this article from o'reilly about remote linux administration would have been more interesting if the author hadn't wimped out on using daemontools. i'd love to see a linux distribution that really used daemontools at its core instead of a mess of initialization scripts and pid files.

the whole arena of software to ease linux system administration and monitoring is either way more underdeveloped than i would have imagined, or there's some magic tool i haven't stumbled on yet. (i do know that cricket is one tool that i haven't really plumbed the depths of yet. sometimes it's hard to see how powerful a tool that graphs can be, since it takes a while to start accumulating the data that makes them interesting.)