A nice article from a seasoned Unix-head on the correct use of /usr/local. Aimed particularly at OS X users. I remember the days of cobling together small disks in SCSI chains and watching the bus errors fly by due to termination problems...

Useful for monitoring 'stuff' - Understanding SNMP. The article is generic even though its on a Windows site. If you run a Unix OS then the net-snmp package lets you get all sorts of information out of all sorts of equipment (eg you can setup something like Nagios to monitor certain SNMP codes on a device and alert you via a custom plugin).

More useful for monitoring 'stuff' - Linux Server Management with IPMI. IPMI lets you extract useful environment information from hardware - such as cpu temperature, fan speed etc. As he points out in the article often a fan failure or slow-down can result in a server meltdown - so any kind of prior warning of this event is really useful (Dell have ESM which provides similar diagnostics).

Been there - Server Room Cabling Nightmare. Its interesting that he doesn't like management arms - I guess if the cabling is tidy they're no longer required. Theres also the perennial problem of how many cable-ties to undo/redo when you add new equipment. The end result is very pretty though (if you like that sort of thing). Another set of Techrepublic server room pics - ranging from the terribly tidy to the dangerously messy.

Interesting - Enomilism VMC is a XEN Virtual Machine management console (much like the VMWare ESX console).

Detailed cfengine article - looks really useful but from memory its quite tricky to maintain. I guess if you reach a certain threshold of config changes over time then its worth investing time in a cfengine infrastructure to centralise change management.

Via BoingBoing a link to some fantastic 60's Designs at WorldofKane.

The Social Issues Research Center has some great articles. Including Passport to the Pub: A guide to British pub etiquette which is only slightly tongue-in-cheek.