Today’s reading is from next month’s FreeBSD Journal Letters column.
Perhaps you have extensive monitoring and log analysis, all meticulously tuned to inform you of every little wobble. You can identify the host spewing stray packets with a single netflow query and know how many times a second hopeful spambot flings garbage at xmlrpc. php. Your mail server sneers at spam. You’ve even taught fail2ban manners without resorting to a spiked club. You have all this, right? Or do you merely have plans for all these? Plans offer the greatest gift, which is Hope, but hope and a good swift kick to the teeth will get you a minuscule stash of legal narcotics and a substantial dentist bill. Are you protecting the dream or the reality? Dreams can be moved. Whatever you’re planning to do can be planned just as well elsewhere, and always remember Rule of System Administration #15: Today’s plans address yesterday’s failures. Failure is a renewable resource
A new collection of Letters, Dear Abyss, should go through Kickstarter later this year.