-> Another example - at work last week the admins reformatted the -> hard drive on my Ultra5 and started over, because it needed some -> repartitioning anyway. (Suns have this neat firmware -> feature that allows them to install a complete filesystem -> via the network; no mucking around with boot disks.) Afterwards -> I could no longer ftp into the system. I scratched my head for -> a while, checked everything I could think of, and had to ask an -> admin for help (which is a little embarrassing, because I've -> been the -> thorn in their sides many times for being control freaks, -> and espoused -> the viewpoint that a software engineer should have root on his -> own box, for crying out loud.) Agreed. -> The problem was that my shell is -> bash, and ftp only accepts connections for users whose shells are -> "blessed" as being OK, by having them listed in /etc/shells. -> (The admins all use korn shell, the masochists, so they don't have -> this problem.) (And if korn shell can do command history, filename -> completion etc. they don't know how... which makes me wonder why -> they keep putting up with it. But by golly, freeware is -> untrustworthy so they won't use it, and they begrudge me using it too.) I use both, and they both have a lot of great feature. history is one of them. -> the admin remembered how to fix this problem, and I didn't, despite -> the fact that it had occurred about a year ago and was fixed the -> same way; so for him it only took a minute to fix, and I would have -> been taking a lot of guesses and trying things to see what works, or -> trying to find useful error messages in log files, if it'd been me. -> Or maybe something would have jogged my memory, hard to say. The -> problem was trivial but not all people are good at memorizing little -> details like this. Ok, I have to admint when I was making the comment about solving the problems in 5 minutes I was more thinking about problems which occure in software construction. I was not considering fixing problems associated with specific functionality of a specific program. -> Well I guess if you are that organized as to be able to find old -> notes so fast, it would help. (Which reminds me I should put some -> features into nettebook to facilitate it.) I am not as organized as I would like to be however find and grep work pretty good and I do take a lot of notes with my projects. The Wolf