Unix as a Second Language 
by Sandra Henry-Stocker
Sandra Henry-Stocker has been administering Unix systems for more than 18 years. She describes herself as "USL" (Unix as a second language) but remembers enough English to write books and buy groceries. She currently works for TeleCommunication Systems, a wireless communications company, in Annapolis, Maryland, where no one else necessarily shares any of her opinions. She lives on a small farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
This blog offers advice for every-day Unix systems administration and some clever ways to approach more challenging problems.
Send comments and suggestions to mailto:bugfarm@gmail.com.
The Day that Cron Stood Still
I was surprised a couple days ago to notice that a cron job that was set up to move files from one system to another suddenly stopped working. Squeezing a little timefrom my other tasks to keep the files flowing to the application that needed them, I noted that I could run the script and move the files by hand. In fact, everything ran normally when I did and the files arrived at their proper destination in time to be processed and turned into useful graphs. Even so, the next day, the same thing happened again.
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Relaying Mail from Subdomains
Relaying mail doesn't only come into play when someone is trying to use your mail server to deliver mail to a third domain. It can also affect your own subdomains.
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Book Review: The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
If I had only one thing to say about The Art of Deception, it would be that it convinced me that even technologically savvy people fall prey to the guile of practiced social engineers (formerly known as a "con artists" to most of us).
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You're nobody until ...
The old song continues "somebody loves you", the geekier version changes this to "somebody quotes you" and the NFS version claims "somebody trusts you". Whether files in your NFS mounts list "nobody" as the owner and "nobody" as the group or show root and real usernames depends on your NFS settings.
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