        to periodically merge /etc/motd.public into /etc/motd wasn't
        running.  When I looked into it, the cron daemon was running, but
        there hadn't been any root activity in the log since April 7th.  I
        looked into it for a while, but got lost in other things I was
	...

2/9     Reminder: support for mail services has been deprecated for *several
        years*. Mail forwarding, specifically .forward mail forwarding, is
        officially supported and was never deprecated.
        \_ There is no .forward under ~root.  How do we mail root and how do
           we get responses?
           \_ root@csua.berkeley.edu is and always has been an alias.
	...

9/12    We've restored CSUA NFS to something vaguely resembling normal
        functionality -- plus, with some luck, we should now have something
        vaguely resembling normal uptime, too!  Ping root@csua.org if you
        notice any problems.  --jordan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \_  Oh, and http://irc.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU is online again.
	...

6/5     In an effort to stabilize our services, we'll be rebuilding parts of
        the CSUA infrastructure over the course of this summer.  To give us
        some wiggle room, I've temporarily decreased soda's allocated RAM from
        8GB to 2GB.  If you need to run something that requires large amounts
        of memory, please send mail to root@csua.org and we'll try to
        accommodate your request.  --jordan
	...

4/28    Will wall be fixed?   - jsl
        \_ What's wall?
           \_ An anachronism from a bygone era, when computers were hard to
              comeby, the dorms didn't have net, there was no airbears, and
              when phones didn't come standard with twitter or sms.
           \_ A non useful implementation of twitter.
	...

5/19    Uh, is anyone still using this? Please mark here if you post and
        haven't added this yet. I'll start:
        \_ person k
        \_ ausman, I check in about once a week.
        \_ erikred, twice a week or so.
        \_ mehlhaff, I login when I actually own my home directory instead of
	...

12/21   Help, all my files are owned by nobody! -ausman
        (yes I emailed root)
        \_ Things should be fine now. As usual, the NFS server caused a cascade
           of errors.
	...

1/4     I want to test how my servers behave during a disk failure and
        a RAID reconstruction so I want to simulate a hardware failure.
        How can I do this in Linux without having to physically pull
        a drive? These disks are behind a RAID card and run Linux. -ausman
        \_ According to the Linux RAID wiki, you might be able to use mdadm
           to do this with something like the following:
	...

9/13    Thanks to Jordan, our disk server is no longer virtualized. Our long
        nightmare of poor IO performance should hopefully be over. Prepare for
        another long nightmare of poor hardware reliability!
        ...
        Just kidding! (I hope)
        In any case, this means that cooler was taken out back and shot, and
	...

2/14    You sure soda isn't running windows in disguise?  It would explain the
        uptimes.
        \_ hardly, My winbox stays up longer.
        \_ Nobody cares about uptime anymore brother, that's what web2.0 has
           taught us.  Everything is "stateless".
           \_ You;d think gamers would care more about uptime.
	...

2/18    Why does the system seem so sluggish lately?
        \_ Slow NFS is basically always the answer. --toulouse
        \_ Any truth to the rumor that soda will be decommissioned this summer?
           \_ Absolutely none. Soda might go down temporarily while disks are
              reorganized and stuff so soda doesn't suffer from such shitty
              performance nearly as much, but no, we've gotta maintain NFS and
	...

7/22    Playing with dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/<disk> on linux and bsd:
        2 questions, on linux when <disk>==hda it always gives me this off
        by one report i.e. Records out == records in-1 and says there is an
        error. Has anyone else seen this?  Second, when trying to repeat this
        on bsd, <disk>==rwd0 now, to my surprise, using the install disk and
        selecting (S)hell, when I try to dd a 40 gig disk it says "409 records
	...

10/27   I just read an article that Facebook had moved their database
        to all SSD to speed throughput, but now I can't find it. Has
        anyone else seen this? Any experience with doing this? -ausman
        \_ I hope you're not running mission critical data:
           http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/10/27/1559248/Reliability-of-PC-Flash-SSDs?from=rss
        \_ Do you have any idea how much storage space is used by Facebook,
	...

8/3     VMWare + Windows XP + Validation question. I need to test stuff with
        Service Pack 3 installed. I have a valid key that I own (yeah yeah I
        actually *bought* a copy, please don't flame me for supporting evil
        M$). Is it possible to register the key once, and then duplicate it
        for testing purposes?  Will Windows or Microsoft detect copies and
        disable the rest the copies?
	...

7/28    Does it make sense to defragment disks on VMWare? My 80GB disk
        on VMWare isn't really using 80GB, it just uses what it needs.
        Will defragment do anything to it?
        \_ If you want to speed up disk operation in your VM, it's best to
           defragment the disks in your VM, then defragment the disk on your
           host machine where the VM files are.
	...