Cakemox's questions

Datacenters are noisy places. On occasion it is necessary for an administrator or technician to troubleshoot a problem in the datacenter while on a phone call or conference call. Unfortunately, these can be long, drawn out conversations, depending on the issue at hand. Mobile phones are pretty lousy in these circumstances: the person in the datacenter can't easily hear over the noise, and the mic tends to make things unpleasant for the listeners.

In-ear monitors make it easier for the person in the datacenter to hear, but don't do a whole lot for the people listening on the other end.

What features should I be looking for in a headset for making phone calls in the noise of the datacenter less noticeable for all involved?

I've noticed that the "preferred" method of setting the system hostname is fundamentally different between Red Hat/CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu systems.

CentOS documentation and the RHEL deployment guide say the hostname should be the FQDN:

HOSTNAME=<value>, where <value> should be the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), such as hostname.example.com, but can be whatever hostname is necessary.

The RHEL install guide is slightly more ambiguous:

Setup prompts you to supply a host name for this computer, either as a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) in the format hostname.domainname or as a short host name in the format hostname.

The Debian reference says the hostname should not use the FQDN:

3.5.5. The hostname

The kernel maintains the system hostname. The init script in runlevel S which is symlinked to "/etc/init.d/hostname.sh" sets the system hostname at boot time (using the hostname command) to the name stored in "/etc/hostname". This file should contain only the system hostname, not a fully qualified domain name.

I haven't seen any specific recommendations from IBM about which to use, but some software seems to have a preference.

My questions:

• In a heterogeneous environment, is it better to use the vendor recommendation, or choose one and be consistent across all hosts?
• What software have you encountered which is sensitive to whether the hostname is set to the FQDN or short name?

I recently installed Debian 6 in a VM on ESXi 4.1, but I noticed there is no /proc/scsi/scsi. Am I missing a module which provides that, or is there a different way of doing things like echo "scsi add-single-device 0 0 1 0">/proc/scsi/scsi?

I have an apache web server which is configured to allow access via client certificate to only a few people. I cannot lock down by IP because the certificate holders could potentially connect from anywhere.

Apache currently returns 403 to anyone not presenting a valid certificate or trying to access an invalid URL, but since the machine has no ACL restrictions it is frequently scanned for vulnerabilities. These scans cause quite a lot of noise in the logs.

Is there a way to log to a different file based on the response code? Is it possible to send all logging for requests which result in a 403 to a different file?