yum claims there are no updates

If a yum update reports there are updates when it is clear that there are, try unregistering the system with the repository and re-registering. If that fails you might have a corrupt yum cache. Yum downloads items into cache, and then checks it going forward. If this is corrupt, then it will break updates. This fix is to clear out the cache by emptying the contents of /var/cache/yum and /var/spool/up2date.

Google: GFS & Routing Around Outages

• Google File System (GFS)
• How Google Routes Around Outages

Pulling Gnome off of RedHat

If X and Gnome are already installed on RedHat it can be tricky to remove them with yum. However, a friend of mine reports success using pirut to remove them. It warns that it is about to remove itself, but it does seem to work. Packages that are not dependencies of the X and Gnome package tree are not removed.

fscking

I've become very interested in fscking. I'm going to keep a link to various pages on fscking that I find interesting. We'll start with something friendly, like how even apples need fscking and then get into some more detail:

1. Apple Knowledgebase: Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck (TS1417)
2. Andy's Unix FAQ: The In's and Out's of Fsck - Dealing with corrupt filesystems

MySQL and SAN

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/03/09/when-would-you-use-san-with-mysql/