Re: weblog checking - yes, checking for nasties coming from the outside is important...and would make a nice addition to any periodic monitoring of a website. I need to add that to my monitoring program...

This only complements your note about avoiding impending doom. I'd rather get warned about impending doom 2 minutes before it happens...rather than finding out about it 10 minutes AFTER the moment of doom. I guess that's also a quality of a good sys admin.

(I'm not a sys admin, though. Just a programmer. But my company doesn't seem to see a reason to hire a full-time sys admin for our 6 sun boxen + > 300 users. Guess that's why I get very little REM sleep... ;)