| 2025-03-23: |
The obviousness of indexing the Unix filesystem buffer cache by inodes
|
| 2025-03-22: |
How we automate installing extra packages during Ubuntu installs
|
| 2025-03-21: |
The mystery (to me) of tiny font sizes in KDE programs I run
|
| 2025-03-20: |
Go's choice of multiple return values was the simpler option
|
| 2025-03-19: |
Go's multiple return values and (Go) types
|
| 2025-03-18: |
How ZFS knows and tracks the space usage of datasets
|
| 2025-03-17: |
I don't think error handling is a solved problem in language design
|
| 2025-03-16: |
OIDC claim scopes and their interactions with OIDC token authentication
|
| 2025-03-15: |
Some notes on the OpenID Connect (OIDC) 'redirect uri'
|
| 2025-03-14: |
Some notes on configuring Dovecot to authenticate via OIDC/OAuth2
|
| 2025-03-13: |
Doing multi-tag matching through URLs on the modern web
|
| 2025-03-12: |
The commodification of desktop GUI behavior
|
| 2025-03-11: |
Some views on the common Apache modules for SAML or OIDC authentication
|
| 2025-03-10: |
The web browser as an enabler of minority platforms
|
| 2025-03-09: |
How I got my nose rubbed in my screens having 'bad' areas for me
|
| 2025-03-08: |
How SAML and OIDC differ in sharing information, and perhaps why
|
| 2025-03-07: |
The OpenID Connect (OIDC) 'sub' claim is surprisingly load-bearing
|
| 2025-03-06: |
The problem facing MFA-enabled IMAP at the moment (in early 2025)
|
| 2025-03-05: |
A Prometheus gotcha with alerts based on counting things
|
| 2025-03-04: |
What SimpleSAMLphp's core:AttributeAlter does with creating new attributes
|
| 2025-03-03: |
If you get the chance, always run more extra network fiber cabling
|
| 2025-03-02: |
Updating local commits with more changes in Git (the harder way)
|
| 2025-03-01: |
Using PyPy (or thinking about it) exposed a bug in closing files
|
| 2025-02-28: |
Always sync your log or journal files when you open them
|
| 2025-02-27: |
Using Netplan to set up WireGuard on Ubuntu 22.04 works, but has warts
|
| 2025-02-26: |
I'm not impressed by the state of NFS v4 in the Linux kernel
|
| 2025-02-25: |
MFA's "push notification" authentication method can be easier to integrate
|
| 2025-02-24: |
Go's behavior for zero value channels and maps is partly a choice
|
| 2025-02-23: |
JSON has become today's machine-readable output format (on Unix)
|
| 2025-02-22: |
Institutions care about their security threats, not your security threats
|
| 2025-02-21: |
HTTP connections are part of the web's long tail
|
| 2025-02-20: |
It's good to have offline contact information for your upstream networking
|
| 2025-02-19: |
Shared (Unix) hosting and the problem of managing resource limits
|
| 2025-02-18: |
One problem with "shared Unix hosting" was the lack of resource limits
|
| 2025-02-17: |
More potential problems for people with older browsers
|
| 2025-02-16: |
The HTTP status codes of responses from about 21 hours of traffic to here
|
| 2025-02-15: |
Why I have a little C program to filter a $PATH (more or less)
|
| 2025-02-14: |
The profusion of things that could be in your $PATH on old Unixes
|
| 2025-02-13: |
'Internal' accounts and their difference from 'external' accounts
|
| 2025-02-12: |
How you should respond to authentication failures isn't universal
|
| 2025-02-11: |
A surprise with rspamd's spam scoring and a workaround
|
| 2025-02-10: |
Everything should be able to ratelimit sources of authentication failures
|
| 2025-02-09: |
Providing pseudo-tags in DWiki through a simple hack
|
| 2025-02-08: |
The Prometheus host agent is missing some Linux NFSv4 RPC stats (as of 1.8.2)
|
| 2025-02-07: |
Web application design and the question of what is a "route"
|
| 2025-02-06: |
Linux kernel NFSv4 server and client RPC operation statistics
|
| 2025-02-05: |
How Ubuntu 24.04's bad bpftrace package appears to have happened
|
| 2025-02-04: |
The practical (Unix) problems with .cache and its friends
|
| 2025-02-03: |
Why writes to disk generally wind up in your OS's disk read cache
|
| 2025-02-02: |
Web spiders (or people) can invent unfortunate URLs for your website
Build systems and their effects on versioning and API changes
|
| 2025-02-01: |
An alarmingly bad official Ubuntu 24.04 bpftrace binary package
|
| 2025-01-31: |
Modern languages and bad packaging outcomes at scale
|
| 2025-01-30: |
The tradeoffs of having an internal unauthenticated SMTP server
|
| 2025-01-29: |
Our well-prepared phish spammer may have been chasing lucrative prey
|
| 2025-01-28: |
We got hit by an alarmingly well-prepared phish spammer
|
| 2025-01-27: |
How to accidentally get yourself with 'find ... -name something*'
|
| 2025-01-26: |
Some learning experiences with HTTP cookies in practice
|
| 2025-01-25: |
Syndication feeds here are now rate-limited on a per-IP basis
|
| 2025-01-24: |
Languages don't version themselves using semantic versioning
|
| 2025-01-23: |
Sometimes you need to (or have to) run old binaries of programs
|
| 2025-01-22: |
More features for web page generation systems doing URL remapping
|
| 2025-01-21: |
A change in the handling of PYTHONPATH between Python 3.10 and 3.12
|
| 2025-01-20: |
The (potential) complexity of good runqueue latency measurement in Linux
|
| 2025-01-19: |
Sometimes print-based debugging is your only choice
|
| 2025-01-18: |
Some ways to restrict who can log in via OpenSSH and how they authenticate
|
| 2025-01-17: |
Thoughts on having SSH allow password authentication from the Internet
|
| 2025-01-16: |
Some stuff about how Apache's mod_wsgi runs your Python apps (as of 5.0)
|
| 2025-01-15: |
(Multiple) inheritance in Python and implicit APIs
|
| 2025-01-14: |
My bug reports are mostly done for work these days
|
| 2025-01-13: |
A mystery with Django under Apache's mod_wsgi on Ubuntu 24.04
|
| 2025-01-12: |
The history and use of /etc/glob in early Unixes
|
| 2025-01-11: |
IMAP clients can vary in their reactions to IMAP errors
|
| 2025-01-10: |
The problem with combining DNS CNAME records and anything else
|
| 2025-01-09: |
Realizing why Go reflection restricts what struct fields can be modified
|
| 2025-01-08: |
Using tcpdump to see only incoming or outgoing traffic
|
| 2025-01-07: |
What a FreeBSD kernel message about your bridge means
|
| 2025-01-06: |
The issue with DNF 5 and script output in Fedora 41
|
| 2025-01-05: |
WireGuard's AllowedIPs aren't always the (WireGuard) routes you want
|
| 2025-01-04: |
There are different sorts of WireGuard setups with different difficulties
|
| 2025-01-03: |
The programmable web browser was and is inevitable
|
| 2025-01-02: |
Rejecting email at SMTP time based on the From: header address
|
| 2025-01-01: |
The modern web is why web browsers don't have "nice things" (platform APIs)
|
| 2024-12-31: |
My unusual X desktop wasn't made 'from scratch' in a conventional sense
|
| 2024-12-30: |
I'm firmly attached to a mouse and (overlapping) windows
|
| 2024-12-29: |
My screens now have areas that are 'good' and 'bad' for me
|
| 2024-12-28: |
In an unconfigured Vim, I want to do ':set paste' right away
|
| 2024-12-27: |
Cgroup V2 memory limits and their potential for thrashing
|
| 2024-12-26: |
WireGuard on OpenBSD just works (at least as a VPN server)
|
| 2024-12-25: |
x86 servers, ATX power supply control, and reboots, resets, and power cycles
|
| 2024-12-24: |
The TLS certificate multi-file problem (for automatic updates)
|
| 2024-12-23: |
A gotcha with importing ZFS pools and NFS exports on Linux (as of ZFS 2.3.0)
|
| 2024-12-22: |
Two views of Python type hints and catching bugs
|
| 2024-12-21: |
When power cycling your (x86) server isn't enough to recover it
|
| 2024-12-20: |
Remembering to make my local changes emit log messages when they act
|
| 2024-12-19: |
Short lived TLS certificates and graceful rollover in web servers
|
| 2024-12-18: |
Browser feed reader addons don't seem to do very well on caching
|
| 2024-12-17: |
We have an unusual concern when we use Let's Encrypt
|
| 2024-12-16: |
Some notes on "closed interfaces" in Go
|
| 2024-12-15: |
I think Go union type proposals should start with their objectives
|
| 2024-12-14: |
ZFS on Linux and block IO limits show some limits of being out of the kernel
|
| 2024-12-13: |
Cgroup V2's cpu.idle setting versus process niceness
|
| 2024-12-12: |
Improving my desktop's responsiveness with the cgroup V2 'cpu.idle' setting
|
| 2024-12-11: |
The long (after)life of some of our old fileserver hardware
|
| 2024-12-10: |
My wish for VFS or filesystem level cgroup (v2) IO limits
|
| 2024-12-09: |
Maybe we should explicitly schedule rebooting our fleet every so often
|
| 2024-12-08: |
Unix's buffered IO in assembly and in C
|
| 2024-12-07: |
PCIe cards we use and have used in our servers
|
| 2024-12-06: |
Common motherboards are supporting more and more M.2 NVMe drive slots
|
| 2024-12-05: |
Buffered IO in Unix before V7 introduced stdio
|
| 2024-12-04: |
Sorting out 'PCIe bifurcation' and how it interacts with NVMe drives
|
| 2024-12-03: |
The modern world of server serial ports, BMCs, and IPMI Serial over LAN
|
| 2024-12-02: |
Good union types in Go would probably need types without a zero value
|
| 2024-12-01: |
Union types ('enum types') would be complicated in Go
|
| 2024-11-30: |
Using systemd-run to limit something's memory usage in cgroups v2
|
| 2024-11-29: |
Python type hints are probably "worth it" in the large for me
|
| 2024-11-28: |
My life has been improved by my quiet Prometheus alert status monitor
|
| 2024-11-27: |
Some notes on my experiences with Python type hints and mypy
|
| 2024-11-26: |
Python type hints may not be for me in practice
|
| 2024-11-25: |
What NFS server threads do in the Linux kernel
|
| 2024-11-24: |
The question of how many NFS server threads you should use (on Linux)
|
| 2024-11-23: |
The general issue of terminal programs and the Alt key
|
| 2024-11-22: |
My new solution for quiet monitoring of our Prometheus alerts
|
| 2024-11-21: |
Our Prometheus alerting problem if our central mail server isn't working
|
| 2024-11-20: |
Thinking about how to tame the interaction of conditional GET and caching
|
| 2024-11-19: |
Two API styles of doing special things involving text in UIs
|
| 2024-11-18: |
Ubuntu LTS (server) releases have become fairly similar to each other
|
| 2024-11-17: |
(Some) spammers will keep trying old, no longer in DNS IPv6 addresses
|
| 2024-11-16: |
The missing text focused programming environment
|
| 2024-11-15: |
IPv6 networks do apparently get probed (and implications for address assignment)
|
| 2024-11-14: |
Your options for displaying status over time in Grafana 11
|
| 2024-11-13: |
Implementing some Git aliases indirectly, in shell scripts
|
| 2024-11-12: |
Finding a good use for keep_firing_for in our Prometheus alerts
|
| 2024-11-11: |
Prometheus makes it annoyingly difficult to add more information to alerts
|
| 2024-11-10: |
Syndication feed fetchers and their behavior on HTTP 429 status responses
|
| 2024-11-09: |
A rough guess at how much IPv6 address space we might need
|
| 2024-11-08: |
Maybe skipping 'Dependabot' commits when using 'git log'
|
| 2024-11-07: |
Complications in supporting 'append to a file' in a NFS server
|
| 2024-11-06: |
Losing NFS locks and the SunOS SIGLOST signal
|
| 2024-11-05: |
The general problem of losing network based locks
|
| 2024-11-04: |
A rough equivalent to "return to last power state" for libvirt virtual machines
|
| 2024-11-03: |
The history of Unix's ioctl and signal about window sizes
|
| 2024-11-02: |
I feel that NAT is inevitable even with IPv6
|
| 2024-11-01: |
Notes on the compatibility of crypted passwords across Unixes in late 2024
|
| 2024-10-31: |
Pam_unix and your system's supported password algorithms
|
| 2024-10-30: |
Keeping your site accessible to old browsers is non-trivial
|
| 2024-10-29: |
Doing general address matching against varying address lists in Exim
|
| 2024-10-28: |
The question of whether to still allow HTTP/1.0 requests or block them
|
| 2024-10-27: |
Linux's /dev/disk/by-id unfortunately often puts the transport in the name
|
| 2024-10-26: |
The importance of name-based virtual hosts (websites)
|
| 2024-10-25: |
Using pam_access to sometimes not use another PAM module
|
| 2024-10-24: |
Having an emergency backup DNS resolver with systemd-resolved
|
| 2024-10-23: |
Doing basic policy based routing on FreeBSD with PF rules
|
| 2024-10-22: |
Having rate-limits on failed authentication attempts is reassuring
|
| 2024-10-21: |
Quoting and not quoting command substitution in the Bourne shell
|
| 2024-10-20: |
Two visions of 'software supply chain security'
|
| 2024-10-19: |
Forced MFA is effectively an annoying, harder to deal with second password
|
| 2024-10-18: |
The Go module proxy and forcing Go to actually update module versions
|
| 2024-10-17: |
Syndication feed readers now seem to leave Last-Modified values alone
|
| 2024-10-16: |
Our various different types of Ubuntu installs
|
| 2024-10-15: |
A surprise with /etc/cron.daily, run-parts, and files with '.' in their name
|
| 2024-10-14: |
We have lots of local customizations (and how we keep track of them)
|
| 2024-10-13: |
Our local changes to standard (Ubuntu) installs are easy to forget
|
| 2024-10-12: |
Some thoughts on why 'inetd activation' didn't catch on
|
| 2024-10-11: |
Potential pragmatic handling of partial matches for HTTP conditional GET
|
| 2024-10-10: |
Linux software RAID and changing your system's hostname
|
| 2024-10-09: |
The history of inetd is more interesting than I expected
|
| 2024-10-08: |
OpenBSD kernel messages about memory conflicts on x86 machines
|
| 2024-10-07: |
Things syndication feed readers do with 'conditional GET'
|
| 2024-10-06: |
DKIM signatures from mailing list providers don't mean too much
|
| 2024-10-05: |
Daemonization in Unix programs is probably about restarting programs
|
| 2024-10-04: |
Traditionally, init on Unix was not a service manager as such
|
| 2024-10-03: |
(Unix) daemonization turns out to be quite old
|
| 2024-10-02: |
Go's new small language features from 1.22 and 1.23 are nice
|
| 2024-10-01: |
Two views of what a TLS certificate verifies
|
| 2024-09-30: |
Resetting the backoff restart delay for a systemd service
|
| 2024-09-29: |
Brief notes on making Prometheus's SNMP exporter use additional SNMP MIB(s)
|
| 2024-09-28: |
Options for adding IPv6 networking to your libvirt based virtual machines
|
| 2024-09-27: |
Brief notes on how the Prometheus SNMP exporter's configurations work
|
| 2024-09-26: |
The impact of the September 2024 CUPS CVEs depends on your size
|
| 2024-09-25: |
Using a small ZFS recordsize doesn't save you space (well, almost never)
|
| 2024-09-24: |
Go and my realization about what I'll call the 'Promises' pattern
|
| 2024-09-23: |
Mostly getting redundant UEFI boot disks on modern Ubuntu (especially 24.04)
|
| 2024-09-22: |
Old (Unix) workstations and servers tended to boot in the same ways
|
| 2024-09-21: |
TLS certificates were (almost) never particularly well verified
|
| 2024-09-20: |
Our broad reasons for and approach to mirroring disks
|
| 2024-09-19: |
OpenBSD versus FreeBSD pf.conf syntax for address translation rules
|
| 2024-09-18: |
Open source maintainers with little time and changes
|
| 2024-09-17: |
My "time to full crawl" (vague) metric
|
| 2024-09-16: |
Why my Fedora 40 systems stalled logins for ten seconds or so
|
| 2024-09-15: |
Why we're interested in FreeBSD lately (and how it relates to OpenBSD here)
|
| 2024-09-14: |
Getting maximum 10G Ethernet bandwidth still seems tricky
|
| 2024-09-13: |
Threads, asynchronous IO, and cancellation
|
| 2024-09-12: |
What admin access researchers have to their machines here
|
| 2024-09-11: |
Rate-limiting failed SMTP authentication attempts in Exim 4.95
|
| 2024-09-10: |
Ways ATX power supply control could work on server motherboards
|
| 2024-09-09: |
How ATX power supply control seems to work on desktop motherboards
|
| 2024-09-08: |
I should probably reboot BMCs any time they behave oddly
|
| 2024-09-07: |
I wish (Linux) WireGuard had a simple way to restrict peer public IPs
Operating system threads are always going to be (more) expensive
|
| 2024-09-05: |
The problems (Open)ZFS can have on new Linux kernel versions
|
| 2024-09-04: |
Using rsync to create a limited ability to write remote files
|
| 2024-09-03: |
TLS Server Name Indications can be altered by helpful code
|
| 2024-09-02: |
Apache's odd behavior for requests with a domain with a dot at the end
|
| 2024-09-01: |
The status of putting a '.' at the end of domain names
|
| 2024-08-31: |
In practice, abstractions hide their underlying details
|
| 2024-08-30: |
Mercurial's extdiff extension and reporting filenames in diffs
|
| 2024-08-29: |
The web fun fact that domains can end in dots and canonicalization failures
|
| 2024-08-28: |
How not to upgrade (some) held packages on Ubuntu (and Debian)
|
| 2024-08-27: |
Some reasons why we mostly collect IPMI sensor data locally
|
| 2024-08-26: |
What's going on with 'quit' in an interactive CPython session (as of 3.12)
|
| 2024-08-25: |
How to talk to a local IPMI under FreeBSD 14
|
| 2024-08-24: |
JSON is usually the least bad option for machine-readable output formats
|
| 2024-08-23: |
My (current) view on open source moral obligations and software popularity
|
| 2024-08-22: |
I used libvirt's 'virt-install' briefly and it worked nicely
|
| 2024-08-21: |
What a POSIX shell has to do with $PWD
|
| 2024-08-20: |
Some brief notes on 'numfmt' from GNU Coreutils
|
| 2024-08-19: |
It's not simple to add function keyword arguments to Go
|
| 2024-08-18: |
A downside or two of function keyword arguments (and default values)
|
| 2024-08-17: |
Why and how I keep around spare libvirt based virtual machines
|
| 2024-08-16: |
FreeBSD's 'root on ZFS' default appeals to me for an odd reason
|
| 2024-08-15: |
Workarounds are often forever (unless you work to make them otherwise)
|
| 2024-08-14: |
Traceroute, firewalls, and the modern Internet: a horrible realization
A note to myself about using traceroute to check for port reachability
|
| 2024-08-13: |
Some thoughts on OpenSSH 9.8's PerSourcePenalties feature
|
| 2024-08-12: |
Uncertainties and issues in using IPMI temperature data
|
| 2024-08-11: |
ZFS properties sometimes change their default values over time
|
| 2024-08-10: |
Allocating disk space (and all resources) is ultimately a political decision
|
| 2024-08-09: |
The Broadcom 'bnxt' Ethernet driver and RDMA (in Ubuntu 24.04)
|
| 2024-08-08: |
How Linux kernel driver modules for hardware get loaded (I think)
|
| 2024-08-07: |
Maybe understanding Crowdstrike's argument arity problem
|
| 2024-08-06: |
Host names in syslog messages may not be quite what you expect
|
| 2024-08-05: |
Staged rollouts of things still have limitations
|
| 2024-08-04: |
The speed of updates for signatures of bad things matters (a lot)
|
| 2024-08-03: |
A surprise with the temperature distribution in our machine room
|
| 2024-08-02: |
Modern web PKI (TLS) is very different than it used to be
|
| 2024-08-01: |
OCSP Stapling always faced a bunch of hard problems
|
| 2024-07-31: |
We may want /usr/bin/python to be Python 3 sooner than I expected
|
| 2024-07-30: |
On not automatically reconnecting to IPMI Serial-over-LAN consoles
|
| 2024-07-29: |
Handling (or not) the serial console of our serial console server
|
| 2024-07-28: |
Our slowly growing Unix monoculture
|
| 2024-07-27: |
Backward compatibility, even for settings, has real costs
|
| 2024-07-26: |
The uncertain possible futures of Unix graphical desktops
|
| 2024-07-25: |
How I almost set up a recursive syslog server
|
| 2024-07-24: |
The Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is basically dead now
|
| 2024-07-23: |
Seeing and matching pf rules when using tcpdump on OpenBSD's pflog interface
|
| 2024-07-22: |
The challenges of working out how many CPUs your program can use on Linux
|
| 2024-07-21: |
Our giant login server: solving resource problems with brute force
|
| 2024-07-20: |
My home wireless network and convenience versus security
|
| 2024-07-19: |
Part of (computer) security is convincing people that it works
|
| 2024-07-18: |
The Linux Out-Of-Memory killer process list can be misleading
|
| 2024-07-17: |
SSH has become our universal (Unix) external access protocol
My self-inflicted UPS and computer conundrum
|
| 2024-07-15: |
People at universities travel widely and unpredictably
|
| 2024-07-14: |
The Firefox source code's 'StaticPrefs' system (as of Firefox 128)
|
| 2024-07-13: |
That software forges are often better than email is unfortunate
|
| 2024-07-12: |
Network switches aren't simple devices (not even basic switches)
|
| 2024-07-11: |
Brute force attackers seem to switch targets rapidly if you block them
|
| 2024-07-10: |
Fedora 40 probably doesn't work with software RAID 0.90 format superblocks
|
| 2024-07-09: |
Some (big) mail senders do use TLS SNI for SMTP even without DANE
|
| 2024-07-08: |
Using WireGuard as a router to get around reachability issues
|
| 2024-07-07: |
I think (GNU) Emacs bankruptcy is inevitable in the longer term
|
| 2024-07-06: |
"Out of band" network management is not trivial
|
| 2024-07-05: |
Gtk 4 has decided to blow up some people's world on HiDPI displays
|
| 2024-07-04: |
Structured log formats are not really "plaintext" logs
|
| 2024-07-03: |
Fedora 40 and a natural but less than ideal outcome with 'alternatives'
|
| 2024-07-02: |
Unix's fsync(), write ahead logs, and durability versus integrity
|
| 2024-07-01: |
Modifying and setting alarm times: a phone UI irritation
|
| 2024-06-30: |
The systemd journal doesn't force you to not have plain text logs
|
| 2024-06-29: |
Plaintext is not a great format for (system) logs
|
| 2024-06-28: |
I wish systemd didn't require two units for each socket service
|
| 2024-06-27: |
Is blocking outgoing traffic by default a good firewall choice now?
|
| 2024-06-26: |
The xinetd restart problem with binding ports that we run into
|
| 2024-06-25: |
Security is not really part of most people's jobs
|
| 2024-06-24: |
(GNU) Emacs wants personal customization in practice
|
| 2024-06-23: |
Some notes on ZFS's zstd compression kstats (on Linux)
|
| 2024-06-22: |
A Prometheus Blackbox gotcha: (UDP) DNS replies have a low size limit
|
| 2024-06-21: |
The IMAP LIST command as it interacts with client prefixes in Dovecot
|
| 2024-06-20: |
Where Thunderbird seems to get your default browser from on Linux
|
| 2024-06-19: |
It seems routine to see a bunch of browser User-Agents from the same IP
|
| 2024-06-18: |
Some things on how ZFS System Attributes are stored
|
| 2024-06-17: |
Go's 'range over functions' iterators and avoiding iteration errors
|
| 2024-06-16: |
Understanding a Python closure oddity
|
| 2024-06-15: |
We don't know what's happening on our networks
|
| 2024-06-14: |
Mixed content upgrades on the web in mid 2024
|
| 2024-06-13: |
Using prime numbers for our Prometheus scrape intervals
|
| 2024-06-12: |
The Linux kernel NFS server and reconnecting client NFS filehandles
|
| 2024-06-11: |
The size of our Prometheus setup as of June 2024
|
| 2024-06-10: |
The NFS server 'subtree' export problem
|
| 2024-06-09: |
OpenSSH can chose (or force) the 'shell' used for a specific SSH key
|
| 2024-06-08: |
Operating services versus operating an "adequate environment"
|
| 2024-06-07: |
Account recovery is still a hard problem in public key management
|
| 2024-06-06: |
Web applications should support being used behind a reverse proxy
|
| 2024-06-05: |
Maybe understanding uname(1)'s platform and machine fields
|
| 2024-06-04: |
Some history and limitations of uname(1) fields
|
| 2024-06-03: |
CVEs are not what I'll call security reports
|
| 2024-06-02: |
Stand-alone downloads of program assets has a security implication
|
| 2024-06-01: |
Phish tests and (not) getting people to report successful phish attacks
|
| 2024-05-31: |
Spammers do forge various noreply@<you> sender addresses
|
| 2024-05-30: |
Phish tests aren't like fire drills
|
| 2024-05-29: |
PyPy has been quietly working for me for several years now
|
| 2024-05-28: |
ZFS's transactional guarantees from a user perspective
|
| 2024-05-27: |
Some notes on Grafana Loki's new "structured metadata" (as of 3.0.x)
|
| 2024-05-26: |
Flaky alerts are telling you something
|
| 2024-05-25: |
Reasons to not expose Go's choice of default TLS ciphers
|
| 2024-05-24: |
The long-overdue problem coming for some people in Go 1.23
|
| 2024-05-23: |
There are multiple uses for metrics (and collecting metrics)
|
| 2024-05-22: |
The Prometheus host agent's 'perf' collector can be kind of expensive
|
| 2024-05-21: |
Go's old $GOPATH story for development and dependencies
|
| 2024-05-20: |
The power of using external authentication information in a web application
|
| 2024-05-19: |
My GNU Emacs MH mail folder completion in MH-E
|
| 2024-05-18: |
Realizing the hidden complexity of cloud server networking
|
| 2024-05-17: |
The trade-offs in not using WireGuard to talk to our cloud server
|
| 2024-05-16: |
Thoughts on (not) automating the setup of our first cloud server
|
| 2024-05-15: |
Turning off the X server's CapsLock modifier
|
| 2024-05-14: |
The X Window System and the curse of NumLock
|
| 2024-05-13: |
Some ideas on what Linux distributions can do about the new kernel situation
|
| 2024-05-12: |
The Linux kernel giving CVEs to all bugfixes is sort of predictable
|
| 2024-05-11: |
Where NS records show up in DNS replies depends on who you ask
|
| 2024-05-10: |
It's very difficult to tell if a Linux kernel bug is a security issue
|
| 2024-05-09: |
One of OCSP's problems is the dominance of Chrome
|
| 2024-05-08: |
All configuration files should support some form of file inclusion
|
| 2024-05-07: |
Some thoughts on when you can and can't lower OpenSSH's 'LoginGraceTime'
|
| 2024-05-06: |
What affects what server host key types OpenSSH will offer to you
|
| 2024-05-05: |
OpenSSH sshd's 'MaxStartups' setting and Internet-accessible machines
|
| 2024-05-04: |
We have our first significant batch of servers that only have UEFI booting
|
| 2024-05-03: |
UEFI, BIOS, and other confusing x86 PC (firmware) terms
|
| 2024-05-02: |
Thinking about filesystem space allocation policies and SSDs
|
| 2024-05-01: |
Having a machine room can mean having things in your machine room
|
| 2024-04-30: |
The state of Python in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
|
| 2024-04-29: |
Our likely long term future (not) with Ubuntu (as of early 2024)
|
| 2024-04-28: |
How I (used to) handle keeping track of how I configured software
|
| 2024-04-27: |
Autoconf and configure features that people find valuable
|
| 2024-04-26: |
I wish projects would reliably use their release announcements mechanisms
|
| 2024-04-25: |
The importance of an ordinary space in a Unix shell command line
|
| 2024-04-24: |
Pruning some things out with (GNU) find options
|
| 2024-04-23: |
Libvirt's virt-viewer and (guest) screen blanking
|
| 2024-04-22: |
Making virtual machine network interfaces inactive in Linux libvirt
|
| 2024-04-21: |
Thoughts on potentially realistic temperature trip limit for hardware
|
| 2024-04-20: |
What the original 4.2 BSD csh hashed (which is not what I thought)
|
| 2024-04-19: |
Modern Linux mounts a lot of different types of virtual filesystems
|
| 2024-04-18: |
On the duration of self-signed TLS (website) certificates
|
| 2024-04-17: |
Limiting the maximum size of Amanda debug logs with a Linux tmpfs mount
|
| 2024-04-16: |
IPMI connections have privilege levels, not just IPMI users
|
| 2024-04-15: |
Having IPv6 for public servers is almost always merely nice, not essential
|
| 2024-04-14: |
(Probably) forcing Git to never prompt for authentication
|
| 2024-04-13: |
A corner case in Firefox's user interface for addon updates
|
| 2024-04-12: |
Please don't try to hot-reload changed Python files too often
|
| 2024-04-11: |
Getting the underlying disks of a Linux software RAID array
|
| 2024-04-10: |
It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu
|
| 2024-04-09: |
Bash's sadly flawed smart (programmable) completion
|
| 2024-04-08: |
Don't require people to change 'source code' to configure your programs
|
| 2024-04-07: |
NAT'ing on the firewall versus host routes for public IPs
|
| 2024-04-06: |
GNU Autoconf is not replaceable in any practical sense
Solving the hairpin NAT problem with policy based routing and plain NAT
|
| 2024-04-05: |
Why I think you shouldn't digitally sign things casually
|
| 2024-04-03: |
GNU Emacs and the case of special space characters
|
| 2024-04-02: |
An issue with Alertmanager inhibitions and resolved alerts
What Prometheus Alertmanager's group_interval setting means
|
| 2024-04-01: |
The power of being able to query your servers for unpredictable things
|
| 2024-03-31: |
Some thoughts on switching daemons to be socket activated via systemd
|
| 2024-03-30: |
The Prometheus scrape interval mistake people keep making
|
| 2024-03-29: |
Some notes on Firefox's media autoplay settings in practice as of Firefox 124
|
| 2024-03-28: |
The effects of silences (et al) in Prometheus Alertmanager
|
| 2024-03-27: |
Some questions to ask about what silencing alerts means
|
| 2024-03-26: |
How I would automate monitoring DNS queries in basic Prometheus
|
| 2024-03-25: |
Options for diverting alerts in Prometheus
|
| 2024-03-24: |
Platform peculiarities and Python (with an example)
|
| 2024-03-23: |
The many possible results of turning an IP address into a 'hostname'
|
| 2024-03-22: |
The Linux kernel.task_delayacct sysctl and why you might care about it
|
| 2024-03-21: |
Reading the Linux cpufreq sysfs interface is (deliberately) slow
|
| 2024-03-20: |
When I reimplement one of my programs, I often wind up polishing it too
|
| 2024-03-19: |
About DRAM-less SSDs and whether that matters to us
|
| 2024-03-18: |
Sorting out PIDs, Tgids, and tasks on Linux
|
| 2024-03-17: |
Disk write buffering and its interactions with write flushes
|
| 2024-03-16: |
Some more notes on Linux's ionice and kernel IO priorities
|
| 2024-03-15: |
The problem of using basic Prometheus to monitor DNS query results
|
| 2024-03-14: |
You might want to think about if your system serial numbers are sensitive
|
| 2024-03-13: |
Restarting systemd-networkd normally clears your 'ip rules' routing policies
|
| 2024-03-12: |
What do we count as 'manual' management of TLS certificates
|
| 2024-03-11: |
Why we should care about usage data for our internal services
|
| 2024-03-10: |
Scheduling latency, IO latency, and their role in Linux responsiveness
|
| 2024-03-09: |
Some thoughts on usage data for your systems and services
|
| 2024-03-08: |
A realization about shell pipeline steps on multi-core machines
|
| 2024-03-07: |
Some notes about the Cloudflare eBPF Prometheus exporter for Linux
|
| 2024-03-06: |
Where and how Ubuntu kernels get their ZFS modules
|
| 2024-03-05: |
A peculiarity of the X Window System: Windows all the way down
|
| 2024-03-04: |
An illustration of how much X cares about memory usage
|
| 2024-03-03: |
X graphics rendering as contrasted to Wayland rendering
|
| 2024-03-02: |
Something I don't know: How server core count interacts with RAM latency
|
| 2024-03-01: |
Options for your Grafana panels when your metrics change names
|
| 2024-02-29: |
The speed of improvement in servers may have slowed down
|
| 2024-02-28: |
Detecting absent Prometheus metrics without knowing their labels
|
| 2024-02-27: |
Our probably-typical (lack of) machine inventory situation
|
| 2024-02-26: |
How to make your GNU Emacs commands 'relevant' for M-X
|
| 2024-02-25: |
Open source culture and the valorization of public work
|
| 2024-02-24: |
The Go 'range over functions' proposal and user-written container types
|
| 2024-02-23: |
Fixing my problem of a stuck 'dnf updateinfo info' on Fedora Linux
|
| 2024-02-22: |
A recent abrupt change in Internet SSH brute force attacks against us
|
| 2024-02-21: |
What ZIL metrics are exposed by (Open)ZFS on Linux
|
| 2024-02-20: |
NetworkManager won't share network interfaces, which is a problem
|
| 2024-02-19: |
The flow of activity in the ZFS Intent Log (as I understand it)
|
| 2024-02-18: |
Even big websites may still be manually managing TLS certificates (or close)
|
| 2024-02-17: |
We outsource our public web presence and that's fine
|
| 2024-02-16: |
Options for genuine ECC RAM on the desktop in (early) 2024
|
| 2024-02-15: |
(Some) X window managers deliberately use off-screen windows
|
| 2024-02-14: |
Understanding a recent optimization to Go's reflect.TypeFor
|
| 2024-02-13: |
What is in (Open)ZFS's per-pool "txgs" /proc file on Linux
|
| 2024-02-12: |
Linux kernel boot messages and seeing if your AMD system has ECC
|
| 2024-02-11: |
Go 1.22's go/types Alias type shows the challenge of API compatibility
|
| 2024-02-10: |
My plan for backups of my home machine (as of early 2024)
|
| 2024-02-09: |
Compatibility lingers long after it's needed (until it gets noticed)
|
| 2024-02-08: |
Accidentally making windows vanish in my old-fashioned Unix X environment
|
| 2024-02-07: |
What I'd like in a hypothetical new desktop machine in 2024
|
| 2024-02-06: |
What the max_connect Linux NFS v4 mount parameter seems to do
|
| 2024-02-05: |
We might want to regularly keep track of how important each server is
|
| 2024-02-04: |
I switched to explicit imports of things in our Django application
|
| 2024-02-03: |
Solving one of our Django problems in a sideways, brute force way
|
| 2024-02-02: |
One of my MH-E customizations: 'narrow-to-pending' (refiles and deletes)
|
| 2024-02-01: |
Our Django application is now using Python 3 and a modern Django
|
| 2024-01-31: |
Using IPv6 has quietly become reliable (for me)
|
| 2024-01-30: |
Putting a Python executable in venvs is probably a necessary thing
|
| 2024-01-29: |
What I think goes wrong periodically with our Grafana Loki on restarts
Servers are (probably) starting to drop serial ports
|
| 2024-01-27: |
Getting the Python LSP server working with venvs the brute force way
|
| 2024-01-26: |
Histogram data is most useful when they also provide true totals
|
| 2024-01-25: |
In Go, I'm going to avoid using 'any' as an actual type
|
| 2024-01-24: |
The cooling advantage that CPU integrated graphics has
|
| 2024-01-23: |
CGI programs have an attractive one step deployment model
|
| 2024-01-22: |
Desktop PC motherboards and the costs of extra features
|
| 2024-01-21: |
The expected size of a gap in a Prometheus range vector (sometimes)
|
| 2024-01-20: |
An example of how Prometheus's delta() function will extrapolate time ranges
|
| 2024-01-19: |
A Django gotcha with Python 3 and the encoding of CharFields
|
| 2024-01-18: |
Notes on the Linux kernel's 'irq' pressure stall information and meaning
|
| 2024-01-17: |
Some interesting metrics you can get from cgroup V2 systems
|
| 2024-01-16: |
What Prometheus exporters we use (as of the end of 2023)
|
| 2024-01-15: |
How we monitor that our wireless network is still there in places
|
| 2024-01-14: |
Git branches as a social construct
|
| 2024-01-13: |
Indexed archive formats and selective restores
|
| 2024-01-12: |
What we use ZFS on Linux's ZED 'zedlets' for
|
| 2024-01-11: |
An old Unix mistake you could make when signaling init (PID 1)
|
| 2024-01-10: |
MFA today is both 'simple' and non-trivial work
|
| 2024-01-09: |
How far back we want our metrics to go depends on what they're for
|
| 2024-01-08: |
One of the things limiting the evolution of WebPKI is web servers
|
| 2024-01-07: |
TLS certificate expiry times are fundamentally a hack
|
| 2024-01-06: |
Some ballpark numbers for fun on filling filesystem cache with NFS traffic
|
| 2024-01-05: |
Having a virtual machine host server has been quite useful
|
| 2024-01-04: |
'Unmaintained' (open source) code represents a huge amount of value
|
| 2024-01-03: |
Ten years isn't long enough for maximum age settings
|
| 2024-01-02: |
Why Unix's lseek() has that name instead of 'seek()'
|
| 2024-01-01: |
Alerting on our NTP servers having a high NTP stratum hasn't been useful
|
| 2023-12-31: |
Switching Linux software RAID disks around in (early) 2023
|
| 2023-12-30: |
Email addresses are not good 'permanent' identifiers for accounts
|
| 2023-12-29: |
Your kernel panics in ZFS on Linux probably aren't actual kernel panics
|
| 2023-12-28: |
The various phases of Prometheus Blackbox's HTTP probe
|
| 2023-12-27: |
Web CGI programs aren't particularly slow these days
|
| 2023-12-26: |
Maybe learning to let new environments be themselves (more or less)
|
| 2023-12-25: |
Standards often provide little guidance for handling 'bad' content
|
| 2023-12-24: |
Do we actually need negative access control rules (in general)?
|
| 2023-12-23: |
A DKIM signature on email by itself means very little
|
| 2023-12-22: |
What I think the 'SMTP Smuggling' attack enables
|
| 2023-12-21: |
Systemd will block a service's start if you manually restart it too fast
|
| 2023-12-20: |
The (historical) background of 'SMTP Smuggling'
|
| 2023-12-19: |
Why grub-install can give you an "unknown filesystem" error
|
| 2023-12-18: |
In Go, constant variables are not used for optimization
|
| 2023-12-17: |
Prometheus's group_left() and group_right() operators
|
| 2023-12-16: |
The three email addresses of OpenID Connect (OIDC) in practice
|
| 2023-12-15: |
What /.well-known/ URL queries people make against our web servers
|
| 2023-12-14: |
Partially emulating #ifdef in Go with build tags and consts
|
| 2023-12-13: |
Why systemd-resolved can give weird results for nonexistent bare hostnames
|
| 2023-12-12: |
We've switched (back) to using Bind for our local DNS resolvers
|
| 2023-12-11: |
Seeing how fast people will probe you after you get a new TLS certificate
|
| 2023-12-10: |
Some notes on using the logcli program to query Grafana Loki
|
| 2023-12-09: |
I recently used Grafana Loki for fast, flexible log searching
|
| 2023-12-08: |
A possible path to reliable name constraints on internal TLS CAs
|
| 2023-12-07: |
Mapping out my understanding of (web-based) single sign-on systems
|
| 2023-12-06: |
Understanding another piece of per-cgroup memory usage accounting
|
| 2023-12-05: |
Doing work that scales requires being able to scale your work
|
| 2023-12-04: |
Getting some information about the Linux kernel dentry cache (dcache)
|
| 2023-12-03: |
A bit more trivia on the Unix V6 shell and its control flow
|
| 2023-12-02: |
Why Unix kernels have grown caches for directory entries ('name caches')
|
| 2023-12-01: |
The Unix V6 shell and how control flow worked in it
|
| 2023-11-30: |
My sysadmin's view of going from Centrex to VoIP (sort of)
|
| 2023-11-29: |
The quietly impressive thing mail clients do when you write HTML mail
|
| 2023-11-28: |
Why we scrape Prometheus Blackbox's metrics endpoint
|
| 2023-11-27: |
Go's API stability and making assumptions, even in semi-official code
|
| 2023-11-26: |
The HTML viewport mess
|
| 2023-11-25: |
Unix shells and the current directory
|
| 2023-11-24: |
A peculiarity of the GNU Coreutils version of 'test' and '['
|
| 2023-11-23: |
Unix's 'test' program and the V7 Bourne shell
|
| 2023-11-22: |
Understanding and sorting out ZFS pool features
|
| 2023-11-21: |
Modern proxy (IPv4) ARP and proxy IPv6 NDP on Linux
|
| 2023-11-20: |
Why I'm still using the "Certainly Something" addon for Firefox
|
| 2023-11-19: |
Third party Emacs packages that I use (as of November 2023)
|
| 2023-11-18: |
Using argparse in my Python programs encourages me to add options to them
|
| 2023-11-17: |
My first Django database migration worked fine
|
| 2023-11-16: |
Setting up an IPv6 gateway on an Ubuntu 22.04 server with WireGuard
|
| 2023-11-15: |
WireGuard and the question of link-local IPv6 addresses
|
| 2023-11-14: |
Amanda and deciding between server and client compression
|
| 2023-11-13: |
Amanda has clever restores from tar archives (sometimes)
|
| 2023-11-12: |
The Amanda backup system completely reads tar archives on restores
|
| 2023-11-11: |
Go modules and the domain expiry problem
|
| 2023-11-10: |
Backup systems and how much they do or don't know about storage formats
|
| 2023-11-09: |
Brief early impressions of Emacs' evil Vim emulation
|
| 2023-11-08: |
Holding packages in Debian (and Ubuntu) has gotten easier over the years
|
| 2023-11-07: |
The Vim features that make me a Vim user instead of a Vi user
|
| 2023-11-06: |
What client host keys OpenSSH ssh uses for host based authentication
|
| 2023-11-05: |
Exim's options for how to DKIM sign various email headers
|
| 2023-11-04: |
The various meanings of DKIM signing message headers
|
| 2023-11-03: |
Our varying levels of what you could charitably call 'physical security'
|
| 2023-11-02: |
Network firewalls and Ethernet addresses
|
| 2023-11-01: |
People do change what a particular version is of a Go module
|
| 2023-10-31: |
Real (email) HTML can get a bit extreme
|
| 2023-10-30: |
Finding which NFSv4 client owns a lock on a Linux NFS(v4) server
|
| 2023-10-29: |
One reason that ZFS can't turn a directory into a filesystem
|
| 2023-10-28: |
Thinking about the sensible limits of customization of things
|
| 2023-10-27: |
Alerting on sticky configuration reload failures for Prometheus
|
| 2023-10-26: |
The issue of what headers to include in your DKIM signatures
|
| 2023-10-25: |
There are at least two ways to 'verify' TLS client host certificates
|
| 2023-10-24: |
dup()'s shared file IO offset is a necessary part of Unix
|
| 2023-10-23: |
Internet network sessions can be remarkably durable
|
| 2023-10-22: |
Unix /dev/fd and dup(2)
|
| 2023-10-21: |
Understanding dynamic menubar menus in GNU Emacs
|
| 2023-10-20: |
Changing the menu bar order of Emacs easy-menu menus
|
| 2023-10-19: |
Using extra Firefox profiles to make my life better
|
| 2023-10-18: |
WireGuard is pleasantly easy to set up on smartphones (if you're experienced)
|
| 2023-10-17: |
(Minibuffer) completion categories in GNU Emacs and forcing them
|
| 2023-10-16: |
The two places firewall NAT can happen in our network
|
| 2023-10-15: |
Finally noticing a quiet speedup in my environment
|
| 2023-10-14: |
Stateful versus stateless firewalls, and why stateful is attractive
|
| 2023-10-13: |
OpenBSD PF-based firewalls suffer differently from denial of service attacks
|
| 2023-10-12: |
Getting the active network interface(s) in a script on Ubuntu 22.04
|
| 2023-10-11: |
The wisdom of being selective about python-lsp-server plugins
|
| 2023-10-10: |
Keyboard keys and characters
|
| 2023-10-09: |
My understanding of various sorts of completion in GNU Emacs
|
| 2023-10-08: |
The tools I use to read email affect how I read it (more than I thought)
|
| 2023-10-07: |
The three modern formats for email forwarded by people
|
| 2023-10-06: |
Understanding the orderless package for GNU Emacs
|
| 2023-10-05: |
X's two ways to send events to X clients (more or less)
|
| 2023-10-04: |
You can do Apache HTTP Basic Authentication through PAM
|
| 2023-10-03: |
In praise of modest, simple third party packages for GNU Emacs
|
| 2023-10-02: |
What we did when we couldn't gracefully roll over an OpenVPN TLS root certificate
|
| 2023-10-01: |
Brief notes on doing TOTP MFA with oathtool
|
| 2023-09-30: |
I have questions about MFA push notification fatigue
|
| 2023-09-29: |
Understanding the NMH repl command's '-cc me' and '-nocc me' options
|
| 2023-09-28: |
The IMAP Sent folder can create some odd issues and confusion
|
| 2023-09-27: |
Uncertainties over adding IP ratelimits to your local DNS resolvers
|
| 2023-09-26: |
Some reasons to combine systemd-resolved with your private DNS resolver
|
| 2023-09-25: |
Splitting our local DNS resolvers apart to serve different audiences
|
| 2023-09-24: |
I wish Linux exposed a 'OOM kills due to cgroup limits' kernel statistic
|
| 2023-09-23: |
Some questions about Unbound's domain-based rate limits (as of fall 2023)
|
| 2023-09-22: |
Changing GNU Emacs Lisp functions through advice-add, not brute force
|
| 2023-09-21: |
HTTP Basic Authentication and your URL hierarchy
|
| 2023-09-20: |
Restarting nfs-server on a Linux NFS (v3) server isn't transparent
|
| 2023-09-19: |
How Unix shells used to be used as an access control mechanism
|
| 2023-09-18: |
Making a function that defines functions in GNU Emacs ELisp
|
| 2023-09-17: |
Unix shells are generally not viable access control mechanisms any more
|
| 2023-09-16: |
Apache's HTTP Basic Authentication could do with more logging
|
| 2023-09-15: |
Insuring that my URL server and client programs exit after problems
|
| 2023-09-14: |
An important difference between intern and make-symbol in GNU Emacs ELisp
|
| 2023-09-13: |
A user program doing intense IO can manifest as high system CPU time
|
| 2023-09-12: |
My (new) simple system to open URLs on my desktop from remote Linux machines
|
| 2023-09-11: |
GNU Emacs, use-package, and key binding for mode specific keymaps
|
| 2023-09-10: |
The roots of an obscure Bourne shell error message
|
| 2023-09-09: |
The effects of modest TCP latency (I think) on my experience with some X programs
|
| 2023-09-08: |
How changing a ZFS filesystem's recordsize affects existing files
|
| 2023-09-07: |
(Unix) Directory traversal and symbolic links
|
| 2023-09-06: |
What I understand about two-factor/multi-factor authentication (in 2023)
|
| 2023-09-05: |
Having ClamAV reject email using the Malwarepatrol database seems unwise
|
| 2023-09-04: |
An (Open)SSH Certificate Authority is sort of unlimited and sort of not
|
| 2023-09-03: |
TLS CA root certificate name constraints for internal CAs
|
| 2023-09-02: |
In practice, 'alerts' can have different meanings in different organizations
|
| 2023-09-01: |
Alerting on high level 'user stories' failing doesn't work in all setups
|
| 2023-08-31: |
The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant
|
| 2023-08-30: |
Email anti-spam (and really all anti-spam) is all heuristics now
|
| 2023-08-29: |
Experiencing the increase in web bandwidth usage for myself
|
| 2023-08-28: |
Go 1.22's (likely) new reflect.TypeFor() generic function
Link: quoting strings and breaking strings across multiple lines in YAML
|
| 2023-08-27: |
YAML is an okay enough configuration file format
|
| 2023-08-26: |
Linux NFS v4 idmapd domain handling and server/client agreement
|
| 2023-08-25: |
Enabling NFS v4 on an Ubuntu 22.04 fileserver (instead of just NFS v3)
|
| 2023-08-24: |
One challenge in reducing TLS certificate lifetimes down to 90 days
|
| 2023-08-23: |
Giving Linux mountd a '--no-nfs-version 4' argument does nothing
|
| 2023-08-22: |
We have a NFS v3 locking problem on our Ubuntu 22.04 servers
|
| 2023-08-21: |
Packaging software is something that takes work
|
| 2023-08-20: |
Unix is both a technology and an idea
|
| 2023-08-19: |
CLAs create different issues than making (small) open source contributions
|
| 2023-08-18: |
Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) impede modest contributions
|
| 2023-08-17: |
What I need to SSH to old hosts on Fedora 37 (and probably later)
|
| 2023-08-16: |
A pointless review of my (current) favorite mouse, the Contour optical mouse
|
| 2023-08-15: |
Maybe we shouldn't default to allowing logins on machines
|
| 2023-08-14: |
A brief brush with writing and using Python type hints
|
| 2023-08-13: |
The tangled problems of asking for people's '(full) legal name'
|
| 2023-08-12: |
Getting my backup Internet connection through BlueTooth on Linux
|
| 2023-08-11: |
Some problems with 'first name' and 'last name' fields in data
|
| 2023-08-10: |
Browsers barely care what HTTP status code your web pages are served with
|
| 2023-08-09: |
A program's (effective) log messages can have many sources
|
| 2023-08-08: |
Programs shouldn't commit to fixed and predictable log messages
|
| 2023-08-07: |
Good RPC systems versus basic 'RPC systems'
|
| 2023-08-06: |
Monitoring your logs is mostly a tarpit
|
| 2023-08-05: |
How the rc shell handles whitespace in various contexts
|
| 2023-08-04: |
On Linux, NFS v4 mounts are a different filesystem type than NFS (v3) mounts
|
| 2023-08-03: |
Prometheus scrape failures can cause alerts to be 'resolved'
|
| 2023-08-02: |
The Prometheus host agent's metrics for systemd unit restarts
|
| 2023-08-01: |
Turning off the sidebar of Firefox's built in PDF viewer
|
| 2023-07-31: |
Systemd auto-restarts of units can hide problems from you
|
| 2023-07-30: |
Our alerts and monitoring can never be comprehensive
|
| 2023-07-29: |
Prometheus Blackbox probes and DNS lookups
|
| 2023-07-28: |
The issue with control flow in interpreters using the 'eval' pattern
|
| 2023-07-27: |
On the future of free long term support for Linux distributions
|
| 2023-07-26: |
There's more than one reason that people used (or use) CentOS
|
| 2023-07-25: |
Where the speed limits on our Amanda backups appear to be in 2023
|
| 2023-07-24: |
The 'eval' pattern for interpreting simple languages
|
| 2023-07-23: |
Some cheap things are only cheap if they have enough volume
|
| 2023-07-22: |
I'm not going to accurately remember our past views and thoughts
|
| 2023-07-21: |
When we take things out of service, I should write up how they worked
|
| 2023-07-20: |
Command hashing in Unix shells is probably no longer worth it
|
| 2023-07-19: |
HTTP has become the default, universal communication protocol
|
| 2023-07-18: |
Non-uniform CPU hyperthreading is here and can cause fun issues
|
| 2023-07-17: |
A bit of Unix history on 'su -'
|
| 2023-07-16: |
Social media posts aren't as small and simple as you might think
|
| 2023-07-15: |
Static websites have a low barrier to entry
|
| 2023-07-14: |
The theory versus the practice of "static websites"
|
| 2023-07-13: |
Some notes on errno when tracing Linux kernel system call results
|
| 2023-07-12: |
Two views of security and vulnerability scanners
|
| 2023-07-11: |
How I move URLs between browsers in my Unix desktop environment
|
| 2023-07-10: |
Notes on Linux's /proc/locks and NFS v4 locks as of Ubuntu 22.04
|
| 2023-07-09: |
Polymorphism and other important aspects of inheritance
|
| 2023-07-08: |
The HTTP status code for a web server's default "hello" front page
|
| 2023-07-07: |
Our experience with nftables and 'iptables' on Ubuntu 22.04
|
| 2023-07-06: |
Basic NFS v4 seems to just work (so far) on Ubuntu 22.04
|
| 2023-07-05: |
The mere 'presence' of an URL on a web server is not a good signal
|
| 2023-07-04: |
Web servers should refuse requests for random, unnecessary URLs
|
| 2023-07-03: |
Our Python fileserver management code has been quite durable over the years
|
| 2023-07-02: |
The evolving Unix attitudes on handling signals in your code
|
| 2023-07-01: |
Cool URLs keep their contents (an obvious point that still matters)
|
| 2023-06-30: |
In practice, cool URLs can become inaccessible even if they don't change
|
| 2023-06-29: |
The persistence of 'san' names in our environment
|
| 2023-06-28: |
You should delete the 'User-Agent' header from outgoing email
|
| 2023-06-27: |
Belatedly remembering to use the two expression form of Python's assert
|
| 2023-06-26: |
Let's Encrypt's interesting certificate issuance error
|
| 2023-06-25: |
Why use 'TEST-NET' IP addresses in general documentation instead of RFC 1918 ranges
|
| 2023-06-24: |
Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located
|
| 2023-06-23: |
Go 1.21 will (probably) download newer toolchains on demand by default
|
| 2023-06-22: |
I don't expect to see competitive RISC-V servers any time soon
|
| 2023-06-21: |
Domination has a lead time
|
| 2023-06-20: |
Having non-x86 machines makes your life harder, especially in a mixed setup
|
| 2023-06-19: |
Failing to draw lines between 'script' and 'program'
|
| 2023-06-18: |
Link: The Difference Between Root Certificate Authorities, Intermediates, and Resellers
One temptation of shell scripting is reusing other people's code
|
| 2023-06-17: |
Javascript modifying cut and paste can sometimes be a good thing in browsers
|
| 2023-06-16: |
CGIs combine well with Apache location-based access control
|
| 2023-06-15: |
The evaporation of lots of .ga domains
|
| 2023-06-14: |
Where your program's configuration files ('dotfiles') should go today
|
| 2023-06-13: |
The Certificate Authority's view of Certificate Transparency and CT Logs
|
| 2023-06-12: |
There are two levels of isolation when building Linux packages
|
| 2023-06-11: |
The potential risks of using (Open)ZFS On Linux with at least NFS
|
| 2023-06-10: |
A potential issue with outstanding query limits in your DNS resolver
|
| 2023-06-09: |
(Apparent) Certificate Authorities aren't always actual CAs
|
| 2023-06-08: |
Let's Encrypt (really ACME) has a decent reason for (still) using CSRs
|
| 2023-06-07: |
A retrospective on my thesis about language niches, fifteen years later
|
| 2023-06-06: |
I should read the Vim help more often
|
| 2023-06-05: |
The Linux kernel will fix some peculiar argv usage in execve(2)
|
| 2023-06-04: |
Why Prometheus exporters really need fixed TCP ports
|
| 2023-06-03: |
Unix is not POSIX
|
| 2023-06-02: |
GNU Grep versus the (Linux) open source ecology
|
| 2023-06-01: |
Capturing data you need later when using bpftrace
|
| 2023-05-31: |
DNSSEC failures are how you get people to disable DNSSEC
|
| 2023-05-30: |
Some tricks for getting the data you need when using bpftrace
|
| 2023-05-29: |
System administration's long slow march to configuration automation
|
| 2023-05-28: |
My current editor usage (as of mid 2023)
|
| 2023-05-27: |
How I set up a server for testing new Grafana versions and other things
|
| 2023-05-26: |
In practice, Grafana has not been great at backward compatibility
|
| 2023-05-25: |
That people produce HTML with string templates is telling us something
|
| 2023-05-24: |
Encryption for stream based protocols versus 'RPC' protocols
|
| 2023-05-23: |
Some views on protocols and encryption
|
| 2023-05-22: |
What I see as good options today for encrypted NFS
|
| 2023-05-21: |
NFS with Kerberos and NFS without Kerberos are two quite different things
|
| 2023-05-20: |
Some notes on the cost of Go finalizers (in Go 1.20)
|
| 2023-05-19: |
The long life of Apache httpd 2.4
|
| 2023-05-18: |
What a desktop environment is on modern Linux
|
| 2023-05-17: |
(Graphical) Unix has always had desktop environments
Having metrics for something attracts your attention to it
|
| 2023-05-15: |
The time our Linux systems spend on integer to text and back conversions
|
| 2023-05-14: |
Why I use separate lexers in my recursive descent parsers
|
| 2023-05-13: |
The paradox of ZFS ARC non-growth and ARC hit rates
|
| 2023-05-12: |
The modern browser experience has some impressive subtle tricks
|
| 2023-05-11: |
I've mostly stopped reading technical mailing lists
|
| 2023-05-10: |
Mailing lists versus forums, some thoughts
|
| 2023-05-09: |
Curing my home desktop from locking up in the cold (so far)
|
| 2023-05-08: |
When to use drgn instead of eBPF tools like bpftrace, and vice versa
|
| 2023-05-07: |
Advisory file locks and mandatory file locks are two quite different things
|
| 2023-05-06: |
Finding which NFS client owns a lock on a NFS server via Linux kernel delving
|
| 2023-05-05: |
Some early praise for using drgn for poking into Linux kernel internals
|
| 2023-05-04: |
Flock() and fcntl() file locks and Linux NFS (v3)
|
| 2023-05-03: |
Forcefully breaking NFS locks on Linux NFS servers as of Ubuntu 22.04
|
| 2023-05-02: |
The types of TLS seen on our external MX (as of April 2023)
|
| 2023-05-01: |
How NFS v3 servers and clients re-synchronize locks after reboots
|
| 2023-04-30: |
Os.walk, the temptation of hammers, and the paralysis of choice
|
| 2023-04-29: |
A crontab related mistake you can make with internal email ratelimits
|
| 2023-04-28: |
More notes on Linux's /proc/locks and NFS as of Ubuntu 22.04
|
| 2023-04-27: |
I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup
|
| 2023-04-26: |
Putting the 'User-Agent' in your web crawler's User-Agent
|
| 2023-04-25: |
Understanding ZFS ARC hit (and miss) kstat statistics
|
| 2023-04-24: |
Thinking about our passive exposure to IPv6 issues
|
| 2023-04-23: |
Programming on Unix and automatic memory management
|
| 2023-04-22: |
The two types of C programmers (a provocative thesis)
|
| 2023-04-21: |
The traditional workaround for stuck NFS(v3) locks
|
| 2023-04-20: |
Setting the ARC target size in ZFS on Linux (as of ZoL 2.1)
|
| 2023-04-19: |
An interesting mistake I made with a (Go) SSH client API
|
| 2023-04-18: |
When and how ZFS on Linux changes the ARC target size (as of ZoL 2.1)
|
| 2023-04-17: |
ARC memory reclaim statistics exposed by ZFS on Linux (as of ZoL 2.1)
|
| 2023-04-16: |
Some important ARC memory statistics exposed by ZFS on Linux (as of ZoL 2.1)
|
| 2023-04-15: |
Some thoughts on OpenSSH versus SSH
|
| 2023-04-14: |
The various sizes of the ZFS ARC (as of OpenZFS 2.1)
|
| 2023-04-13: |
OpenSSH's (signed) certificates are not TLS X.509 certificates
|
| 2023-04-12: |
The chain of landing web pages that I saw for a phish spam today
|
| 2023-04-11: |
Notification sounds and system sounds on Linux should be granular
|
| 2023-04-10: |
Failing to build a useful pre Go 1.21 static Go toolchain on Linux
|
| 2023-04-09: |
On Linux, you can't usefully statically link programs using NSS
|
| 2023-04-08: |
A Prometheus Alertmanager alert grouping conundrum
|
| 2023-04-07: |
Go 1.21 will (likely) have a static toolchain on Linux
|
| 2023-04-06: |
ZFS On Linux (still) needs better ways to control the ZFS ARC
|
| 2023-04-05: |
Giving Firefox the tiniest URL bar bookmark 'star' button possible
|
| 2023-04-04: |
How to get a bigger font for Firefox's preview of link targets (sort of)
|
| 2023-04-03: |
Automated status tests need to have little or no 'noise'
|
| 2023-04-02: |
You should automate some basic restore testing of your backups
|
| 2023-04-01: |
Avoiding HTTP/3 (for a while) as a pragmatic default
|
| 2023-03-31: |
Exploiting (or abusing) password fields for Multi-Factor Authentication
|
| 2023-03-30: |
Giving Gnome-Terminal some margins makes me happier with it
|
| 2023-03-29: |
The case of the very wrong email Content-Transfer-Encoding
|
| 2023-03-28: |
An interesting yet ordinary consequence of ZFS using the ZIL
|
| 2023-03-27: |
Moving from 'master' to 'main' in Git with local changes
|
| 2023-03-26: |
My pragmatic shift from PS/2 keyboards and mice to USB ones
|
| 2023-03-25: |
Apache 2.4's event MPM can require more workers than you'd expect
|
| 2023-03-24: |
Key rotation is not the same as key revocation (or invalidation)
|
| 2023-03-23: |
SSD block discard in practice on Linux systems
|
| 2023-03-22: |
The problem RAID faces with discarding blocks on SSDs
|
| 2023-03-21: |
ZFS on Linux and NFS(v3) server filesystem IDs
|
| 2023-03-20: |
Today the default choice for a terminal program is Gnome Terminal
|
| 2023-03-19: |
Easily adjusting the minimum interval on panels in Grafana dashboards
|
| 2023-03-18: |
There are two facets to dd usage
|
| 2023-03-17: |
Some reasons why CPUs might re-use unofficial NOPs for other things
|
| 2023-03-16: |
NFS filehandles from Linux NFS servers can be client specific
|
| 2023-03-15: |
The extra hazards of mutual TLS authentication (mTLS) in web servers
|
| 2023-03-14: |
Some notes on searching the systemd journal with journalctl
|
| 2023-03-13: |
What I like using Grafana Loki for (and where I avoid it)
|
| 2023-03-12: |
Getting a Python 2 virtual environment (in 2023's twilight of Python 2)
|
| 2023-03-11: |
As a system administrator, I work in many different environments
|
| 2023-03-10: |
Some bits on Linux NFS(v3) server filesystem IDs (and on filehandles)
|
| 2023-03-09: |
ZFS on Linux and when you get stale NFSv3 mounts
|
| 2023-03-08: |
Debconf's questions, or really whiptail, doesn't always work in xterms
|
| 2023-03-07: |
ANSI colours aren't consistent across X terminal programs
|
| 2023-03-06: |
Special tcpdump filtering options for OpenBSD's pflog interface
|
| 2023-03-05: |
An unexciting idea: Code changes have context
|
| 2023-03-04: |
How secure is merely discarding (TRIMing) all of a SSD's blocks?
|
| 2023-03-03: |
When securely erasing disks, who are you trying to stop?
|
| 2023-03-02: |
Modern email addresses can be in UTF-8
|
| 2023-03-01: |
A gotcha with Systemd's DynamicUser, supplementary groups, and NFS (v3)
|
| 2023-02-28: |
Ubuntu is a Canonical product
|
| 2023-02-27: |
Future Internet PKI schemes need to be bootstrapped through web PKI
|
| 2023-02-26: |
Universities are often environments with distributed accounts and identities
|
| 2023-02-25: |
Systemd-resolved plus LLMNR can create delays in name non-resolution
|
| 2023-02-24: |
Thinking about what a 'VPN' solution is authenticating
|
| 2023-02-23: |
The web single sign on versus availability problem
|
| 2023-02-22: |
How to block people's automatic mail forwarding (to GMail, at least)
|
| 2023-02-21: |
Grafana Loki doesn't compact log chunks and what this means for you
|
| 2023-02-20: |
A bit on unspecified unique objects in Python
|
| 2023-02-19: |
Using web server reverse proxying to deal with file access permissions
|
| 2023-02-18: |
The size of a window is complicated in X (or can be)
|
| 2023-02-17: |
Implementing 'grow down' window placement in Fvwm on X11
|
| 2023-02-16: |
Linux Ext4 directories have a maximum size (in entries)
|
| 2023-02-15: |
BIOS MBR booting isn't always flawless and can be odd
|
| 2023-02-14: |
Things I ran into when moving from Fvwm2 to Fvwm3
|
| 2023-02-13: |
Our current plague of revolving .top and .click spam email domains
|
| 2023-02-12: |
The case for atomic types in programming languages
|
| 2023-02-11: |
Learning about Linux fwmark masks
|
| 2023-02-10: |
Things that systemd-resolved is not for (as of systemd 251)
|
| 2023-02-09: |
I'm considering giving in to the systemd-resolved wave
|
| 2023-02-08: |
The general 'recursive routing' problem in IP networking
|
| 2023-02-07: |
What I want in Prometheus (as a whole) is aggregating alert notifications
|
| 2023-02-06: |
Rsync'ing (only) some of the top level pieces of a directory
|
| 2023-02-05: |
Some things on Prometheus's new feature to keep alerts firing for a while
|
| 2023-02-04: |
The practical appeal of a mesh-capable VPN solution
|
| 2023-02-03: |
In a university, people want to use our IPs even for external traffic
|
| 2023-02-02: |
A gotcha when making partial copies of Prometheus's database with rsync
|
| 2023-02-01: |
C was not created as an abstract machine (of course)
|
| 2023-01-31: |
I've had bad luck with transparent hugepages on my Linux machines
|
| 2023-01-30: |
One reason I still prefer BIOS MBR booting over UEFI
|
| 2023-01-29: |
The CPU architectural question of what is a (reserved) NOP
|
| 2023-01-28: |
I should assume contexts aren't retained in Go APIs
|
| 2023-01-27: |
Some thoughts on whether and when TRIM'ing ZFS pools is useful
|
| 2023-01-26: |
Some notes on using using TRIM on SSDs with ZFS on Linux
|
| 2023-01-25: |
You should back up the settings for your Firefox addons periodically
|
| 2023-01-24: |
Linux software RAID mirrors, booting, mdadm.conf, and disk counts for non-fun
|
| 2023-01-23: |
I should always make a checklist for anything complicated
|
| 2023-01-22: |
How Let's Encrypt accounts are linked to your certificates in Certbot
|
| 2023-01-21: |
How Prometheus makes good use of the HTTP Accept: header
|
| 2023-01-20: |
An instruction oddity in the ppc64 (PowerPC 64-bit) architecture
|
| 2023-01-19: |
My twitch about adding a shim in front of a (shell script) interpreter
|
| 2023-01-18: |
Some things on SSDs and their support for explicitly discarding blocks
|
| 2023-01-17: |
An aggressive, stealthy web spider operating from Microsoft IP space
|
| 2023-01-16: |
Backporting changes is clearly hard, which is a good reason to avoid it
|
| 2023-01-15: |
Some weird effects you can get from shared Let's Encrypt accounts
|
| 2023-01-14: |
Your server BMCs can need to be rebooted every so often
|
| 2023-01-13: |
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS servers and phased apt updates
|
| 2023-01-12: |
A browser tweak for system administrators doing (web) network debugging
|
| 2023-01-11: |
Sometimes it actually is a kernel bug: bind() in Linux 6.0.16
|
| 2023-01-10: |
My Git settings for carrying local changes on top of upstream development
|
| 2023-01-09: |
In Python, zero is zero regardless of the number type
Link: X Window System Basics
|
| 2023-01-08: |
Let's Encrypt's complex authorization process and multi-name TLS certificates
|
| 2023-01-07: |
Our ZFS spares handling system sort of relies on our patterns of disk usage
|
| 2023-01-06: |
Setting alerts is a chance to figure out what you really care about
|
| 2023-01-05: |
The different sorts of 'iconification' of windows in X
|
| 2023-01-04: |
Finding people's use of /usr/bin/python with the Linux audit framework
|
| 2023-01-03: |
Some thoughts on Prometheus Alertmanager's alert reminders
|
| 2023-01-02: |
Debian has removed Python 2 from its next version
|
| 2023-01-01: |
Research Unix V2 already had a lot of what we think of as 'Unix'
|
| 2022-12-31: |
Going from a Firefox preference to the underlying configuration setting
|
| 2022-12-30: |
Disabling automatic form autofilling in Firefox (which is now simple)
|
| 2022-12-29: |
Some notes to myself on 'git log -G' (and sort of on -S)
|
| 2022-12-28: |
Some practical notes on the systemd cgroups/units hierarchies
|
| 2022-12-27: |
Our varied approaches to upgrading machines with local state
|
| 2022-12-26: |
More use of Rust is inevitable in open source software
|
| 2022-12-25: |
Sorting out PC chassis power switches for ATX power supplies
|
| 2022-12-24: |
The systemd journal is primarily time-based
|
| 2022-12-23: |
Handling numbers in Vim when they have a dash in front of them
|
| 2022-12-22: |
The power of URLs you can use with query parameters and a HTTP GET request
|
| 2022-12-21: |
The Prometheus cardinality issues with systemd unit-related metrics
|
| 2022-12-20: |
Detecting missing or bad Go modules and module versions
|
| 2022-12-19: |
Systemd unit templates don't provide a native way to have multiple parameters
|
| 2022-12-18: |
My dmenu wrapper script and what it will invoke for me
|
| 2022-12-17: |
A trick of my dmenu setup: a custom $PATH
|
| 2022-12-16: |
A practical issue with YAML: your schema is not actually documentation
|
| 2022-12-15: |
How I do static IPs and names for my NAT'd libvirt-based VMs
|
| 2022-12-14: |
Your options for displaying status over time in Grafana 9
|
| 2022-12-13: |
Go and the case of the half-missing import
|
| 2022-12-12: |
An enforced 'real names only' policy forces people to advertise things
|
| 2022-12-11: |
Prometheus Blackbox 0.23.0 has added a nice improvement to its DNS checks
|
| 2022-12-10: |
Unix's special way of marking login shells goes back to V2 Unix (at least)
|
| 2022-12-09: |
Sometimes an Ubuntu package of a Python module is probably good enough
|
| 2022-12-08: |
Python version upgrades and deprecations
|
| 2022-12-07: |
My story of using Linux libvirt/KVM to get an ad hoc remote desktop
|
| 2022-12-06: |
Why being able to partially distrust a Certificate Authority is good
|
| 2022-12-05: |
I've now disabled systemd-oomd on my Fedora desktops
|
| 2022-12-04: |
How to lose some of your tabs in Firefox 107+ (and possibly earlier)
|
| 2022-12-03: |
Using Dovecot 2.3's 'events' system to create Prometheus metrics
|
| 2022-12-02: |
Apache 2.4's event MPM and oddities with ServerLimit
|
| 2022-12-01: |
Linux Certificate Authority root stores have a too simple view of 'trust'
|
| 2022-11-30: |
Using Dovecot 2.3's 'events' system to generate log messages
|
| 2022-11-29: |
The uncertain question of how much RAM our servers need
|
| 2022-11-28: |
The annoying question of Intel CPU support for XMP RAM profiles
|
| 2022-11-27: |
Getting my unit size 'prefixes' (really suffixes) straight, sort of
|
| 2022-11-26: |
Moving our /var/mail to be local on our IMAP server has gone very well
|
| 2022-11-25: |
A revealing Vim addressing mistake that I made today
|
| 2022-11-24: |
Unix's (technical) history is mostly old now
|
| 2022-11-23: |
Unix swap configuration used to be rather simple and brute force
|
| 2022-11-22: |
Twitter's 'quoted tweets' feature and how design affects behavior
|
| 2022-11-21: |
Using curl to test alternate (test) servers for a web site
|
| 2022-11-20: |
Floating point NaNs as map keys in Go give you weird results
|
| 2022-11-19: |
Python dictionaries and floating point NaNs as keys
|
| 2022-11-18: |
Go 1.21 may have a clear(x) builtin and there's an interesting reason why
|
| 2022-11-17: |
Understanding how fast Ethernet really is (and in what units)
|
| 2022-11-16: |
Monitoring if our wireless network is actually working in locations
|
| 2022-11-15: |
It's useful to think about a 'ground up' recovery of your environment
|
| 2022-11-14: |
Firefox will now copy non-breaking spaces from HTML and that can be a problem
|
| 2022-11-13: |
I wouldn't use ZFS for swap (either for swapfiles or with a zvol)
|
| 2022-11-12: |
Questionable TLS Certificate Authorities and Certificate Transparency
|
| 2022-11-11: |
How Linux swap files (and swap partitions) find where to read and write
|
| 2022-11-10: |
The problem of (Unix) swapfiles and server backups
|
| 2022-11-09: |
Linux swap files don't seem to update their modification time when you swap
|
| 2022-11-08: |
Some thoughts on organizations running their own Fediverse instance
|
| 2022-11-07: |
An odd error I encountered with ZFS snapshots on Ubuntu 18.04
|
| 2022-11-06: |
Go's sync.Pool has (undocumented) 'thread' locality
|
| 2022-11-05: |
Our upgrade wave of Ubuntu 18.04 machines has gone fine
|
| 2022-11-04: |
An email's Message-ID header isn't a good spam signal (in late 2022)
|
| 2022-11-03: |
On not having a separate /boot filesystem on modern (x86) Linux
|
| 2022-11-02: |
The problem of getting problem reports from (our) people
|
| 2022-11-01: |
(Maybe) copying email anti-spam measures from Google and company
|
| 2022-10-31: |
I wish ZFS supported per-user reservations, not just per-user quotas
|
| 2022-10-30: |
Silencing KDE application notification sounds under fvwm
|
| 2022-10-29: |
Importing a Python program that doesn't have a .py extension
|
| 2022-10-28: |
People like file extensions whether or not they're necessary
|
| 2022-10-27: |
Scripts and programs should skip having extensions like '.sh' and '.bash'
|
| 2022-10-26: |
Our computer security problems are our own fault
|
| 2022-10-25: |
An email phish attempt using attachment file type confusion
|
| 2022-10-24: |
Filesystems and progressive deletion of things
|
| 2022-10-23: |
Why I feel DNS CAA records are a real TLS security improvement in practice
|
| 2022-10-22: |
TLS Certificate Transparency is about improving the (web) TLS ecology
|
| 2022-10-21: |
The Prometheus timestamp() function can be used on expressions, sort of
|
| 2022-10-20: |
The programming challenge that is a modern browser
|
| 2022-10-19: |
Understanding '+incompatible' in Go module version names
|
| 2022-10-18: |
We're finally fully moving away from Apache's prefork MPM (hopefully)
|
| 2022-10-17: |
The proper setup of a Go module, as I understand it
|
| 2022-10-16: |
What it means to see a 'bad' certificate in TLS Certificate Transparency logs
|
| 2022-10-15: |
How much swap space we're using across our servers (in October 2022)
|
| 2022-10-14: |
Two views of CPU utilization (a realization)
|
| 2022-10-13: |
We're moving away from swap partitions on our Linux servers
|
| 2022-10-12: |
We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)
|
| 2022-10-11: |
When Promtail seems to make position checkpoints (as of v2.6.1)
|
| 2022-10-10: |
The pragmatic effects of setting nconnect on NFS v3 mounts on Linux
|
| 2022-10-09: |
Research Unix V7's (comparatively) long time gap from V6
|
| 2022-10-08: |
Linux NFS clients (normally) make only one TCP connection to each fileserver
|
| 2022-10-07: |
How old various Unix signals are
|
| 2022-10-06: |
My performance intuitions and the complexities of SSD performance
|
| 2022-10-05: |
The Maildir mail storage format doesn't seem to work well over NFS
|
| 2022-10-04: |
Our unusual traditional /var/mail setup for people's inboxes
|
| 2022-10-03: |
Universities, "Bring your own device", and security
|
| 2022-10-02: |
Universities and their non-employees (part two)
|
| 2022-10-01: |
YAML in practice can be looser than I expected
|
| 2022-09-30: |
Your Grafana Loki setup needs security and access control
|
| 2022-09-29: |
Python virtual environments can usually or often be moved around
|
| 2022-09-28: |
How I've set up my libvirt based virtual machines (in late 2022)
|
| 2022-09-27: |
Reaching past our firewalls with WireGuard (some thoughts)
|
| 2022-09-26: |
The lsb_release program and the /etc/os-release file
|
| 2022-09-25: |
What can a compromised TLS Certificate Transparency Log do?
|
| 2022-09-24: |
Needing xdg-desktop-portal may be in my future (even without Wayland)
|
| 2022-09-23: |
Browsers and them 'supporting' TLS certificate transparency
|
| 2022-09-22: |
The TLS client's view of Certificate Transparency and CT Logs
|
| 2022-09-21: |
Some notes on the readings you get from USB TEMPer2 temperature sensors
|
| 2022-09-20: |
Why the ZFS ZIL's "in-place" direct writes of large data are safe
|
| 2022-09-19: |
Tangled issues with what status we should use for our HTTP redirects
|
| 2022-09-18: |
I believe SELinux needs active support from your distribution
|
| 2022-09-17: |
Authenticated SMTP and IMAP authentication attacks and attempts we see here
|
| 2022-09-16: |
The problem of network tunnels and (asymmetric) routing
|
| 2022-09-15: |
The C free() API gives libraries and functions useful freedom
|
| 2022-09-14: |
Grafana Loki doesn't duplicate a central syslog server (or vice versa)
Link: USB, Thunderbolt, Displayport & docks
|
| 2022-09-13: |
My Firefox addons as of Firefox 104 (they haven't changed in a while)
|
| 2022-09-12: |
What's lost when running the Prometheus host agent as a non-root user on Linux
|
| 2022-09-11: |
The amount of memory in basic 1U servers and our shifting views of it
|
| 2022-09-10: |
C's malloc() and free() APIs are reasonable APIs for C
|
| 2022-09-09: |
How we monitor the temperature of our machine rooms
|
| 2022-09-08: |
Grafana's problem with the order of dashboard panel legends and Prometheus
|
| 2022-09-07: |
What systemd timer directives seem to be used in practice
|
| 2022-09-06: |
Machine room temperatures and the value of long Prometheus metrics history
|
| 2022-09-05: |
The history of sending signals to Unix process groups
|
| 2022-09-04: |
Support for 'kill -SIGNAME ...' was added in 4BSD
|
| 2022-09-03: |
Our Prometheus host metrics saved us from some painful experiences
|
| 2022-09-02: |
An rsyslog(d) syslog forwarding setup for Grafana Loki (via Promtail)
|
| 2022-09-01: |
Go 1.19 added an atomic.Pointer type that's a generic type
|
| 2022-08-31: |
ZFS DVA offsets are in 512-byte blocks on disk but zdb misleads you about them
|
| 2022-08-30: |
ZFS DVA offsets are in bytes, not (512-byte) blocks
|
| 2022-08-29: |
A thought on presentational versus semantic HTML
|
| 2022-08-28: |
Getting USB TEMPer2 temperature sensor readings into Prometheus (on Linux)
|
| 2022-08-27: |
Large scale Internet SSH brute force attacks seem to have stopped here
|
| 2022-08-26: |
Using systemd timers to run things frequently (some early notes)
|
| 2022-08-25: |
U.2, U.3, and other server NVMe drive connector types (in mid 2022)
|
| 2022-08-24: |
We now have some 1U servers with U.2 NVMe SSDs and they're okay
|
| 2022-08-23: |
On Ubuntu, AppArmor is quite persistent and likes to reappear on you
|
| 2022-08-22: |
Some notes on Grafana annotations sourced from Prometheus metrics
|
| 2022-08-21: |
ZFS DVAs and what they cover on raidz vdevs
|
| 2022-08-20: |
The Ubuntu 22.04 server installer wants you to scrub reused disks first
|
| 2022-08-19: |
I wish Prometheus had a table-driven label remapping feature
|
| 2022-08-18: |
Rasdaemon is what you want on Linux if you're seeing kernel MCE messages
|
| 2022-08-17: |
Some resources for looking at the current development version of Go
|
| 2022-08-16: |
The names of disk drive SMART attributes are kind of made up (sadly)
|
| 2022-08-15: |
Disk drive SMART attributes can go backward and otherwise be volatile
|
| 2022-08-14: |
Our slow turnover of servers and server generations
|
| 2022-08-13: |
The C free() API means memory allocation must save some metadata
|
| 2022-08-12: |
My adventure with URLs in a Grafana that's behind a reverse proxy
|
| 2022-08-11: |
My uncertainty over whether an URL format is actually legal
|
| 2022-08-10: |
Some notes (to myself) about formatting text in jq
|
| 2022-08-09: |
Ubuntu 22.04 with multiple disks and (U)EFI booting
|
| 2022-08-08: |
Two example Grafana Loki log queries to get things from ntpdate logs
|
| 2022-08-07: |
Our BMCs are not great at keeping accurate time
|
| 2022-08-06: |
The pervasive effects of C's malloc() and free() on C APIs
|
| 2022-08-05: |
How old our servers are (as of 2022)
|
| 2022-08-04: |
The odd return value of the original 4.2 BSD gethostbyname()
Link: The MGR Window System
|
| 2022-08-03: |
Vim settings I'm using for editing YAML (with a sideline into Python)
|
| 2022-08-02: |
I wish that systemd (and everything) would rate-limit configuration warnings
|
| 2022-08-01: |
A brief history of looking up host addresses in Unix
|
| 2022-07-31: |
Using Prometheus's recent '@ end()' PromQL feature to reduce graph noise
|
| 2022-07-30: |
Python is my default choice for scripts that process text
|
| 2022-07-29: |
How systemd names instances of templated socket service units
|
| 2022-07-28: |
Print based debugging and infrequent developers
|
| 2022-07-27: |
What ZFS 'individual' and 'aggregated' IO size statistics mean
|
| 2022-07-26: |
To be fully useful, Prometheus histograms want their cumulative sums
|
| 2022-07-25: |
ZFS pool IO statistics (and vdev statistics) are based on physical disk IO
|
| 2022-07-24: |
Some pragmatic issues with Linux kernel mode setting on servers
|
| 2022-07-23: |
The state of getting per-pool IO statistics in ZFS on Linux as of version 2.1
|
| 2022-07-22: |
I've now used Linux nftables for firewall rules and it went okay
|
| 2022-07-21: |
You can sensibly move or copy Prometheus's database with rsync
|
| 2022-07-20: |
A brute force solution to nested access permissions in Apache
|
| 2022-07-19: |
We won't be sending systemd logs to Grafana Loki in JSON format
|
| 2022-07-18: |
Grafana Loki and what can go wrong with label cardinality
|
| 2022-07-17: |
An assortment of timestamp formats found in our (Unix) logs
|
| 2022-07-16: |
How to get (or recognize) a common Unix log timestamp format in things
|
| 2022-07-15: |
'iptables -L' doesn't show you interface matches on rules by default
|
| 2022-07-14: |
IMAP servers can have significant imbalances between disk and network IO
|
| 2022-07-13: |
How Unix didn't used to support '#!', a brief history
|
| 2022-07-12: |
Getting the names of your Linux software RAID devices to stick
|
| 2022-07-11: |
It feels surprisingly good to block Bingbot from my blog front page
|
| 2022-07-10: |
My distrust of multi-factor authentication's account recovery story
|
| 2022-07-09: |
The Linux load average does mean something (although maybe not much)
|
| 2022-07-08: |
Larger backup systems often operate in multiple stages
|
| 2022-07-07: |
DKIM signature types (algorithms) that we see (as of July 2022)
|
| 2022-07-06: |
My current mixed views on the Linux kernel netconsole
|
| 2022-07-05: |
A surprise: you can only have one Linux kernel serial console
|
| 2022-07-04: |
Why an empty (executable) file is generally true in Unix
|
| 2022-07-03: |
Filesystems versus general tree structures
|
| 2022-07-02: |
Why reproducible machines didn't used to be a priority (I think)
|
| 2022-07-01: |
A quiet shift in what tech people build for their blogs
|
| 2022-06-30: |
Having one is often much easier than having more than one
|
| 2022-06-29: |
Notes on the Linux kernel's 'pressure stall information' and its meanings
|
| 2022-06-28: |
What symmetric and asymmetric IP routing are
|
| 2022-06-27: |
Wishing for a simple way to set up multi-interface symmetric routing on Linux
|
| 2022-06-26: |
Modern disk sizes and powers of two
|
| 2022-06-25: |
A limitation on what 'go install' can install (as of Go 1.18)
|
| 2022-06-24: |
Even for us, SSD write volume limits can matter
|
| 2022-06-23: |
A mystery with Fedora 36, fontconfig, and xterm (and urxvt)
|
| 2022-06-22: |
Signing email with DKIM is becoming increasing mandatory in practice
|
| 2022-06-21: |
Some network speeds and network related speeds we see in mid 2022
|
| 2022-06-20: |
Modern HDDs have gotten somewhat better than they used to be
|
| 2022-06-19: |
What fast SSH bulk transfer speed (probably) looks like in mid-2022
|
| 2022-06-18: |
Humanizing numbers in Python through a regexp substitution function
|
| 2022-06-17: |
What is our Python 2 endgame going to be?
|
| 2022-06-16: |
I wish Grafana dashboards and panels could have easy, natural comments
|
| 2022-06-15: |
Understanding some peculiarities of per-cgroup memory usage accounting
|
| 2022-06-14: |
Go programs and Linux glibc versioning
|
| 2022-06-13: |
In general Unix system calls are not cancellable, just abortable
|
| 2022-06-12: |
Framebuffer consoles have been around before on Unix workstations
|
| 2022-06-11: |
Linux kernel mode setting on servers (and Ubuntu 22.04)
|
| 2022-06-10: |
Text consoles and framebuffer consoles in Linux
|
| 2022-06-09: |
How we wound up with Linux's kernel mode setting ('KMS')
|
| 2022-06-08: |
The information theory reason for assuming non-secret cryptography algorithms
|
| 2022-06-07: |
TLS Certificate Transparency logs don't always talk to you
|
| 2022-06-06: |
Doing a selective alert about a host's additional exporters in Prometheus
|
| 2022-06-05: |
Checking a few metrics (time series) at once in Prometheus's query language
|
| 2022-06-04: |
Web URL paths don't quite map cleanly onto the abstract 'filesystem API'
|
| 2022-06-03: |
Regular expressions are effectively a (hard) programming language
|
| 2022-06-02: |
Serving static files versus dynamic web server APIs
|
| 2022-06-01: |
Setting up Linux fair share CPU scheduling with systemd and cgroup v2
|
| 2022-05-31: |
The basics of Linux fair share CPU scheduling in cgroup v2 ('unified cgroups')
|
| 2022-05-30: |
Systemd memory limits and strict memory overcommit
|
| 2022-05-29: |
My wish for per-port IP access controls in systemd .service units
|
| 2022-05-28: |
It's a bit risky to give people access to your Prometheus Blackbox exporter
|
| 2022-05-27: |
Modal dialogs and other things that steal keyboard focus are dangerous
|
| 2022-05-26: |
Stopping an Ubuntu 22.04 desktop from suspending at the login screen
|
| 2022-05-25: |
Shell scripts should be written to be clear first
|
| 2022-05-24: |
Some notes on providing Python code as a command line argument
|
| 2022-05-23: |
Systems should expose a (simple) overall health metric as well as specifics
|
| 2022-05-22: |
Modern (public) TLS has only a limited number of intermediate certificates
|
| 2022-05-21: |
Some things that make languages easy (or not) to embed in Unix shell scripts
|
| 2022-05-20: |
Getting a Bourne shell "here document" into a shell variable
|
| 2022-05-19: |
Moving a libvirt-based virtualization setup from one machine to another
|
| 2022-05-18: |
Missing TLS intermediate certificates can create mysterious browser problems
|
| 2022-05-17: |
Why I'm not all that positive on working through serial consoles
|
| 2022-05-16: |
Python programs as wrappers versus filters of other Unix programs
|
| 2022-05-15: |
The idea of hierarchical filesystems doesn't feel like an API to me
|
| 2022-05-14: |
The web is, in a sense, designed for serving static files
|
| 2022-05-13: |
The cause of an odd DNF/RPM error about conflicting files
|
| 2022-05-12: |
Why I'm considering some use of NetworkManager (and I probably have to)
|
| 2022-05-11: |
Traditionally there are fewer steps in setting up a static website
|
| 2022-05-10: |
Seeing the speed of your USB devices under Linux the easy way
|
| 2022-05-09: |
Snaps don't seem compatible with NFS home directories in Ubuntu 22.04
|
| 2022-05-08: |
Checking if a machine is 'up' for scripts, well, for rsync
|
| 2022-05-07: |
Solving a problem I had with the Unix date command in the right way
|
| 2022-05-06: |
Filtering Prometheus metrics with deliberately repeated labels
|
| 2022-05-05: |
When you install systems semi-manually, when updates get done matters
|
| 2022-05-04: |
The temptation of smartctl's JSON output format given NVMe SSDs
|
| 2022-05-03: |
NVMe disk drives and SMART attributes (and data)
|
| 2022-05-02: |
Monitoring is too hard, as illustrated by TLS certificates expiring
Link: An opinionated list of best practices for textual websites
|
| 2022-05-01: |
Using Linux's libvirt for my virtualization needs has been okay
|
| 2022-04-30: |
Some thoughts about your (our) site needing Javascript
|
| 2022-04-29: |
Our positive experience with having our support site be basic HTML
|
| 2022-04-28: |
The practical problem with /etc/pam.d on long-lived Linux systems
|
| 2022-04-27: |
The root cause of my xdg-desktop-portal problems on a Fedora machine
|
| 2022-04-26: |
Why your physical servers running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS can boot very slowly
|
| 2022-04-25: |
Sort of making snapshots of UEFI libvirt-based virtual machines
|
| 2022-04-24: |
Some things that make shell scripts have performance issues
|
| 2022-04-23: |
The temptation of writing shell scripts, illustrated
|
| 2022-04-22: |
The state of Python (both 2 and 3) in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
|
| 2022-04-21: |
4K HiDPI monitors come in inconvenient sizes if you want two of them
|
| 2022-04-20: |
My virtualization setup so far with Linux's virt-manager and friends
|
| 2022-04-19: |
Some bits on keeping isolated network interfaces organized (on Linux)
|
| 2022-04-18: |
How to talk to a local IPMI under OpenBSD
Where Linux's load average comes from in the kernel
|
| 2022-04-16: |
"Long term support" Unixes and versions of software in them
|
| 2022-04-15: |
I need (or at least want) a new virtual machine (GUI) environment
|
| 2022-04-14: |
Building Firefox from source and Rust versions
|
| 2022-04-13: |
A reason why Unix programs sometimes support '-?' for help
|
| 2022-04-12: |
Mangling your distribution version in your Apt sources for fun and profit
|
| 2022-04-11: |
How Debian's procps package is surprisingly opinionated
|
| 2022-04-10: |
A Linux PAM setup and the problem of stopping authentication
|
| 2022-04-09: |
Understanding the effects of PAM module results ('controls' in PAM jargon)
|
| 2022-04-08: |
On the ordering of password and MFA challenges during login
|
| 2022-04-07: |
What goes into an X resource and its name
|
| 2022-04-06: |
Fedora now has a sensible UEFI boot setup (and has for some time)
|
| 2022-04-05: |
The failure of the idea of X resources
|
| 2022-04-04: |
Things I needed to change for HiDPI on Linux that weren't in my X settings
|
| 2022-04-03: |
Some notes on using snmpwalk to poke at devices with SNMP
|
| 2022-04-02: |
Sorting out IPMI and BMC terminology and technology
|
| 2022-04-01: |
Some notes on finding and reading information over SNMP
|
| 2022-03-31: |
The awkward timing of Fedora and Go releases
|
| 2022-03-30: |
Why a (Linux) service delaying its shutdown is a bad thing
|
| 2022-03-29: |
Fixing Pipx when you upgrade your system Python version
|
| 2022-03-28: |
We need a way to scan Microsoft Office files for malware
|
| 2022-03-27: |
Some thoughts on Go's unusual approach to identifier visibility
|
| 2022-03-26: |
Unsurprisingly, the clock in your server's IPMI drifts over time
|
| 2022-03-25: |
Some notes on lslocks, the Linux command to list current file locks
|
| 2022-03-24: |
Some notes on Linux's /proc/locks listing of file locks
|
| 2022-03-23: |
Document your mistakes and then try to block them in the future
|
| 2022-03-22: |
Getting a fixed baud rate on your serial ports for logins under systemd
|
| 2022-03-21: |
The modern trend of variable DNS results and its effects on troubleshooting
|
| 2022-03-20: |
Prometheus: using gauge-like things as if they were counters
|
| 2022-03-19: |
Some problems that Python's cgi.FieldStorage has
|
| 2022-03-18: |
Our limited use of Python's cgi module
|
| 2022-03-17: |
I need to remember to check for ZFS filesystems being mounted
|
| 2022-03-16: |
People might want to think about saving a copy of Go 1.17
|
| 2022-03-15: |
How Linux dynamic loaders can be both shared objects and executables
|
| 2022-03-14: |
Where cut comes into Unix (and a bit on the history of awk)
|
| 2022-03-13: |
We do see ZFS checksum failures, but only infrequently
|
| 2022-03-12: |
I wish ZFS pools kept a persistent count of various errors
|
| 2022-03-11: |
Filesystems can experience at least three different sorts of errors
|
| 2022-03-10: |
It would be nice if Linux had a count of disk errors in sysfs
|
| 2022-03-09: |
Linux disk names you can encounter in your Prometheus host metrics
|
| 2022-03-08: |
Hardware can be weird, server and USB keyboard edition
|
| 2022-03-07: |
The convenience of multi-purpose monitoring (in Prometheus)
|
| 2022-03-06: |
What sort of server it takes to build Firefox in four and a bit minutes
|
| 2022-03-05: |
Dynamic web pages can be viewed as a form of compression (sometimes)
|
| 2022-03-04: |
A pragmatic driver of support for serving static files on the web is efficiency
|
| 2022-03-03: |
Understanding a thing with ZFS on Linux, kernel versions, RPMs, and DKMS
|
| 2022-03-02: |
A Python program can be outside of a virtual environment it uses
|
| 2022-03-01: |
The problem of keeping track of hardlinks as you traverse a directory tree
|
| 2022-02-28: |
Firefox (Nightly) and the case of the fading scrollbars on Unix
|
| 2022-02-27: |
Python's os.environ is surprisingly liberal in some ways
|
| 2022-02-26: |
Unix environment variables (and the environment) are a fuzzy thing
|
| 2022-02-25: |
The varying sizes of images on the web today, and remembering that
|
| 2022-02-24: |
I've come to think that the Git index is a good thing
|
| 2022-02-23: |
Some early notes on Dovecot namespaces (in Dovecot 2.2.33, currently)
|
| 2022-02-22: |
A realization about using DNS sub-names in modern protocols like DMARC
|
| 2022-02-21: |
Python's Global Interpreter Lock is not there for Python programmers
|
| 2022-02-20: |
The history (sort of) of service management in Unix
|
| 2022-02-19: |
The important things about Unix init systems aren't booting the system
|
| 2022-02-18: |
Ubuntu limits the console kernel log level even on servers
|
| 2022-02-17: |
The Linux kernel's message log levels are relatively meaningless
|
| 2022-02-16: |
Lurking complexities in a web server that just serves static files
|
| 2022-02-15: |
A major caution when using 'rsync -a' to copy or move directory trees
|
| 2022-02-14: |
Beware of trying to compare the size of subtrees with du
|
| 2022-02-13: |
Go generics: the question of types made from generic types and type sets
|
| 2022-02-12: |
The 'any' confusion in Go generics between type constraints and interfaces
|
| 2022-02-11: |
Some things on strict and relaxed DKIM alignment in DMARC
|
| 2022-02-10: |
Notes on using DKIM in a DMARC world
|
| 2022-02-09: |
ZFS performance and modern solid state disk systems
|
| 2022-02-08: |
Some SSD write volumes from my machines
|
| 2022-02-07: |
What does it mean for a filesystem to perform well on modern hardware?
|
| 2022-02-06: |
Checking out a Git branch further back than the head
|
| 2022-02-05: |
Go 1.18 won't have a 'constraints' package of generics helpers
|
| 2022-02-04: |
Some notes on Grafana relative time ranges
|
| 2022-02-03: |
The hassles today of having servers with disks that can't be hot-swapped
|
| 2022-02-02: |
Disk drives can have weird SMART values for their power on hours
|
| 2022-02-01: |
The likely long-term result of good on-host (host-based) firewalls
|
| 2022-01-31: |
Git 2.34 has changed how you configure fast-forward only pulls and rebasing
|
| 2022-01-30: |
A thesis: most websites are implicitly designed with a short lifetime
|
| 2022-01-29: |
The reason Unix has the argv[0] issue (and API)
|
| 2022-01-28: |
Some things on Django's CSRF protection, sessions, and REMOTE_USER
|
| 2022-01-27: |
The Linux kernel, simultaneous multithreading, and process scheduling
Django and Apache HTTP Basic Authentication (and REMOTE_USER)
|
| 2022-01-25: |
Giving things an IP address is dangerous (to them)
Go generics are going to be both simple and complex (as of Go 1.18)
|
| 2022-01-23: |
DNS queries to external sources do fail every so often out of the blue
|
| 2022-01-22: |
Modern public TLS is a quite different thing than it used to be
|
| 2022-01-21: |
Sorting out the situation with Intel desktop CPUs and hyper-threading
|
| 2022-01-20: |
I'm using journalctl's --since option now to speed up checking logs
|
| 2022-01-19: |
When I might expect simultaneous multithreading to help
|
| 2022-01-18: |
Logs are invisible (at least most of the time and by default)
|
| 2022-01-17: |
Pipx and a problem with changing the system Python version
|
| 2022-01-16: |
HTTPS is still optional, at least sort of
|
| 2022-01-15: |
You should do lint checks on your Prometheus alert (and recording) rules
|
| 2022-01-14: |
Link: Histograms in Grafana (a howto)
Understanding what a DKIM (spam) replay attack is
|
| 2022-01-13: |
In practice, there are two types of window managers in modern X
|
| 2022-01-12: |
My sunk cost fallacy relationship with my home desktop
|
| 2022-01-11: |
Some things about Prometheus Alertmanager's notification metrics
|
| 2022-01-10: |
The complexity of seeing if your Prometheus Alertmanager is truly healthy
|
| 2022-01-09: |
I have mixed feelings about the Go time package's time formatting strings
|
| 2022-01-08: |
Good web scraping is not just about avoiding load
|
| 2022-01-07: |
In practice, Debian (and Ubuntu) have fixed minimum system UIDs and GIDs
|
| 2022-01-06: |
An annoyance with Debian postinstall scripts during package upgrades
|
| 2022-01-05: |
Some things about Dovecot, its index files, and the IMAP SELECT command
|
| 2022-01-04: |
Some ways to implement /dev/fd in Unix kernels
|
| 2022-01-03: |
The important Unix idea of the "virtual filesystem switch"
|
| 2022-01-02: |
Why "process substitution" is a late feature in Unix shells
Why I'm not interested in rolling back to snapshots of Linux root filesystems
|
| 2021-12-31: |
Why I (still) use ext4 for my Linux root filesystems
|
| 2021-12-30: |
Checking what features your ext4 filesystems have
|
| 2021-12-29: |
Pipx's 'reinstall' command works right by reinstalling injected packages too
|
| 2021-12-28: |
A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet
|
| 2021-12-27: |
Link: Eric Rescorla's "DNS Security, Part II: DNSSEC"
A thesis: large, significant open source projects must keep moving or die
Security systems and requiring attacks instead of accidents to evade them
|
| 2021-12-25: |
Our webmail is a surprisingly popular service
|
| 2021-12-24: |
Sadly, my experience is that big commercial anti-malware detection is better
|
| 2021-12-23: |
Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
|
| 2021-12-22: |
Using pipx in a PyPy installation more or less just works
|
| 2021-12-21: |
Our internal network access authentication needs
|
| 2021-12-20: |
Some usage notes for the Linux ss program
|
| 2021-12-19: |
My Firefox bookmarklet to see links I've visited more reliably
Some brief notes for myself on growing a LVM root filesystem
|
| 2021-12-17: |
Our never-used system for user-provided NFS accessible storage
In Go 1.18, generics are implemented through code specialization
|
| 2021-12-15: |
User runtime directories on modern Linux, aka /run/user/<uid>
|
| 2021-12-14: |
Finding Ubuntu (and Debian) packages that are in odd states
|
| 2021-12-13: |
A bit on compilation's changing number of stages (and assembly)
|
| 2021-12-12: |
How Vim's visual mode has wound up being useful for me
|
| 2021-12-11: |
Some numbers from ZRAM swap on my two Fedora machines
|
| 2021-12-10: |
The question (and some answers) of modern day partition sizes for Linux
|
| 2021-12-09: |
Why it's good to explicitly document the purposes of things, illustrated
Some NVMe drive temperature things from my drives
|
| 2021-12-08: |
NVMe drives and the case of opaque bandwidth limits
|
| 2021-12-06: |
Linux's vm.admin_reserve_kbytes sysctl is both not big enough and not sufficient
|
| 2021-12-05: |
A bit on what Unix system pre-boot environments used to look like
|
| 2021-12-04: |
Most computer standards broadly require good faith implementations
|
| 2021-12-03: |
My views so far on bookmarklets versus addons in Firefox
|
| 2021-12-02: |
On servers maybe moving to M.2 NVMe drives for their system drives
|
| 2021-12-01: |
Unfortunately, damaged ZFS filesystems can be more or less unrepairable
|
| 2021-11-30: |
Prometheus will make persistent connections to agents (scrape targets)
|
| 2021-11-29: |
The long term relative prices of M.2 NVMe drives and 2.5" SSDs
|
| 2021-11-28: |
The problem I have with Pip's dependency version handling
|
| 2021-11-27: |
Two stories of how and why simultaneous multithreading works
|
| 2021-11-26: |
How we use the SLURM job scheduler system on our compute servers
Why region based memory allocation help with fragmentation
|
| 2021-11-25: |
Computation that needs to be "secure" is everywhere in practice
|
| 2021-11-23: |
I wish systemd logged information about the source of "transactions"
|
| 2021-11-22: |
Why it matters to us if exploits are available for security issues
|
| 2021-11-21: |
Why V7 Unix matters so much
|
| 2021-11-20: |
Linux has no fair-share scheduling that really works for compute servers
Why your Go programs can surprisingly be dynamically linked
|
| 2021-11-18: |
What data about your NVMe drives Linux puts in sysfs
|
| 2021-11-17: |
Why we have a split-horizon DNS setup
|
| 2021-11-16: |
Why we have public websites on private IPs (internally)
|
| 2021-11-15: |
Chrome may start restricting requests to private networks
|
| 2021-11-14: |
Go 1.18 will let you set the version of the "AMD64" architecture to target
|
| 2021-11-13: |
Considering "iowait" CPU time and CPU utilization
|
| 2021-11-12: |
A linear, sequential boot and startup order is easier to deal with
|
| 2021-11-11: |
I'm unsure of the security of simultaneous multithreading on modern x86 CPUs
|
| 2021-11-10: |
People will always exploit presentation, because presentation matters
|
| 2021-11-09: |
Our new way of waiting for the network to be "up" in systemd's world
|
| 2021-11-08: |
Soon to expire TLS certificates aren't necessarily a problem
|
| 2021-11-07: |
Systemd timer units don't have much appeal for us (over crontab entries)
|
| 2021-11-06: |
Thinking about when our crontab entries run
|
| 2021-11-05: |
If we use PyPy, we'll likely use our own install of it
|
| 2021-11-04: |
Two different worldviews of version control systems
|
| 2021-11-03: |
Thinking through the threat models when encrypting your backups
|
| 2021-11-02: |
Why I maintain my private changes to upstream projects via rebasing
|
| 2021-11-01: |
Rebasing changes can be common when working with version control systems
|
| 2021-10-31: |
Linux puts a bunch of DMI information into sysfs for you
Python 3 forced its own hand so that standard input had to be Unicode
|
| 2021-10-29: |
Why browsers are driven to offer some degree of remote control
Things to do in Python 3 when your Unix standard input is badly encoded
|
| 2021-10-27: |
We're seeing increasingly targeted and dangerous phish spam attempts
|
| 2021-10-26: |
Vim visual mode and an unfortunate restriction on the filter operation
Go 1.18 will embed source version information into binaries
|
| 2021-10-24: |
Companies and their stewardship of open source projects
Your SMART drive database of attribute meanings needs regular updates
|
| 2021-10-22: |
Python 2's status in various Linux distributions (October 2021 edition)
|
| 2021-10-21: |
The easy way to see underneath NFS mount points on Linux
|
| 2021-10-20: |
In the beginning, there was no way to expand C's stack size
|
| 2021-10-19: |
VCS history versus large open source development
|
| 2021-10-18: |
The cut and paste irritation in "smart" in-browser text editing
Getting some hardware acceleration for video in Firefox 93 on my Linux home desktop
|
| 2021-10-16: |
My wish for a way to activate one systemd unit when another one started
|
| 2021-10-15: |
You may not want to require all of your bind mounts (in systemd)
|
| 2021-10-14: |
Systemd (v237) can do quite odd things with /etc/fstab bind mounts
|
| 2021-10-13: |
Web browsers drive what Certificate Authority root certificates are accepted
|
| 2021-10-12: |
Reasons to limit your stack size even in non-threaded environments
|
| 2021-10-11: |
Unknown NMIs and counting hardware CPU events in eBPF programs
|
| 2021-10-10: |
TLS Certificate Transparency logs let us assess Certificate Authorities
V7 Unix had no stack size limit, and when Unix acquired one
|
| 2021-10-08: |
We've migrated from Yubikey 2FA to the university's MFA
What Linux kernel "unknown reason" NMI messages mean
|
| 2021-10-06: |
The OpenSSH server has limits on what user authentication you can use
|
| 2021-10-05: |
Some early notes on using pipx for managing third-party Python programs
|
| 2021-10-04: |
The "why" problem with on-host (host-based) firewalls on your machines
|
| 2021-10-03: |
Modern TLS has no place left for old things, especially clients
Desktops don't always use NetworkManager's programs
|
| 2021-10-01: |
Firefox on Unix is moving away from X11-based remote control
|
| 2021-09-30: |
Moving averages (and rates) for metrics in Prometheus (and Grafana)
|
| 2021-09-29: |
My changing (citation) style of external links here on Wandering Thoughts
|
| 2021-09-28: |
Avoiding flawed server ACPI information for power monitoring
|
| 2021-09-27: |
Stack size is invisible in C and the effects on "portability"
|
| 2021-09-26: |
The shifting view of two factor authentication at the university
|
| 2021-09-25: |
Notes on updating OpenBSD machines to current, supported versions
|
| 2021-09-24: |
Understanding EGL, GLX and friends in the Linux and X graphics stack
Link: Examining btrfs, Linux’s perpetually half-finished filesystem
Go generics have a new "type sets" way of doing type constraints
|
| 2021-09-22: |
It's probably not the hardware, a sysadmin lesson
|
| 2021-09-21: |
Why we care about being able to (efficiently) reproduce machines
|
| 2021-09-20: |
What the 'proto' field is about in Linux 'ip route' output (and input)
|
| 2021-09-19: |
Microsoft's Bingbot crawler is relentless for changing pages (it seems)
|
| 2021-09-18: |
One major obstacle to unifying the two types of package managers
|
| 2021-09-17: |
At least from an outside perspective, Ubuntu is Canonical's thing
|
| 2021-09-16: |
Use virtual environments to install third-party Python programs from PyPI
|
| 2021-09-15: |
Some notes on upgrading programs with Python's pip
|
| 2021-09-14: |
There are (at least) two types of package managers
|
| 2021-09-13: |
The rc shell's nice feature for subdirectory searching of $PATH
Why I'm mostly not a fan of coloured text (in terminals or elsewhere)
|
| 2021-09-11: |
How many Prometheus metrics a typical host here generates
Some things to reduce background bandwidth usage on a Fedora machine
|
| 2021-09-09: |
TLS Certificate Transparency logs come and go over time
|
| 2021-09-08: |
The "web" TLS world is different from the non-public one in practice
|
| 2021-09-07: |
My long-lived personal Linux installs
|
| 2021-09-06: |
Why Nutch-based web spiders are now blocked here
|
| 2021-09-05: |
Firefox on Linux is still not working well with WebRender for me (again)
|
| 2021-09-04: |
Adding a "host" label to all of your per-host Prometheus metrics
|
| 2021-09-03: |
How I try out and test new versions of Grafana
|
| 2021-09-02: |
Go multi-module workspace mode, a forthcoming feature in Go 1.18
|
| 2021-09-01: |
Large Unix programs were historically not all that portable between Unixes
|
| 2021-08-31: |
Go doesn't have a stack the way that some other languages do
|
| 2021-08-30: |
How ZFS stores symbolic links on disk
|
| 2021-08-29: |
Some notes on OpenZFS's new 'draid' vdev redundancy type
In Go, pointers (mostly) don't go with slices in practice
|
| 2021-08-27: |
What my first Linux was, and its context
Using our metrics system when I test systems before deployment
|
| 2021-08-25: |
I'm turning off dnf-makecache on my Fedora machines
My interest in Intel's future discrete GPUs (and my likely disappointment)
|
| 2021-08-23: |
Notes on deliberately invoking actions controlled by systemd timers
|
| 2021-08-22: |
What we'll likely do when Linux distributions drop Python 2 entirely
Setting up Python LSP support in GNU Emacs is reasonably worth it
|
| 2021-08-20: |
A home UPS has been more handy and useful than I expected
Seeing what all Cinnamon keyboard shortcuts are
|
| 2021-08-19: |
Configuration (and configuration files) is not and cannot be generic
|
| 2021-08-17: |
It's surprising how many things assume you have available bandwidth
|
| 2021-08-16: |
Browsers listening to developers or users requires them to be humble
|
| 2021-08-15: |
Chrome's automatic updates and the power it holds on the web
|
| 2021-08-14: |
Our experience with IPP-based, PPD-less CUPS printing
|
| 2021-08-13: |
Some of my views on using YAML for human-written configuration files
Prometheus alerts and the idea of "deadbands" (or maybe hysteresis) (with an implementation)
Learning that Vim has insert mode keystrokes that do special things
Go keeps surprising me with its careful design and specification
|
| 2021-08-12: |
Prometheus, Alertmanager, and maybe avoiding flapping alerts
|
| 2021-08-11: |
The meaning of "hysteresis" and how it relates to alerts
|
| 2021-08-09: |
The Firefox uMatrix addon is not quite dead (so far)
|
| 2021-08-08: |
The xterm terminal emulator can do a lot more than just display text
|
| 2021-08-07: |
Some thoughts on new top-level domains being used for spam
|
| 2021-08-06: |
Some bits of how Bash and GNU Readline's "bracketed paste" mode behaves
|
| 2021-08-05: |
Using journalctl's ability to show only one service
|
| 2021-08-04: |
I have mixed views on new DNS top level domains (TLDs)
When you do and don't get stuck query results from a down Prometheus
|
| 2021-08-02: |
Anonymous ("transparent") structures are a good thing in programming languages
|
| 2021-08-01: |
Unix APIs are where I first saw C #define used to rename struct fields
|
| 2021-07-31: |
Learning that you can use unions in C for grouping things into namespaces
|
| 2021-07-30: |
Hardware and (Linux) driver quality can be invisible to non-specialists
XHTML pages cause problems for some Firefox addons
|
| 2021-07-29: |
How Go maps store their values (and keys)
|
| 2021-07-28: |
Modern email is hard to search, which encourages locked up silos
|
| 2021-07-26: |
Understanding plain Linux NVMe device names (in /dev and kernel messages)
|
| 2021-07-25: |
I should probably learn command-line NetworkManager usage
The tiny irritation of ZFS's 'zpool status' nagging you about upgrades
|
| 2021-07-23: |
Why it matters that map values are unaddressable in Go
|
| 2021-07-22: |
Apache's mod_wsgi and the Python 2 issue it creates
Improving my web reading with Martin Tournoij's "readable" Firefox bookmarklet
|
| 2021-07-21: |
It's nice when programs switch to being launched from systemd user units
|
| 2021-07-19: |
Making a Go program build with Go modules can be not a small change
|
| 2021-07-18: |
On sending all syslog messages to one file
|
| 2021-07-17: |
The minimum for syslog configurations should be to log (nearly) everything
|
| 2021-07-16: |
The WireGuard VPN challenge of provisioning clients
Setting up a WireGuard client with NetworkManager (using nmcli)
|
| 2021-07-14: |
Making two Unix permissions mistakes in one
Some ways to get (or not get) information about system memory ranges on Linux
|
| 2021-07-12: |
Problems in the way of straightforward device naming in operating systems
Understanding something about udev's normal network device names on Linux
|
| 2021-07-10: |
Why Bash and GNU Readline's "bracketed paste" mode is not for us
University computer accounts are often surprisingly complicated
|
| 2021-07-08: |
Redirecting paths that start with two slashes in Apache
A semi-surprise with Python's urllib.parse and partial URLs
|
| 2021-07-07: |
The initramfs for old kernels can hide old versions of things
|
| 2021-07-06: |
Unused hardware in computers can now be distinctly inactive
|
| 2021-07-05: |
Losing track of part of our Amanda configuration and then recovering it
|
| 2021-07-04: |
Two ways to have Amanda always make full backups of a filesystem
|
| 2021-07-03: |
Some brief notes on turning Firefox bookmarklets into convenient buttons
|
| 2021-07-02: |
Dealing with CSS fixed position headers and footers in Firefox
|
| 2021-06-30: |
Giving your Linux network interfaces fixed names (under udevd and networkd)
|
| 2021-06-29: |
Monitoring the status of Linux network interfaces with Prometheus
|
| 2021-06-28: |
Be careful when matching on Ethernet addresses in systemd-networkd
I should keep track of what Python packages I install through pip
|
| 2021-06-27: |
Some notes on what's in Linux's /sys/class/net for network interface status
|
| 2021-06-26: |
Ethernet network cables can go bad over time, with odd symptoms
|
| 2021-06-25: |
A couple of Linux top-like programs for network traffic
|
| 2021-06-24: |
Go 1.17 is deprecating the traditional use of 'go get'
|
| 2021-06-22: |
I like WireGuard partly because it doesn't have 'sessions'
|
| 2021-06-21: |
A realization about our VPN and IPv6 traffic
Some notes on building Firefox from source on Ubuntu
|
| 2021-06-20: |
A bit on ZFS's coming raidz expansion and ZFS DVAs
|
| 2021-06-19: |
The Unix background of Linux's 'file-max' and nr_open kernel limits on file descriptors
|
| 2021-06-17: |
Apache directory indexes will notice and exclude blocked URLs in them
In Prometheus queries, on and ignoring don't drop labels from the result
|
| 2021-06-16: |
The challenge of what to set server BIOSes to do on power loss
|
| 2021-06-14: |
Some notes on Firefox's media autoplay settings as of Firefox 89
|
| 2021-06-13: |
A strong commitment to backwards compatibility means keeping your mistakes
Rust 1.x seems to not always be backward compatible in practice
|
| 2021-06-11: |
How we're dealing with our expiring OpenVPN TLS root certificate
TLS certificate durations turn out to be complicated and subtle
|
| 2021-06-10: |
Early notes on using the new python-lsp-server (pylsp) in GNU Emacs
|
| 2021-06-09: |
The modern web design aesthetic of hiding visited links
|
| 2021-06-07: |
My failure to arrange a graceful TLS root certificate rollover with OpenVPN
|
| 2021-06-06: |
TLS certificates have at least two internal representations of time
The case of the very old If-Modified-Since HTTP header
|
| 2021-06-04: |
HTTP/3 needs us (and other people) to make firewall changes
New versions of Bash (and readline) default to special handling of pasting into the shell (or other programs)
|
| 2021-06-02: |
Fedora co-mingles its source packages with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Simple use of Let's Encrypt on OpenBSD is pleasantly straightforward (as of 6.8)
|
| 2021-05-31: |
It'd be useful if TLS libraries had better and more detailed error messages
I've come to like date-based names for log rotation
|
| 2021-05-30: |
Go 1.17 will still support the old GOPATH mode (as well as modules)
|
| 2021-05-28: |
Less can filter what it shows to you (a thing I recently learned)
|
| 2021-05-27: |
Some thoughts on having set up a personal Alertmanager instance
Being able to see links I've visited in Firefox is startlingly better
|
| 2021-05-26: |
Working around an AMDGPU automatic fan control problem on my Radeon RX 550
|
| 2021-05-24: |
Rust is a wave of the future
Why we don't have management connections to our switches (an old story)
|
| 2021-05-23: |
Our three generations of network implementations (over the time I've been here)
|
| 2021-05-22: |
I don't know how much memory our Prometheus setup needs
|
| 2021-05-20: |
The temptation to start using some Python type hints
|
| 2021-05-19: |
Fedora has significantly fumbled DKMS handling for Linux kernel modules
Speculating on why DKMS and other Linux things are large shell scripts
|
| 2021-05-17: |
Unix job control has some dark corners and challenging cases, illustrated
|
| 2021-05-16: |
Unix job control and its interactions with TTYs (and shells)
|
| 2021-05-15: |
Downsampling your metrics data is a compromise (what we could call a 'hack')
The size of our Prometheus setup as of May 2021
|
| 2021-05-14: |
The Bourne shell and Bash aren't the right languages for larger programs
|
| 2021-05-12: |
The Bourne shell lets you set variables in if expressions
Firefox and the challenge of trying to make visited links clearly visible
|
| 2021-05-10: |
Errors during SMTP conversations aren't trustworthy, illustrated
|
| 2021-05-09: |
DKMS built one of my kernel modules for the wrong kernel
Storing ZFS send streams is not a good backup method
|
| 2021-05-08: |
It's pleasantly easy to install PyPy yourself (from their binaries)
|
| 2021-05-07: |
Understanding OpenSSH's various options around keys and key algorithms
|
| 2021-05-06: |
The different types of modern (2021) SSH keys (and some opinions)
|
| 2021-05-05: |
It's possible for Firefox to forget about:config preferences you've set
|
| 2021-05-03: |
Our future upgrade wave of Ubuntu 18.04 machines
Understanding OpenSSH's future deprecation of the 'ssh-rsa' signature scheme
|
| 2021-05-02: |
Realizing one general way to construct symmetric ciphers
|
| 2021-04-30: |
Discovering outside people attempting to do dynamic DNS updates to us
There's plenty of our work that's not being done from home
|
| 2021-04-29: |
The shift from "two factor" to "multi-factor" authentication
|
| 2021-04-28: |
Firefox's slow takeover of the address bar's space
|
| 2021-04-26: |
The question of how to do non-annoying multi-factor authentication for SSH
Maybe a local, on-machine caching DNS resolver should be standard (for us)
|
| 2021-04-25: |
The question of having SATA drives behind modern SAS expanders
|
| 2021-04-24: |
Why people care about SAS despite not being 'enterprise'
|
| 2021-04-23: |
How I want to use pip with PyPy to install third party programs
|
| 2021-04-21: |
Go 1.17 will allow converting a slice to an array pointer (some of the time)
|
| 2021-04-20: |
PyPy starts fast enough for our Python 2 commands
|
| 2021-04-19: |
Trying out learning more Vim on demand
|
| 2021-04-18: |
Using NVMe SSDs over SATA SSDs in basic servers is an awkward sales pitch
My view of Wayland here in 2021
|
| 2021-04-16: |
A Firefox surprise from disabling dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
|
| 2021-04-15: |
Learning about the idea of the HTTP self-post
Link: "a2d<C-V>3gE: Vim normal mode grammar
|
| 2021-04-14: |
Some things on ZFS (on Linux) per-dataset basic IO statistics
|
| 2021-04-13: |
Getting NVMe and related terminology straight (for once)
|
| 2021-04-12: |
SSD versus NVMe for basic servers today (in early 2021)
Counting how many times something started or stopped failing in Prometheus
|
| 2021-04-11: |
Vendors put varied and peculiar things in system DMI information
|
| 2021-04-09: |
Why NFS servers generally have a 'reply cache'
What NFSv3 operations can be in the Linux nfsd reply cache
|
| 2021-04-07: |
Rust's rustup tool is surprisingly nice and well behaved
|
| 2021-04-06: |
Modern Linux can require a link signal before it configures IP addresses
|
| 2021-04-05: |
A stable Unix updating its version of Go isn't straightforward
|
| 2021-04-04: |
Some uses for Prometheus's resets() function
You need a version of Go with module support (ideally good support)
|
| 2021-04-02: |
ZFS on Linux is improving the handling of disk names on import
Programs that read IPMI sensors tell you subtly different things
|
| 2021-03-31: |
Understanding Prometheus' changes() function and what it can do for me
Systemd's NSS myhostname module surprised me recently
|
| 2021-03-29: |
Nil in Go is typed in theory and sort of untyped in practice
|
| 2021-03-28: |
What tool you use to read IPMI sensor information can matter
|
| 2021-03-27: |
Internet routing can now vary based on things you wouldn't expect
The attractions of reading sensor information from IPMIs
|
| 2021-03-26: |
Linux's hardware monitoring can lie to you
|
| 2021-03-24: |
HTTPS is really multiple protocols these days
|
| 2021-03-23: |
Discovering Vim's Visual (selection) mode
|
| 2021-03-22: |
Portability has ongoing costs for code that's changing
|
| 2021-03-21: |
My uncertainty about swapping and swap sizing for SSDs and NVMe drives
My experience with x2go is that it's okay but not compelling
|
| 2021-03-20: |
Paging out memory can be 'global' or 'local' these days
|
| 2021-03-19: |
Remote X versus 'seamless windows' in remote desktop software
|
| 2021-03-18: |
Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy
|
| 2021-03-17: |
Remote X has been a life saver over this past year
|
| 2021-03-16: |
The fading HTTP Referer header and (Google) Search paywall bypasses
|
| 2021-03-15: |
Different views of what are basic and advanced Vim features
|
| 2021-03-14: |
I wish Prometheus had some features to deal with 'missing' metrics
|
| 2021-03-13: |
Prometheus and the case of the stuck metrics
|
| 2021-03-11: |
Wrangling HTTP and HTTPS versions of the same Apache virtual host
What OpenSSH sshd logs when a session disconnects (on Linux)
|
| 2021-03-10: |
The tradeoffs of Go version behavior in go.mod module files
|
| 2021-03-09: |
Go version directives in go.mod files: some notes and crude usage numbers
|
| 2021-03-08: |
Packaging Python 2 doesn't mean that Linux distributions support it
|
| 2021-03-06: |
Some views and notes on ZFS deduplication today
|
| 2021-03-05: |
How not to use Apache's RewriteRule directive in a reverse proxy
|
| 2021-03-04: |
Systemd needs (or could use) a linter for unit files
|
| 2021-03-03: |
What signal a RJ-45 serial connection is (probably) missing
|
| 2021-03-02: |
The Python ctypes security issue and Python 2
|
| 2021-03-01: |
Link: Taking This Serially
The balance of power between distributions and software authors
|
| 2021-02-28: |
Dot-separated DNS name components aren't even necessarily subdomains, illustrated
|
| 2021-02-27: |
My Firefox addons as of Firefox 86 (and the current development version)
My pragmatic sysadmin view on subdomains and DNS zones
|
| 2021-02-25: |
The HTTP Referer header is fading away (at least as a useful thing)
|
| 2021-02-24: |
How convenience in Prometheus labels for alerts led me into a quiet mistake
How (and where) Prometheus alerts get their labels
|
| 2021-02-22: |
The mhbuild directives I want for sending MIME attachments with MH
How I set up testing alerts in our Prometheus environment
|
| 2021-02-20: |
Modern software controls dependencies because it helps software authors
|
| 2021-02-19: |
ZFS pool partial (selective) feature upgrades are coming in OpenZFS
|
| 2021-02-18: |
Understanding what 'systemctl restart' means and when I want to use it
|
| 2021-02-17: |
TLS certificates specifying hosts via their CommonName field is more or less gone
When browsers (or at least Firefox) send HTTP Basic Authentication headers
|
| 2021-02-15: |
How ZFS on Linux brings up pools and filesystems at boot under systemd
|
| 2021-02-14: |
Some observed read latencies for SSDs and NVMe drives under Fedora 32
Link: What was the original reason for the design of AT&T assembly syntax?
|
| 2021-02-13: |
Where the default values for Python function arguments are stored
|
| 2021-02-12: |
An interesting issue around using is with a literal in Python
|
| 2021-02-11: |
Getting high IOPS requires concurrency on modern SSDs and NVMe drives
|
| 2021-02-10: |
Let's Encrypt is preparing for an emergency and that's good for TLS in general
The issue of IOPS versus latency on SSDs and NVMe drives
|
| 2021-02-09: |
Normal situations should not be warnings (especially not repeated ones)
|
| 2021-02-07: |
Strict SameSite web cookie policies probably don't do much for us
|
| 2021-02-06: |
Talkd and 'mesg n': a story from the old Unix days
|
| 2021-02-05: |
Limiting what branches I track from an upstream Git repository
|
| 2021-02-04: |
There are limitations to what expendable addresses can help with
|
| 2021-02-03: |
Junk email as a cover for more nefarious things
|
| 2021-02-02: |
The small oddity in the Unix exec*() family
|
| 2021-02-01: |
Go 1.16 will make system calls through libc on OpenBSD
|
| 2021-01-31: |
The limitations on find's -exec option and implementation convenience
|
| 2021-01-30: |
I wish every program that wanted 'a SQL database' would let me use SQLite
|
| 2021-01-29: |
Illustrating the importance of fully multi-core program building today
Forecasting drive failures is not always as useful as it sounds
|
| 2021-01-27: |
Making tracking upstream Git repositories a bit quieter
find mostly doesn't need xargs today on modern Unixes
|
| 2021-01-25: |
Time for Python 2 users to make sure we have a copy of Pip and other pieces
|
| 2021-01-24: |
Your monitoring and alerts remember things for you
Thinking through what can go badly with databases on ZFS
|
| 2021-01-22: |
SMART Threshold numbers turn out to not be useful for us in practice
|
| 2021-01-21: |
A lingering sign of old hopes for ZFS deduplication
Real email has MIME attachments that are HTML
|
| 2021-01-20: |
A realization about the Linux CPU pressure stall information
|
| 2021-01-18: |
Where Firefox's text encoding menus are
|
| 2021-01-17: |
Password managers automate checking the website address for you
One reason to not trust SMART attribute data for consumer drives
|
| 2021-01-15: |
SMART attributes can predict SSD failures under the right circumstances
|
| 2021-01-14: |
Understanding WireGuard's AllowedIPs setting (and a bit of tcpdump)
|
| 2021-01-13: |
Installing Pip in Python 2 environments that don't provide it already
What you can and can't build in Go's module mode
|
| 2021-01-11: |
How to make Bash fail badly on Ubuntu 16.04 by typo'ing a command name
|
| 2021-01-10: |
Thinking through why you shouldn't use plaintext passwords in authentication, even inside TLS
What timestamps you get back along with Prometheus query results
|
| 2021-01-08: |
How to extract raw time series data from Prometheus
|
| 2021-01-07: |
I got to experience the march of storage technology today
|
| 2021-01-06: |
In modern email, it's easy for plaintext and HTML parts to drift apart
Link: ARM support in Linux distributions demystified
Unix shell pipelines have two usage patterns
|
| 2021-01-05: |
TLS Certificate Authority root certificate expiry dates are not how trust in them is managed
|
| 2021-01-03: |
TLS Certificate Authority root certificates and their dates
The modern web and (alleged) software stagnation in the past few decades
|
| 2021-01-01: |
An interesting and puzzling bit of Linux server utilization
|
| 2020-12-31: |
GNU Date and several versions of RFC 3339 dates
|
| 2020-12-30: |
Some ways to do a Prometheus query as of a given time
A Prometheus wish: easy ways to evaluate a PromQL query at a given time
|
| 2020-12-28: |
It feels like the broad Unix API is being used less these days
A little puzzle with printf() and C argument passing
|
| 2020-12-27: |
Our alerts are quiet most of the time (as they should be)
|
| 2020-12-25: |
The expiry time of Certificate Authority root certificates can be nominal (or not)
In Python 3, types are classes (as far as repr() is concerned)
|
| 2020-12-24: |
In CPython, types implemented in C actually are part of the type tree
|
| 2020-12-23: |
Using constant Python hash functions for fun and no real profit
|
| 2020-12-21: |
The legibility of different versions of ZFS
|
| 2020-12-20: |
Who I think CentOS Stream is and isn't for
Go modules are soon going to be the only future
|
| 2020-12-18: |
On Go, release timing, and new machines
|
| 2020-12-17: |
Limiting the Nouveau kernel driver's messages via removal
|
| 2020-12-16: |
Mailing lists and bounce handling (or not handling bounces) today
|
| 2020-12-15: |
How to make Grafana properly display a Unix timestamp
In Prometheus, it's hard to work with when metric points happened
|
| 2020-12-14: |
Chrome is getting its own set of Certificate Authority roots
|
| 2020-12-12: |
My views on the suitability of CentOS Stream
Sometimes a problem really is just a coincidence
|
| 2020-12-11: |
CentOS's switch to CentOS Stream has created a lot of confusion
|
| 2020-12-09: |
A probable benefit to enabling screen blanking on LCD displays
|
| 2020-12-08: |
CentOS's switch to Stream is a major change in what CentOS is
|
| 2020-12-07: |
Exploring when the network is up on a machine
|
| 2020-12-06: |
The deprecation of FTP in browsers and its likely effects on search engines
Linux's hostname -s switch is now safe for many people, but the situation is messy
|
| 2020-12-04: |
How to get generic interface names and IPs in OpenBSD PF
Some thoughts about low power loads and power supply efficiency
|
| 2020-12-02: |
Prometheus 2.23.0 now lets you display graphs in local time
|
| 2020-12-01: |
A new appreciation for Firefox's 'Performance' web developer tool
|
| 2020-11-30: |
Our monitoring of our OpenBSD machines, such as it is (as of November 2020)
Link: wtfpython
|
| 2020-11-29: |
Some thoughts on how I still miss DTrace (and also mdb)
The death and life of postmaster@anywhere
|
| 2020-11-27: |
Setting up self-contained Go program source that uses packages
|
| 2020-11-26: |
The better way to make an Ubuntu 20.04 ISO that will boot on UEFI systems
Making an Ubuntu 20.04 ISO that will boot on UEFI systems
|
| 2020-11-25: |
Firefox's WebRender has mixed results for me on Linux
|
| 2020-11-23: |
What containers do and don't help you with
My views on when you should use the official upstream versions of software
|
| 2020-11-22: |
Sometimes it's best to use the official upstream versions of software
|
| 2020-11-21: |
Github based projects have RSS syndication feeds for their releases
|
| 2020-11-19: |
Firefox on Linux has not worked well with WebRender for me so far
Apple Silicon Macs versus ARM PCs
|
| 2020-11-17: |
Grafana and the case of the infinite serial number
|
| 2020-11-16: |
POSIX write() is not atomic in the way that you might like
Unix doesn't normally do short write()s to files and no one expects it to
|
| 2020-11-15: |
I don't expect to have an ARM-based PC any time soon
|
| 2020-11-14: |
Linux servers can still wind up using SATA in legacy PATA mode
|
| 2020-11-13: |
If you use Exim on Ubuntu, you probably want to skip Ubuntu 20.04
|
| 2020-11-11: |
The problems inherent in building your own copies of software packages
Logging fatal exceptions in my Python programs is not enough
|
| 2020-11-09: |
Seriously using virtualization clashes with our funding model
Getting the git tags that are before and after a commit (in simple cases)
|
| 2020-11-08: |
Thinking about two different models of virtualization hosts
|
| 2020-11-07: |
Turning on console blanking on a Linux machine when logged in remotely
|
| 2020-11-06: |
Console blanking now defaults to off on Linux (and has for a while)
It's possible that the real size of different SSDs is now consistent
|
| 2020-11-04: |
In Python, using the logging package is part of your API, or should be
You shouldn't use the Linux dump program any more (on extN filesystems)
|
| 2020-11-03: |
Fixing blank Cinnamon sessions in VMWare virtual machines (on Fedora)
|
| 2020-11-01: |
Python's global statement and imports in functions
|
| 2020-10-31: |
A gotcha with combining single-label and multi-label Prometheus metrics
Some settings you want to make to CyberPower's UPS Powerpanel daemon
|
| 2020-10-30: |
A sysadmin learning experience courtesy of some UPS issues
|
| 2020-10-29: |
An illustration of why running code during import is a bad idea (and how it happens anyway)
|
| 2020-10-28: |
An issue with Pip installed packages and Python versions (on Unix)
|
| 2020-10-26: |
Sometimes alerts have inobvious reasons for existing
Link: [Firefox] Navigational Instruments
Fifteen years of DWiki, the Python engine of Wandering Thoughts
|
| 2020-10-25: |
Remotely upgrading my office workstation to Fedora 32 worked fine
|
| 2020-10-24: |
Why configuration file snippets in a directory should have some extension
|
| 2020-10-23: |
An inconvenience of physical hardware is that it has to be delivered
|
| 2020-10-21: |
Keeping VMware Workstation VMs running when I quit from VMware
A mystery uncovered by Fedora 32 changing my default font
|
| 2020-10-19: |
Firefox has a little handy font-related thing on Unix (or at least Linux)
What versions of PyPy I can use (October 2020 edition)
|
| 2020-10-18: |
We need to start getting some experience with using Ubuntu 20.04
|
| 2020-10-17: |
A potential Prometheus issue for labeled metrics for infrequent events
|
| 2020-10-16: |
Go is gaining the ability to trace init calls on program startup
|
| 2020-10-15: |
Go packages can have more than one init() function
|
| 2020-10-13: |
As an outsider, I prefer issue tracking to be in its own application
|
| 2020-10-12: |
If you send automated email, you should scan it with anti-spam software
|
| 2020-10-11: |
Microsoft SharePoint is being used to send spam
Our current usage and views of UPSes (late 2020 edition)
|
| 2020-10-10: |
Wanting to be able to monitor for electrical power quality issues
|
| 2020-10-09: |
Whether extra disks should be live or spare now depends on HDs versus SSDs
|
| 2020-10-08: |
Sorting out what the Single Unix Specification is and covers
|
| 2020-10-07: |
A handy diff argument handling feature that's actually very old
|
| 2020-10-06: |
Linux distributions have sensible reasons to prefer periodic releases
|
| 2020-10-04: |
Web page generation systems should support remapping external URLs
Link: Old-School Disk Partitions
Solid state disks in mirrors and other RAID setups, and wear lifetimes
|
| 2020-10-03: |
A thought about the lifetimes of hard disks and solid state disks
|
| 2020-10-02: |
Firefox is improving its handling of HTTP Basic Authentication (on Unix)
|
| 2020-09-30: |
People still use newgrp (to my surprise)
Using DMARC information is complicated in practice in the real world
How the Unix newgrp command behaved back in V7 Unix
|
| 2020-09-29: |
Implementing 'and' conditions in Exim SMTP ACLs the easy way (and in Exim routers too)
Why the Unix newgrp command exists (sort of)
Where (and how) you limit your concurrency in Go can matter
|
| 2020-09-28: |
My likely path away from spinning hard drives on my home desktop
Making product names of what you use visible to people is generally a mistake
Looking at DKIM information for our 'good' email (September 2020 edition)
|
| 2020-09-27: |
Remote power control for your machines comes in two flavours
|
| 2020-09-26: |
We rebooted all of our servers remotely (more or less) and it all worked
Using SPF on HELO/EHLO hostnames is repurposing SPF to validate a different thing
|
| 2020-09-19: |
Python virtual environments transparently add themselves to sys.path
|
| 2020-09-17: |
Python 3 venvs don't normally really embed their own copy of Python (on Unix)
|
| 2020-09-16: |
How I think I want to drop modern Python packages into a single program
Why I write recursive descent parsers (despite their issues)
|
| 2020-09-15: |
When the Go garbage collector will panic over bad pointer values
|
| 2020-09-13: |
I'm now a user of Vim, not classical Vi (partly because of windows)
Rolling distribution releases versus periodic releases are a tradeoff
|
| 2020-09-12: |
Some notes on what Fedora's DNF logs and where
|
| 2020-09-10: |
My take on permanent versus temporary HTTP redirects in general
Permanent versus temporary redirects when handling extra query parameters on your URLs
|
| 2020-09-08: |
What you should do about extra query parameters on your URLs
|
| 2020-09-07: |
Why Fedora version upgrades are complicated and painful for me
URL query parameters and how laxness creates de facto requirements on the web
|
| 2020-09-06: |
Daniel J. Bernstein's IM2000 email proposal is not a good idea
|
| 2020-09-05: |
Some notes on what the CyberPower UPS 'Powerpanel' software reports to you
|
| 2020-09-04: |
In practice, cool URLs change (eventually)
|
| 2020-09-02: |
Why I want something like Procmail with a dedicated mail filtering language
|
| 2020-09-01: |
Even in Go, concurrency is still not easy (with an example)
|
| 2020-08-31: |
Why we won't like it if signing email is the solution to various email problems
|
| 2020-08-30: |
All forms of signing email are generally solving the wrong problem (a thesis)
|
| 2020-08-29: |
An interesting mistake with Go's context package that I (sort of) made
|
| 2020-08-28: |
My divergence from 'proper' Vim by not using and exploring features
Firefox 80 and my confusion over its hardware accelerated video on Linux
|
| 2020-08-26: |
Even on SSDs, ongoing activity can slow down ZFS scrubs drastically
|
| 2020-08-25: |
My home desktop is still locking up when it gets too cold (and what next)
|
| 2020-08-24: |
I want a type of desktop PC (and motherboard) that's generally skipped
|
| 2020-08-23: |
The Linux kernel bugzilla (and others) get spammed (of course)
|
| 2020-08-22: |
Some bits on making Python's argparse module work like Unix usually does
|
| 2020-08-21: |
Link: Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-ons?
When I stopped believing in Google's fundamental good nature
|
| 2020-08-20: |
What you're looking for with a Grafana dashboard affects its settings
|
| 2020-08-19: |
Potential problem points for Chrome (or any browser) to support Linux
|
| 2020-08-18: |
The Prometheus host agent can disturb Linux CPU frequency measurements
|
| 2020-08-17: |
Firefox and web browsers for Linux
Important parts of Unix's history happened before readline support was common
|
| 2020-08-16: |
"It works on my laptop" is a blame game
|
| 2020-08-15: |
Go will inline functions across packages (under the right circumstances)
|
| 2020-08-14: |
Go 1.15's interface optimization for small integers is invisible to Go programs
|
| 2020-08-12: |
People often have multiple social identities even in the physical realm
How Go 1.15 improved converting small integer values to interfaces
|
| 2020-08-10: |
Disabling DNF modules on Fedora 31 so they don't mess up package updates
|
| 2020-08-09: |
Unix options conventions are just that, which makes them products of culture
|
| 2020-08-08: |
More problems with Fedora 31 DNF modules and package updates
|
| 2020-08-07: |
How we choose our time intervals in our Grafana dashboards
Our problem installing an old Ubuntu kernel set of packages
|
| 2020-08-05: |
My views on some conventions for Unix command line options
We may wind up significantly delaying or mostly skipping Ubuntu 20.04
|
| 2020-08-03: |
Exim's change to 'taint' some Exim variables is going to cause us pain
The issue of how to propagate some errors in our Django web app
|
| 2020-08-01: |
Getting my head around the choice between sleeping and 'tickers'
|
| 2020-07-31: |
Putting some extra 'obvious' information into our temperature alerts
|
| 2020-07-30: |
Putting IPMIs on a port isolated network to deal with shared network interfaces
|
| 2020-07-29: |
The problem of 'shared' IPMI network interfaces
|
| 2020-07-28: |
Our ZFS spares handling system for ZFS on Linux
Digital microwaves show an example of good UI doing what you wanted
|
| 2020-07-26: |
Linux PAM leads to terrible error messages from things like passwd
Keeping backup ZFS on Linux kernel modules around
|
| 2020-07-24: |
My varied types of Firefox windows
Some thoughts on us overlooking Illumos's syseventadm
|
| 2020-07-23: |
C's main() is one of the places where Unix's user and kernel APIs differ
|
| 2020-07-21: |
Contrasting the two common approaches to where programs start running
|
| 2020-07-20: |
An exploration of why Python doesn't require a 'main' function
|
| 2020-07-19: |
In praise of ZFS On Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'
|
| 2020-07-18: |
Using Go build directives to optionally use new APIs in the standard library
|
| 2020-07-17: |
Not all sysadmin tools should be silent by default
|
| 2020-07-16: |
Malware spammers put .exe Windows executables in everything
|
| 2020-07-15: |
A piece of phish spam with some clever URL obfuscation
|
| 2020-07-14: |
Today I learned that Python's argparse module allows you to abbreviate long command line options
Link: The Anatomy of a PromQL Query
|
| 2020-07-13: |
How major and minor device numbers worked in V7 Unix
|
| 2020-07-12: |
Running servers and Fred Brooks on transforming programs to products
Linux desktop application autostarting is different from systemd user units
|
| 2020-07-10: |
The impact on middleware of expanding APIs with Go's interface smuggling
Ubuntu, building current versions of Firefox, and snaps
|
| 2020-07-09: |
Link: Mime type associations (on Linux)
|
| 2020-07-08: |
"Interface smuggling", a Go design pattern for expanding APIs
|
| 2020-07-07: |
Some thoughts on Fedora moving to btrfs as the default desktop file system
I now think that blog 'per day' pages with articles are a mistake
|
| 2020-07-05: |
A Go lesson learned: sometimes I don't want to use goroutines if possible
|
| 2020-07-04: |
How you get multiple TLS certificate chains from a server certificate
What a TLS self signed certificate is at a mechanical level
|
| 2020-07-02: |
The work that's not being done from home is slowly accumulating for us
Link: Code Only Says What it Does
|
| 2020-07-01: |
In ZFS, your filesystem layout needs to reflect some of your administrative structure
|
| 2020-06-30: |
The unfortunate limitation in ZFS filesystem quotas and refquota
|
| 2020-06-29: |
How Prometheus Blackbox's TLS certificate metrics would have reacted to AddTrust's root expiry
Adapting our Django web app to changing requirements by not doing much
|
| 2020-06-28: |
Understanding why Django's goals are not our goals for our web application
|
| 2020-06-26: |
NetworkManager and (not) dealing with conflicting network connections
|
| 2020-06-25: |
What Prometheus Blackbox's TLS certificate expiry metrics are checking
|
| 2020-06-24: |
Unix's design issue of device numbers being in stat() results for files
|
| 2020-06-23: |
Sometimes it takes other people to show you some of your site's design flaws
|
| 2020-06-22: |
Today I learned that HTML <abbr> may not do much on mobile browsers
|
| 2020-06-21: |
In Go, the compiler needs to know the types of things when copying values
|
| 2020-06-20: |
The additional complications in DNS updates that secondary DNS servers add
|
| 2020-06-19: |
Removing unmaintained packages from your Fedora machine should require explicitly opting in
People's efficiency expectations for generics in 'Go 2' and patterns of use
|
| 2020-06-17: |
How applications autostart on modern Linux desktops
A scrolling puzzle involving GTK+, XInput, and alternate desktops (on Fedora)
|
| 2020-06-15: |
Input events on X have an old world and a new world
|
| 2020-06-14: |
Product code and utility code
|
| 2020-06-13: |
An interesting combination of flaws in some /etc/mailcap handling
|
| 2020-06-12: |
The safety of GMail's POP server TLS certificate verification (or lack of it)
Dual displays contrasting with virtual screens (aka multiple desktops)
|
| 2020-06-10: |
A dual display setup creates a natural split between things
|
| 2020-06-09: |
The practical people problem with instance diversity in the Fediverse
My mixed feelings about 'swap on zram' for Linux
|
| 2020-06-07: |
A Go time package gotcha with parsing time strings that use named time zones
|
| 2020-06-06: |
Why sysadmins don't like changing things, illustrated
|
| 2020-06-05: |
Why we put alert start and end times in our Prometheus alert messages
|
| 2020-06-04: |
Formatting alert start and end times in Prometheus Alertmanager messages
|
| 2020-06-03: |
In theory you (we) should have SPF records for HELO hostnames too
|
| 2020-06-02: |
A subtle trap when formatting Go time.Time values
|
| 2020-06-01: |
Watching the recent AddTrust root CA certificate expiry has been humbling
|
| 2020-05-31: |
Mail forwarding is slowly dying (probably)
|
| 2020-05-30: |
How we're likely to DKIM sign some of our email messages
|
| 2020-05-29: |
What sort of SSH keys our users use or have listed in their authorized keys files
|
| 2020-05-28: |
The surprising persistence of RSA keys in SSH
|
| 2020-05-27: |
What I think OpenSSH 8.2+'s work toward deprecating 'ssh-rsa' means
My various settings in X to get programs working on my HiDPI display
|
| 2020-05-25: |
My failure with Xpra (probably because what I want is almost impossible)
|
| 2020-05-24: |
A cheatsheet for Python's pip for how I use it
Security questions and warnings are effectively confirmation requests
|
| 2020-05-22: |
Mixed feelings about Firefox Addons' new non-Recommended extensions warning
Working out how frequently your ICMP pings fail in Prometheus
|
| 2020-05-20: |
How I work on Python 2 and Python 3 with the Python Language Server (in GNU Emacs)
Switching to the new in-kernel WireGuard module was easy (on Fedora 31)
|
| 2020-05-18: |
Reading the POSIX standard for Unix functions is not straightforward
|
| 2020-05-17: |
Syndication feeds (RSS) and social media can be complementary
Some views on having your system timezone set to UTC
|
| 2020-05-15: |
Why we use city names when configuring system timezones
|
| 2020-05-14: |
Exploring munmap() on page zero and on unmapped address space
|
| 2020-05-13: |
Getting my head around what things aren't comparable in Go
The modern HTTPS world has no place for old web servers
|
| 2020-05-11: |
Why we have several hundred NFS filesystems in our environment
|
| 2020-05-10: |
How we guarantee there's always some free space in our ZFS pools
|
| 2020-05-09: |
How big our fileserver environment is (as of May 2020)
|
| 2020-05-08: |
Revisiting what the ZFS recordsize is and what it does
Linux software RAID resync speed limits are too low for SSDs
|
| 2020-05-06: |
Modern versions of systemd can cause an unmount storm during shutdowns
How to set up an Ubuntu 20.04 ISO image to auto-install a server
|
| 2020-05-04: |
Notes on the autoinstall configuration file format for Ubuntu 20.04
The Go compiler has real improvements in new versions (and why)
|
| 2020-05-03: |
What OSes we use here (as of May 2020)
|
| 2020-05-01: |
What problems Snaps and Flatpaks are solving
|
| 2020-04-30: |
The afterlife of Python 2
|
| 2020-04-29: |
The problem of Ubuntu 20.04, Snaps, and where your home directory is
Dealing with my worries about Django and HTTP Basic Authentication
|
| 2020-04-27: |
I think you should generally be using the latest version of Go
My views on SystemTap as compared to eBPF for Linux kernel instrumentation
|
| 2020-04-26: |
Looking back at DTrace from a Linux eBPF world (some thoughts)
|
| 2020-04-25: |
Some notes on Firefox's interstitial warning for old TLS versions
|
| 2020-04-24: |
Accepting TLS certificate hostnames based on IP address checks is not safe
|
| 2020-04-23: |
The Unix divide over who gets to chown things, and (disk space) quotas
|
| 2020-04-22: |
More on chown in combination with symlinks
|
| 2020-04-20: |
An important safety note about chown and symlinks (also chmod and chgrp)
|
| 2020-04-19: |
Verifying the server hostname for a TLS certificate has two purposes
GMail, POP, and TLS server certificate verification
|
| 2020-04-17: |
We've disabled eBPF for normal users on our Linux machines
Some bits of grep usage are where I disagree with Shellcheck
|
| 2020-04-15: |
Some ways that servers make their disks not hot-swappable
We're (temporarily) moving to three way mirrored disks on our servers
|
| 2020-04-13: |
If you use GNU Grep on text files, use the -a (--text) option
|
| 2020-04-12: |
The appeal of doing exact string comparisons with Apache's RewriteCond
ZFS on Linux has now become the OpenZFS ZFS implementation
|
| 2020-04-10: |
'Deduplicated' ZFS send streams are now deprecated and on the way out
Why my commit messages for configuration files describe my changes
|
| 2020-04-08: |
Why you want a Linux bootloader even on UEFI systems
There can be differences in what malware variants anti-spam systems distinguish
|
| 2020-04-06: |
Fedora 31 fumbles DNF modules, package updates edition
|
| 2020-04-05: |
My normal process for upgrading from one Fedora version to another
Why it's very bad for applications to start themselves automatically
|
| 2020-04-03: |
Microsoft Teams' bad arrogance on (Fedora) Linux
|
| 2020-04-02: |
We may face some issues with the timing of Ubuntu 20.04 and its effects
|
| 2020-04-01: |
Why Linux bootloaders wind up being complicated
|
| 2020-03-31: |
My home DSL link really is fast enough to make remote X acceptable
|
| 2020-03-30: |
It's worth documenting the obvious (before it stops being obvious)
Notes on Grafana 'value groups' for dashboard variables
|
| 2020-03-29: |
I set up Python program options and arguments in a separate function
|
| 2020-03-28: |
The Prometheus host agent's CPU utilization metrics can be a bit weird
|
| 2020-03-27: |
OpenBSD's 'spinning' CPU time category
|
| 2020-03-26: |
Any KVM over IP systems need to be on secure networks
|
| 2020-03-25: |
The problem of your (our) external mail gateway using internal DNS views
|
| 2020-03-23: |
How we set up our ZFS filesystem hierarchy in our ZFS pools
Why we use 1U servers, and the two sides of them
|
| 2020-03-22: |
Avoiding the 'dangling else' language problem with mandatory block markers
|
| 2020-03-20: |
Wishing for a remote resilient server environment (now that it's too late)
|
| 2020-03-19: |
Make sure to keep useful labels in your Prometheus alert rules
Sorting out Go's 'for ... = range ..' and when it copies things
|
| 2020-03-18: |
Understanding X mouse cursors (and their several layers of history)
|
| 2020-03-17: |
A problem I'm having with my HiDPI display, remote X, and (X) cursors
|
| 2020-03-16: |
How Firefox could support automatically using local DNS over HTTPS servers
|
| 2020-03-15: |
Why the choice of DNS over HTTPS server needs to be automatic (a sysadmin view)
|
| 2020-03-14: |
The two meanings of 'DNS over HTTPS' today
|
| 2020-03-13: |
Sensible heuristics for when to use DNS over HTTPS can't work for us
|
| 2020-03-12: |
TLS increasingly exists in three different worlds
|
| 2020-03-11: |
Some notes on the state of DNS over HTTPS in Firefox (as of March 2020)
|
| 2020-03-09: |
Logging out of HTTP Basic Authentication in Firefox
What makes our Ubuntu updates driver program complicated
|
| 2020-03-08: |
How we sort of automate updating system packages across our Ubuntu machines
|
| 2020-03-07: |
Linux's iowait statistic and multi-CPU machines
|
| 2020-03-05: |
The problem of Unix iowait and multi-CPU machines
|
| 2020-03-04: |
Unix's iowait% is a narrow and limited measure that can be misleading
|
| 2020-03-03: |
One impact of the dropping of Python 2 from Linux distributions
|
| 2020-03-02: |
More or less what versions of Go support what OpenBSD releases (as of March 2020)
|
| 2020-03-01: |
The situation with Go on OpenBSD
|
| 2020-02-29: |
OpenBSD versus Prometheus (and Go)
|
| 2020-02-28: |
One reason for Go to prefer providing indexes in for ... range loops
|
| 2020-02-27: |
Some alert inhibition rules we use in Prometheus Alertmanager
|
| 2020-02-26: |
The magic settings to make a bar graph in Grafana
The browsers are probably running the TLS show now
|
| 2020-02-25: |
The basics of /etc/mailcap on Ubuntu (and Debian)
|
| 2020-02-23: |
Webmail providers (and others) hiding user IPs was the right decision
Our (unusual) freedom to use alerts as notifications
|
| 2020-02-22: |
Will common motherboards ever have very many NVMe drive slots?
|
| 2020-02-21: |
An appreciation for Cinnamon's workspace flipping keyboard shortcuts
|
| 2020-02-20: |
Link: Stop Using Encrypted Email
|
| 2020-02-19: |
Load average is now generally only a secondary problem indicator
How and why we regularly capture information about running processes
|
| 2020-02-17: |
The uncertainty of an elevated load average on our Linux IMAP server
The case of mysterious load average spikes on our Linux login server
|
| 2020-02-16: |
With sudo, complex argument validation is best in cover scripts
|
| 2020-02-14: |
Unix's /usr split and standards (and practice)
The /bin versus /usr split and diskless workstations
|
| 2020-02-12: |
You can't delegate a ZFS administration permission to delete only snapshots
Some git aliases that I use
|
| 2020-02-10: |
Doing frequent ZFS scrubs lets you discover problems close to when they happened
|
| 2020-02-09: |
I'm likely giving up on trying to read Fedora package update information
Code dependencies and operational dependencies
|
| 2020-02-08: |
Ways that I have lost the source code for installed programs
|
| 2020-02-07: |
I frequently use dependencies because they enable my programs to exist
|
| 2020-02-05: |
The drawback of having a dynamic site with a lot of URLs on today's web
|
| 2020-02-04: |
What 'is' translates to in CPython bytecode
The place of the 'is' syntax in Python
|
| 2020-02-02: |
What we do to enable us to grow our ZFS pools over time
Some unusual and puzzling bad requests for my CSS stylesheet
|
| 2020-01-31: |
Finding out what directories exist with only basic shell builtins (a Unix shell trick)
|
| 2020-01-30: |
Some notes on Python's email.header.decode_header()
|
| 2020-01-29: |
Some effects of the ZFS DVA format on data layout and growing ZFS pools
Why ZFS is not good at growing and reshaping pools (or shrinking them)
|
| 2020-01-28: |
More badly encoded MIME Content-Disposition headers
|
| 2020-01-26: |
The real world is mutable (and consequences for system design)
How big our Prometheus setup is (as of January 2020)
|
| 2020-01-25: |
A network interface losing and regaining signal can have additional effects (in Linux)
|
| 2020-01-24: |
Go compared to Python for small scale system administration scripts and tools
|
| 2020-01-23: |
What we've written in Go at work and how it came about (as of January 2020)
|
| 2020-01-22: |
Why I've come to like that Go's type inference is limited
|
| 2020-01-20: |
The value of automation having ways to shut it off (a small story)
|
| 2020-01-19: |
Python 2, Apache's mod_wsgi, and its future in Linux distributions
Why a network connection becoming writable when it succeeds makes sense
|
| 2020-01-18: |
CUPS's page log, its use of SNMP, and (probably) why CUPS PPDs turn that off
|
| 2020-01-17: |
The question of how long Python 2 will be available in Linux distributions
|
| 2020-01-15: |
How Go's net.DialContext() stops things when the context is cancelled
Stopping udev from renaming your VLAN interfaces to bad names
|
| 2020-01-13: |
We may not want to use OCSP stapling in our web servers
Link: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3
|
| 2020-01-12: |
Sorting out the dates of Python 2's 'end of life'
How I now think you want to configure Apache for OCSP stapling
|
| 2020-01-10: |
OCSP stapling and what web servers and browsers do in the face of errors
Fedora 31 has decided to allow (and have) giant process IDs (PIDs)
|
| 2020-01-08: |
Why I use both uBlock Origin and uMatrix
My Firefox addons as of Firefox '74' (the current development version)
|
| 2020-01-07: |
eBPF based tools are still a work in progress on common Linuxes
|
| 2020-01-06: |
How I move files between iOS devices and Unix machines (using SSH)
|
| 2020-01-05: |
Why I prefer the script exporter for exposing script metrics to Prometheus
|
| 2020-01-04: |
Three ways to expose script-created metrics in Prometheus
|
| 2020-01-03: |
How job control made the SIGCHLD signal useful for (BSD) Unix
|
| 2020-01-01: |
The good and bad of errno in a traditional Unix environment
|
| 2019-12-31: |
Things I've stopped using in GNU Emacs for working on Go
|
| 2019-12-30: |
A retrospective on our OmniOS ZFS-based NFS fileservers
The history and background of us using Prometheus
|
| 2019-12-29: |
Prometheus and Grafana after a year (more or less)
|
| 2019-12-28: |
Our setup of Prometheus and Grafana (as of the end of 2019)
|
| 2019-12-26: |
The Unix C library API can only be reliably used from C
|
| 2019-12-25: |
Some reasons for Go to not make system calls through the standard C library
Why udev may be trying to rename your VLAN interfaces to bad names
|
| 2019-12-23: |
The BSD and Linux approaches to development put coherence in different places
|
| 2019-12-22: |
OpenBSD has to be a BSD Unix and you couldn't duplicate it with Linux
Filenames and paths should be a unique type and not a form of strings
|
| 2019-12-20: |
My new Linux office workstation disk partitioning for the end of 2019
Splitting a mirrored ZFS pool in ZFS on Linux
|
| 2019-12-18: |
Linux kernel Security Modules (LSMs) need their own errno value
PCIe slot bandwidth can change dynamically (and very rapidly)
|
| 2019-12-17: |
Browsers and the relative size of their default monospace fonts
|
| 2019-12-16: |
Some pragmatics of blackbox and whitebox malware filtering
|
| 2019-12-15: |
Peering into the depths of (presumed) website vulnerability probing
|
| 2019-12-14: |
It's unfortunately time to move away from using '/usr/bin/python'
|
| 2019-12-13: |
Working out which of your NVMe drives is in what slot under Linux
|
| 2019-12-12: |
Linux makes your PCIe topology visible in sysfs (/sys)
|
| 2019-12-11: |
Fedora is got a good choice if long term stability and usability is a high priority
|
| 2019-12-10: |
It's a good idea to label all of the drives in your desktop
|
| 2019-12-09: |
Firefox's peculiar handling of font choice preferences
|
| 2019-12-08: |
The Go runtime scheduler's clever way of dealing with system calls
|
| 2019-12-07: |
Some important things about how PCIe works out involve BIOS magic
|
| 2019-12-06: |
PCIe bus addresses, lspci, and working out your PCIe bus topology
|
| 2019-12-05: |
Looking into your system's PCIe slot topology and PCIe lane count under Linux
|
| 2019-12-04: |
Desktop motherboards can have fewer useful PCIe slots than they seem to
|
| 2019-12-02: |
You can have Grafana tables with multiple values for a single metric (with Prometheus)
Calculating usage over time in Prometheus (and Grafana)
|
| 2019-11-30: |
Operating spam and malware filtering is ultimately a social problem
Counting the number of distinct labels in a Prometheus metric
|
| 2019-11-29: |
The problem of multiple NVMe drives in a PC desktop today
|
| 2019-11-27: |
Selecting metrics to gather mostly based on what we can use
Capturing command output in a Bourne shell variable as a brute force option
|
| 2019-11-25: |
In Prometheus, don't be afraid of high cardinality metrics if they're valuable enough
|
| 2019-11-24: |
I use unit tests partly to verify that something works in the first place
Timing durations better in Python (most of the time)
|
| 2019-11-23: |
Thinking about timeouts and exceptions in Python
|
| 2019-11-22: |
Our problem of checking if our L2TP VPN servers are actually working
|
| 2019-11-20: |
In the old days, we didn't use multiple Unixes by choice (mostly)
The fading out of multi-'architecture' Unix environments
|
| 2019-11-18: |
LiveJournal and the path to NoSQL
|
| 2019-11-17: |
It's good to make sure you have notifications of things
The operational differences between notifications and logs
|
| 2019-11-15: |
How we structure our Django web application's configuration settings
|
| 2019-11-14: |
TCP/IP and a consequence of reliable delivery guarantees
|
| 2019-11-13: |
How to make a rather obnoxiously bad web spider the easy way
My mistake in forgetting how Apache .htaccess files are checked
|
| 2019-11-11: |
An apparent hazard of removing Linux software RAID mirror devices
|
| 2019-11-10: |
Putting a footer on automated email that says what generated it
The problems with piping curl to a shell are system management ones
|
| 2019-11-08: |
I have to assume that people here can be successfully phished
|
| 2019-11-07: |
Some notes on getting email when your systemd timer services fail
Realizing that Go constants are always materialized into values
|
| 2019-11-06: |
Systemd needs official documentation on best practices
|
| 2019-11-04: |
Systemd timer units have the unfortunate practical effect of hiding errors
Many of our 'worklog' messages currently assume a lot of context
|
| 2019-11-02: |
Using personal ruleset recipes in uMatrix in Firefox
|
| 2019-11-01: |
The appeal of text templating systems for generating HTML
|
| 2019-10-31: |
Some thoughts on the pragmatics of classifying phish spam as malware
|
| 2019-10-30: |
Chrony has been working well for us (on Linux, where we use it)
|
| 2019-10-29: |
Netplan's interface naming and issues with it
|
| 2019-10-28: |
One of XHTML's practical problems was its implications for web page generation
|
| 2019-10-27: |
An interesting little glitch in how Firefox sometimes handles updates to addons
My common patterns in shell script verbosity (for sysadmin programs)
|
| 2019-10-26: |
An incorrect superstition about running commands in the Bourne shell
|
| 2019-10-24: |
Third party ClamAV signatures seem to include a lot of phish and other spam
|
| 2019-10-23: |
The DBus daemon and out of memory conditions (and systemd)
|
| 2019-10-22: |
Groups of processes are a frequent and fundamental thing in Unix
|
| 2019-10-21: |
Filesystem size limits and the complication of when errors are detected
|
| 2019-10-20: |
A small irritation with Go's crypto/tls package
|
| 2019-10-19: |
Ubuntu LTS is (probably) still the best Linux for us and many people
|
| 2019-10-18: |
My little irritation with Firefox's current handling of 'Do-Not-Track'
Remembering that Django template code is not quite your Django Python code
|
| 2019-10-16: |
Some magical weirdness in Django's HTML form classes
|
| 2019-10-15: |
The Ubuntu package roulette
|
| 2019-10-14: |
Googlebot is both quite fast and very determined to crawl your pages
|
| 2019-10-13: |
If you don't test it in your automated testers, it's broken
Magic is fine if it's all magic: why I've switched to use-package in GNU Emacs
|
| 2019-10-11: |
A YAML syntax surprise and trick in Prometheus Alertmanager configuration
|
| 2019-10-10: |
Some additional information on ZFS performance as you approach quota limits
|
| 2019-10-09: |
Limiting the size of things in a filesystem is harder than it looks
|
| 2019-10-08: |
How we implement reboot notifications when our machines reboot in Prometheus
|
| 2019-10-07: |
Why we generate alert notifications about our machines having rebooted
|
| 2019-10-06: |
Automating our 'bookable' compute servers with SLURM has created generic 'cattle' machines
|
| 2019-10-05: |
The wikitext problem with new HTML elements such as <details>
|
| 2019-10-04: |
Vim, its defaults, and the problem this presents sysadmins
|
| 2019-10-03: |
Making changes to multiple files at once in Vim
|
| 2019-10-02: |
It's useful to record changes that you tried and failed to do
|
| 2019-10-01: |
My interest in and disappointment about HTML5's new <details> element
|
| 2019-09-30: |
Using alerts as tests that guard against future errors
Link: The asymmetry of Internet identity
ZFS performance really does degrade as you approach quota limits
|
| 2019-09-29: |
Understanding when to use and not use the -F option for flock(1)
|
| 2019-09-27: |
Some field notes on imposing memory resource limits on users on Ubuntu 18.04
A file permissions and general deployment annoyance with Certbot
|
| 2019-09-25: |
It's always convenient when malware is clear about its nature (7z edition)
Our workaround for Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 failing to reliably reboot some of our servers
|
| 2019-09-24: |
How we implement per-user CPU and memory resource limits on Ubuntu
|
| 2019-09-22: |
The increasing mess of libreadline versions in Linux distributions
|
| 2019-09-21: |
Why chroot is a security feature for (anonymous) FTP
|
| 2019-09-20: |
Modernizing (a bit) some of our HTML form <input> elements
TLS server certificate verification has two parts (and some consequences)
|
| 2019-09-18: |
Firefox, DNS over HTTPS, and us
Converting a Go pointer to an integer doesn't quite do what it looks like
|
| 2019-09-17: |
Finding metrics that are missing labels in Prometheus (for alert metrics)
|
| 2019-09-16: |
The problem of 'triangular' Network Address Translation
|
| 2019-09-14: |
Some notes on the structure of Go binaries (primarily for ELF)
|
| 2019-09-13: |
Bidirectional NAT and split horizon DNS in our networking setup
|
| 2019-09-12: |
The mystery of why my Fedora 30 office workstation was booting fine
|
| 2019-09-11: |
Making your own changes to things that use Go modules
|
| 2019-09-10: |
Catching Control-C and a gotcha with shell scripts
|
| 2019-09-09: |
A safety note about using (or having) go.mod inside $GOPATH in Go 1.13
|
| 2019-09-08: |
Jumping backward and forward in GNU Emacs
|
| 2019-09-07: |
CentOS 7 and Python 3
|
| 2019-09-06: |
Programs that let you jump around should copy web browser navigation
Go modules and the problem of noticing updates to dependencies
|
| 2019-09-04: |
If you use the rarfile module, make sure you're using version 3.0 (or later)
Using Wireshark's Statistics menu to get per-host traffic volume
|
| 2019-09-02: |
Another way to do easy configuration for lots of Prometheus Blackbox checks
|
| 2019-09-01: |
Some limitations of wifi MAC address randomization
|
| 2019-08-31: |
The sorts of email attachments that we get these days have become boring
|
| 2019-08-30: |
ZFS is not a universal filesystem that is always good for all workloads
How I'm dealing with my Python indentation problem in GNU Emacs
|
| 2019-08-28: |
A wifi MAC address randomization surprise in a new Android gadget
Allowing some Alias directives to override global Redirects in Apache
|
| 2019-08-26: |
A lesson of (alert) scale we learned from a power failure
|
| 2019-08-25: |
Text UIs and the problem of discoverability
|
| 2019-08-24: |
Apache, Let's Encrypt, and site-wide reverse proxies and HTTP redirections
|
| 2019-08-23: |
What happens in ZFS when you have 4K sector disks in an ashift=9 vdev
Link: GNOME Terminal Cursor Blinking Saga
|
| 2019-08-22: |
Pruning deleted remote Git branches (manually or automatically)
|
| 2019-08-21: |
Making sense of OpenBSD 'pfctl -ss' output for firewall state tables
|
| 2019-08-20: |
Saying goodbye to Flash (in Firefox, and in my web experience)
|
| 2019-08-19: |
Go 2 Generics: contracts are now boring (and that's good)
|
| 2019-08-18: |
Early notes on using LSP-based editing in GNU Emacs for Python
|
| 2019-08-17: |
A situation where Python has undefined values
|
| 2019-08-16: |
A gotcha with Fedora 30's switch of Grub to BootLoaderSpec based configuration
Systemd and waiting until network interfaces or addresses are configured
|
| 2019-08-15: |
Getting LSP-based editing working for Go in GNU Emacs
|
| 2019-08-13: |
Changes to Go and the appearance of finality
|
| 2019-08-12: |
Linux can run out of memory without triggering the Out-Of-Memory killer
|
| 2019-08-11: |
Roughly when the Linux Out-Of-Memory killer triggers (as of mid-2019)
|
| 2019-08-10: |
One core problem with DNSSEC
|
| 2019-08-09: |
Turning off DNSSEC in my Unbound instances
Non-uniform caches are harder to make work well
|
| 2019-08-07: |
What has to happen with Unix virtual memory when you have no swap space
Rewriting my iptables rules using ipsets
|
| 2019-08-05: |
dup(2) and shared file descriptors
|
| 2019-08-04: |
Some notes on understanding how to use flock(1)
|
| 2019-08-03: |
Sharing file descriptors with child processes is a clever Unix decision
Link: ASCII table and history (Or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal?)
|
| 2019-08-02: |
If you can, you should use flock(1) for shell script locking
Getting NetworkManager to probably verify TLS certificates for 802.1x networks
|
| 2019-08-01: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 24)
|
| 2019-07-31: |
How mountd and exportfs handle NFS export permissions on Linux
Link: A program to read AMD Ryzen RAPL information on Linux
|
| 2019-07-30: |
I think it's time to explicitly set Go's $GO111MODULE environment variable
|
| 2019-07-29: |
The practical difference between CPU TDP and observed power draw illustrated
|
| 2019-07-28: |
A note on using the Go Prometheus client package to exposed labeled metrics
What I want out of my window manager
|
| 2019-07-26: |
Some things on the GUID checksum in ZFS pool uberblocks
How 'zpool import' generates its view of a pool's configuration
|
| 2019-07-24: |
I think I like systemd's DynamicUser feature (under the right circumstances)
ZFS pool imports happen in two stages of pool configuration processing
|
| 2019-07-22: |
Why file and directory operations are synchronous in NFS
|
| 2019-07-21: |
Why we're going to be using Certbot as our new Let's Encrypt client
Wireless networks have names and thus identify themselves
|
| 2019-07-19: |
Some brief views on iOS clients for Mastodon (as of mid 2019)
|
| 2019-07-18: |
Switching Let's Encrypt clients is currently quite disruptive
|
| 2019-07-17: |
Django 1.11 has a bug that causes intermittent CSRF validation failures
|
| 2019-07-16: |
Go's proposed try() will be used and that will change how code is written
|
| 2019-07-15: |
ZFS on Linux still has annoying issues with ARC size
|
| 2019-07-14: |
We're going to be separating our redundant resolving DNS servers
|
| 2019-07-13: |
Our switches can wind up in weird states after a power failure
|
| 2019-07-12: |
Browers can't feasibly stop web pages from talking to private (local) IP addresses
Reflections on almost entirely stopping using my (work) Yubikey
|
| 2019-07-10: |
I brought our Django app up using Python 3 and it mostly just worked
|
| 2019-07-09: |
Systemd services that always restart should probably set a restart delay too
|
| 2019-07-08: |
SMART drive self-tests seem potentially useful, but not too much
|
| 2019-07-07: |
Straightforward web applications are now very likely to be stable in browsers
|
| 2019-07-06: |
Clearing disk errors (or SMART complaints) for Linux software RAID arrays
|
| 2019-07-05: |
My plan for two-stage usage of Certbot when installing web server hosts
|
| 2019-07-04: |
Django's goals are probably not our goals for our web application
|
| 2019-07-03: |
Converting a variable to a single-element slice in Go via unsafe
Finding out what 32-bit x86 Linux programs your users are running
|
| 2019-07-01: |
The power of option types is in what they do to the rest of the language
|
| 2019-06-30: |
Understanding why 'root window' X under Wayland may matter
|
| 2019-06-29: |
Being realistic about what we're going to do with our Django app
|
| 2019-06-28: |
Using Prometheus's statsd exporter to let scripts make metrics updates
|
| 2019-06-27: |
Our last OmniOS fileserver is now out of production (and service)
|
| 2019-06-26: |
The death watch for the X Window System (aka X11) has probably started
A hazard of our old version of OmniOS: sometimes powering off doesn't
|
| 2019-06-24: |
The convenience (for me) of people writing commands in Python
|
| 2019-06-23: |
What it takes to run a 32-bit x86 program on a 64-bit x86 Linux system
|
| 2019-06-22: |
Google Groups entirely ignores SMTP time rejections
We get a certain amount of SMTP MAIL FROM's in UTF-8 with odd characters
|
| 2019-06-21: |
One of the things a metrics system does is handle state for you
|
| 2019-06-19: |
How Bash decides it's being invoked through sshd and sources your .bashrc
A Let's Encrypt client feature I always want for easy standard deployment
|
| 2019-06-17: |
Sometimes, the problem is in a system's BIOS
My Mastodon remark about tiling window managers
|
| 2019-06-16: |
Firefox and my views on the tradeoffs of using DNS over HTTPS
|
| 2019-06-15: |
Some notes on Intel's CPUID and how to get it for your CPUs
|
| 2019-06-14: |
Intel's approach to naming Xeon CPUs is pretty annoying
Intel's MDS issues have now made some old servers almost completely useless to us
|
| 2019-06-12: |
My weird problem with the Fedora 29 version of Firefox 67
An interesting Fedora 29 DNF update loop with the createrepo package
|
| 2019-06-10: |
Keeping your past checklists doesn't help unless you can find them again
|
| 2019-06-09: |
Go recognizes and specially compiles some but not all infinite loops
|
| 2019-06-08: |
Hardware Security Modules are just boxes running opaque and probably flawed software
Our current approach for updating things like build instructions
|
| 2019-06-06: |
Feed readers and their interpretation of the Atom 'title' element
|
| 2019-06-05: |
The HTML <pre> element doesn't do very much
Go channels work best for unidirectional communication, not things with replies
|
| 2019-06-03: |
Almost all of our OmniOS machines are now out of production
|
| 2019-06-02: |
Exploring the start time of Prometheus alerts via ALERTS_FOR_STATE
I haven't customized my Vim setup and I'm not sure I should try to (yet)
|
| 2019-05-31: |
Some things on how ZFS dnode object IDs are allocated (which is not sequentially)
Some things about where icons for modern X applications come from
|
| 2019-05-30: |
Conditional expressions in any form are an attractive thing
|
| 2019-05-28: |
Distribution packaging of software needs to be informed (and useful)
An interesting report on newly used domain names and their usage in spam
|
| 2019-05-27: |
Something that Linux distributions should not do when packaging things
|
| 2019-05-26: |
Why I no longer have strong feelings about changes to Python
|
| 2019-05-25: |
Blocking JavaScript by default is not an easy path
|
| 2019-05-24: |
The problem of paying too much attention to our dashboards
|
| 2019-05-23: |
I will probably never give my shell dotfiles the major reform they could use
On programming languages belonging (or not) to their community
|
| 2019-05-22: |
Go is Google's language, not ours
|
| 2019-05-20: |
Understanding how to pull in labels from other metrics in Prometheus
|
| 2019-05-19: |
DKIM signed email as a signal (of something)
|
| 2019-05-18: |
Binding keys to actions in xterm, and my bindings as an example
|
| 2019-05-17: |
My new favorite tool for looking at TLS things is certigo
One of our costs of using OmniOS was not having 10G networking
|
| 2019-05-16: |
Go has no type for types in the language
|
| 2019-05-15: |
An infrequent odd kernel panic on our Ubuntu 18.04 fileservers
|
| 2019-05-13: |
Fixing Alpine to work over NFS on Ubuntu 18.04 (and probably other modern Linuxes)
|
| 2019-05-12: |
What we'll want in a new Let's Encrypt client
Committed address space versus active anonymous pages in Linux: a mystery
|
| 2019-05-10: |
Some thoughts on Red Hat Enterprise 8 including Python 2 and what it means
Firefox versus Chrome (my 2019 view)
|
| 2019-05-08: |
Some general things and views on DNS over HTTPS
A Linux machine with a strict overcommit limit can still trigger the OOM killer
|
| 2019-05-07: |
Some weird and dubious syndication feed fetching from SBL-listed IPs
|
| 2019-05-05: |
TLS certificate rollover outside of the web is complex and tangled
What usually identifies an intermediate or root TLS certificate
|
| 2019-05-03: |
In Go, unsafe type conversions are still garbage collection safe
Some implications of using offset instead of delta() in Prometheus
|
| 2019-05-01: |
One of my problems with YAML is its sheer complexity
|
| 2019-04-30: |
My problem with YAML's use of whitespace
|
| 2019-04-29: |
Notifications and interruptions, and my view on them
|
| 2019-04-28: |
A gotcha with stale metrics and *_over_time() in Prometheus
|
| 2019-04-27: |
Some useful features of (GNU) date for things like time conversion
|
| 2019-04-26: |
Brief notes on making Prometheus instant queries with curl
Various aspects of Python made debugging my tarfile problem unusual
|
| 2019-04-24: |
How we're making updated versions of a file rapidly visible on our Linux NFS clients
The appeal of using plain HTML pages
|
| 2019-04-22: |
Go 2 Generics: The usefulness of requiring minimal contracts
You might as well get an x86 CPU now, despite Meltdown and its friends
|
| 2019-04-21: |
My view on upgrading Prometheus (and Grafana) on an ongoing basis
|
| 2019-04-19: |
V7 Unix programs are often not written the way you would expect
Links: A Practitioner's Guide to System Dashboard Design (with a bonus)
|
| 2019-04-18: |
One reason ed(1) was a good editor back in the days of V7 Unix
A pattern for dealing with missing metrics in Prometheus in simple cases
|
| 2019-04-17: |
Private browsing mode versus a browser set to keep nothing on exit
|
| 2019-04-15: |
How Linux starts non-system software RAID arrays during boot under systemd
|
| 2019-04-14: |
A VPN for me but not you: a surprise when tethering to my phone
|
| 2019-04-13: |
Remembering that Prometheus expressions act as filters
WireGuard was pleasantly easy to get working behind a NAT (or several)
|
| 2019-04-12: |
Getting (and capturing) spam can sometimes be useful to see what's in it
|
| 2019-04-10: |
The tarfile module is too generous about what is considered a tar file
A Git tool that I'd like and how I probably use Git differently from most people
|
| 2019-04-08: |
An example of a situation where Go interfaces can't substitute for generics
|
| 2019-04-07: |
Why selecting times is still useful even for dashboards that are about right now
A ZFS resilver can be almost as good as a scrub, but not quite
|
| 2019-04-05: |
I won't be trying out ZFS's new TRIM support for a while
It's always DNS (a story of our circular dependency)
|
| 2019-04-03: |
A sign of people's fading belief in RSS syndication
NVMe and an interesting technology change
|
| 2019-04-01: |
Our plan for handling TRIM'ing our ZFS fileserver SSDs
|
| 2019-03-31: |
Our likely ZFS fileserver upgrade plans (as of March 2019)
Erasing SSDs with blkdiscard (on Linux)
|
| 2019-03-29: |
Our current approach for significantly upgrading or modifying servers
My NVMe versus SSD uncertainty (and hesitation)
|
| 2019-03-27: |
A new and exciting failure mode for Linux UEFI booting
|
| 2019-03-26: |
Drifting away from OmniOS (CE)
|
| 2019-03-25: |
The mystery of my desktop that locks up when it gets too cold
|
| 2019-03-24: |
Prometheus's delta() function can be inferior to subtraction with offset
Link: What has your microcode done for you lately?
A bit more on ZFS's per-pool performance statistics
|
| 2019-03-22: |
Sometimes the simplest version of a graph is a text table
|
| 2019-03-21: |
What sorts of good email attachments our users get (March 2019 edition)
|
| 2019-03-20: |
The types of attachments we see in malware email (March 2019 edition)
|
| 2019-03-19: |
ZFS Encryption is still under development (as of March 2019)
|
| 2019-03-18: |
Prometheus subqueries pick time points in a surprising way
|
| 2019-03-17: |
Going from a bound instance method to its class instance in Python
|
| 2019-03-16: |
Callable class instances versus closures in Python
Staying away from Google Chrome after six months or so
|
| 2019-03-14: |
The plague of 'you've logged in to our site again' notification emails
|
| 2019-03-13: |
Peculiarities about Unix's statfs() or statvfs() API
|
| 2019-03-12: |
An easy optimization for restricted multi-metric queries in Prometheus
|
| 2019-03-11: |
Testing Prometheus alert conditions through subqueries
|
| 2019-03-10: |
What the default query step is for Prometheus subqueries
Turning something into a script encourages improving it
|
| 2019-03-08: |
Exploring how and why interior pointers in Go keep entire objects alive
|
| 2019-03-07: |
Exploring the mild oddity that Unix pipes are buffered
Our problem with Netplan and routes on Ubuntu 18.04
|
| 2019-03-06: |
Using Prometheus subqueries to look for spikes in rates
|
| 2019-03-04: |
A surprisingly arcane little Unix shell pipeline example
|
| 2019-03-03: |
Understanding a change often requires understanding how the code behaves
Really understanding diffs requires knowing their context too
|
| 2019-03-01: |
What you get when you do a DNS A record lookup for a CNAME'd name
|
| 2019-02-28: |
Taking advantage of the Linux kernel NFS server's group membership cache
|
| 2019-02-27: |
How to see and flush the Linux kernel NFS server's group membership cache
Using Prometheus subqueries to do calculations over time ranges
|
| 2019-02-25: |
ntpdate has a surprising restriction on what it will sync to
Link: Vim anti-patterns
|
| 2019-02-24: |
Process states from /proc/[pid]/stat versus /proc/stat's running and blocked numbers
The modern danger of locales when you combine sort and cron
|
| 2019-02-22: |
Using default function arguments to avoid creating a class
|
| 2019-02-21: |
An advantage of tablets and two-in-one devices over small laptops
|
| 2019-02-20: |
What /proc/[pid]/stat's process state means and where it comes from
The cliffs in the way of adding tests to our Django web app
|
| 2019-02-18: |
When cloning git repos, things go faster if you start from a good base
|
| 2019-02-17: |
Why I like middle mouse button paste in xterm so much
Some notes on heatmaps and histograms in Prometheus and Grafana
|
| 2019-02-15: |
Accumulating a separated list in the Bourne shell
|
| 2019-02-14: |
A pleasant surprise with a Thunderbolt 3 10G-T Ethernet adapter
|
| 2019-02-13: |
An unpleasant surprise with part of Apache's AllowOverride directive
|
| 2019-02-12: |
Using grep with /dev/null, an old Unix trick
|
| 2019-02-11: |
Thinking about the merits of 'universal' URL structures
|
| 2019-02-10: |
Open protocols can evolve fast if they're willing to break other people
|
| 2019-02-09: |
'Scanned' versus 'issued' numbers for ZFS scrubs (and resilvers)
|
| 2019-02-08: |
Making more use of keyboard control over window position and size
|
| 2019-02-07: |
A touchpad is not a mouse, or at least not a good one
|
| 2019-02-06: |
Using a single git repo to compare things between two upstreams
|
| 2019-02-05: |
A problem with strict memory overcommit in practice
|
| 2019-02-04: |
Hand-building an updated upstream kernel module for your (Fedora) kernel
|
| 2019-02-03: |
My temptation of getting a personal laptop
|
| 2019-02-02: |
A little appreciation for Vim's 'g' command
|
| 2019-02-01: |
A bit of Sun's history that still lingers on in Illumos
|
| 2019-01-31: |
What getopt package I use for option handling in my Go programs
|
| 2019-01-30: |
ZFS On Linux's kernel modules issues are not like NVidia's
How having a metrics system centralized information and got me to check it
|
| 2019-01-28: |
Go 2 Generics: some features of contracts that I like
The potential risk to ZFS created by the shift in its userbase
|
| 2019-01-27: |
How to handle Unicode character decoding errors depends on your goals
|
| 2019-01-25: |
A piece of email malware that wanted to make sure we rejected it
The Linux kernel's pstore error log capturing system, and ACPI ERST
|
| 2019-01-23: |
Consider setting your Linux servers to reboot on kernel problems
A little surprise with Prometheus scrape intervals, timeouts, and alerts
|
| 2019-01-22: |
Things you can do to make your Linux servers reboot on kernel problems
|
| 2019-01-21: |
Two annoyances I have with Python's imaplib module
|
| 2019-01-20: |
A few notes on using SSL in Python 3 client programs
|
| 2019-01-19: |
A surprise potential gotcha with sharenfs in ZFS on Linux
|
| 2019-01-18: |
Linux CPU numbers are not necessarily contiguous
|
| 2019-01-17: |
Why C uninitialized global variables have an initial value of zero
|
| 2019-01-16: |
Perhaps you no longer want to force a server-preferred TLS cipher order on clients
|
| 2019-01-14: |
Why your fresh new memory pages are zero-filled
|
| 2019-01-13: |
Two views of ZFS's GPL-incompatibility and the Linux kernel
The risk that comes from ZFS on Linux not being GPL-compatible
Even thinking about spam makes me angry
|
| 2019-01-12: |
I have somewhat mixed feelings about Python 3's socket module errors
|
| 2019-01-11: |
A new drawback of using my custom-compiled Firefox
|
| 2019-01-10: |
Why I still have a custom-compiled Firefox (early 2019 edition)
|
| 2019-01-09: |
On right and wrong ways to harvest system-level performance stats
|
| 2019-01-08: |
Link: The IOCCC 2018 "Best of show" program
|
| 2019-01-07: |
Daemons and the pragmatics of unexpected error values from system calls
|
| 2019-01-06: |
accept(2)'s problem of trying to return two different sorts of errors
Linux network-scripts being deprecated is a problem for my home PPPoE link
|
| 2019-01-05: |
Some things on ZFS's per-pool performance statistics
|
| 2019-01-04: |
Planning ahead in documentation worked out for us
|
| 2019-01-02: |
You shouldn't allow Firefox to recommend things to you any more
How I get a copy of the Ubuntu kernel source code (as of Ubuntu 18.04)
|
| 2018-12-31: |
Our Linux ZFS fileservers work much like to our OmniOS ones
Thinking about DWiki's Python 3 Unicode issues
|
| 2018-12-30: |
Our third generation ZFS fileservers and their setup
|
| 2018-12-28: |
An odd MIME Content-Disposition or two
|
| 2018-12-27: |
Having metrics has taught me I didn't really know how our systems behave
The many return values of read() (plus some other cases)
|
| 2018-12-26: |
The problem of screenshots when you have a HiDPI display
|
| 2018-12-24: |
Some notes on ZFS prefetch related stats
Plaintext parts of email are fading away (in spam and non-spam)
|
| 2018-12-23: |
How I wound up finding a bug in GNU Tar
|
| 2018-12-21: |
Moving to Fedora 29 has not been one of the smooth upgrades for me
Working around an irritating recent XTerm change in behavior
|
| 2018-12-20: |
FreeBSD ZFS will be changing to be based on ZFS on Linux
|
| 2018-12-19: |
My unusual Linux setup of an untagged network and tagged VLANs on the same interface
|
| 2018-12-17: |
My current trick for keeping reasonably ready virtual machine images
Exploring casual questions with our new metrics system
|
| 2018-12-16: |
The Go 2 Error Handling proposal will likely lead to more use of error in return types
|
| 2018-12-15: |
Python 3's approach to filenames and arguments is pragmatically right
|
| 2018-12-14: |
Link: Everything you should know about certificates and PKI but are too afraid to ask
Why our Grafana URLs always require HTTP Basic Authentication
|
| 2018-12-13: |
Some new-to-me features in POSIX (or Single Unix Specification) Bourne shells
|
| 2018-12-12: |
One situation where you absolutely can't use irate() in Prometheus
|
| 2018-12-10: |
Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
A spate of somewhat alarming flaky SMART errors on Crucial MX500 SSDs
|
| 2018-12-09: |
Firefox, WebExtensions, and Content Security Policies
|
| 2018-12-08: |
Link: HTTPS in the real world
|
| 2018-12-07: |
Why we like HTTP Basic Authentication in Apache so much
Modern Bourne shell arithmetic is pretty pleasant
|
| 2018-12-05: |
Some basic ZFS ARC statistics and prefetching
The brute force cron-based way of flexibly timed repeated alerts
|
| 2018-12-03: |
Wget is not welcome here any more (sort of)
Linux disk IO stats in Prometheus
|
| 2018-12-02: |
Checking to see if a process is alive (on Linux)
|
| 2018-11-30: |
Today I (re-)learned that top's output can be quietly system dependent
I've learned that sometimes the right way to show information is a simple one
|
| 2018-11-29: |
Go 2 Generics: Interfaces are not the right model for type constraints
|
| 2018-11-28: |
Go 2 Generics: A way to make contracts more readable for people (if not programs)
|
| 2018-11-26: |
(Open)SSH quiet connection disconnects in theory and in practice
|
| 2018-11-25: |
Firefox's middle-click behavior on HTML links on Linux
How we monitor our Prometheus setup itself
|
| 2018-11-23: |
Some Linux disk IO stats you can calculate from kernel information
Qualified praise for the Linux ss program
|
| 2018-11-21: |
Some views on more flexible (Illumos) kernel crash dumps
What I really miss when I don't have X across the network
|
| 2018-11-20: |
When Prometheus Alertmanager will tell you about resolved alerts
|
| 2018-11-18: |
Old zombie Linux distribution versions aren't really doing you any favours
Some notes about kernel crash dumps in Illumos
|
| 2018-11-16: |
Restisting the temptation to rely on Ubuntu for Django 1.11
Go 2 Generics: Contracts are too clever
|
| 2018-11-14: |
Linux iptables compared to OpenBSD PF (through a real example)
|
| 2018-11-13: |
Our pragmatic attachment to OpenBSD PF for our firewall needs
|
| 2018-11-12: |
What Python 3 versions I can use (November 2018 edition)
|
| 2018-11-11: |
Easy configuration for lots of Prometheus Blackbox checks
The needs of Version Control Systems conflict with capturing all metadata
OpenSSH 7.9's new key revocation support is welcome but can't be a full fix
|
| 2018-11-10: |
Why Prometheus turns out not be our ideal alerting system
Character by character TTY input in Unix, then and now
|
| 2018-11-09: |
Getting CPU utilization breakdowns efficiently in Prometheus
|
| 2018-11-08: |
The future of our homedir-based mail server system design
|
| 2018-11-07: |
What email messages to not send autoreplies to (late 2018 edition)
|
| 2018-11-06: |
Our self-serve system for 'vacation' autoreplies and its surprising advantage
|
| 2018-11-05: |
rate() versus irate() in Prometheus (and Grafana)
|
| 2018-11-04: |
DKIM provides sender attribution (for both spam and not necessarily spam)
My view on Debian versus Ubuntu LTS for us today
|
| 2018-11-02: |
Metadata that you can't commit into a VCS is a mistake (for file based websites)
|
| 2018-11-01: |
In Linux, hitting a strict overcommit limit doesn't trigger the OOM killer
|
| 2018-10-31: |
Do I feel uncertain about CentOS's future now? Yes, a bit
OpenSSH has broader key revocation than I thought
|
| 2018-10-29: |
Shooting myself in the foot by cargo-culting Apache configuration bits
|
| 2018-10-28: |
How I'm visualizing health check history in Grafana
Link: HiDPI on dual 4K monitors with Linux
The obviousness of inheritance blinded me to the right solution
|
| 2018-10-26: |
What 'dependency' means in Unix init systems is underspecified
|
| 2018-10-25: |
I should always give my Python classes a __str__ method
|
| 2018-10-24: |
You can sort of use zdb as a substitute for a proper ZFS fsck
|
| 2018-10-23: |
ZFS scrubs check (much) less than you probably think they do
|
| 2018-10-22: |
Some DKIM usage statistics from our recent inbound email (October 2018 edition)
Using group_* vector matching in Prometheus for database lookups
|
| 2018-10-21: |
Some tradeoffs of having a Certificate Authority in your model
|
| 2018-10-20: |
The original Unix ed(1) didn't load files being edited into memory
|
| 2018-10-18: |
Some things on delays and timings for Prometheus alerts
Link: Vectorized Emulation [of CPUs and virtual machines]
Why you should be willing to believe that ed(1) is a good editor
|
| 2018-10-17: |
When metrics disappear on updates with Prometheus Pushgateway
|
| 2018-10-16: |
Quickly bashing together little utilities with Python is nice
|
| 2018-10-15: |
The external delivery delays we see on our central mail machine
Garbage collection and the underappreciated power of good enough
|
| 2018-10-13: |
Getting a CPU utilization breakdown in Prometheus's query language, PromQL
How Prometheus's query steps (aka query resolution) work
|
| 2018-10-12: |
My unusual use for Firefox's Private Browsing mode
|
| 2018-10-11: |
Some notes on Prometheus's Blackbox exporter
|
| 2018-10-10: |
Even systemd services and dependencies are not self-documenting
|
| 2018-10-09: |
Something systemd is missing for diagnosing oddly slow boots
|
| 2018-10-07: |
It's good to check systemd for new boot-time things every so often
|
| 2018-10-06: |
A deep dive into the OS memory use of a simple Go program
Go basically never frees heap memory back to the operating system
|
| 2018-10-05: |
My non-approach to password management tools
|
| 2018-10-03: |
Thinking about what we want to be alerted about
|
| 2018-10-02: |
Thinking about what we probably want for monitoring, metrics, etc
An irritating limitation or two of addons in Firefox Quantum
|
| 2018-09-30: |
My Firefox addons as of Firefox '64' (the current development version)
Why updating my Fedora kernels is a complicated multi-step affair
|
| 2018-09-28: |
Addressable values in Go (and unaddressable ones too)
Using a very old ZFS filesystem can give you a kernel panic on Linux
|
| 2018-09-27: |
Learning about Go's unaddressable values and slicing
|
| 2018-09-25: |
A problem with unmounting FUSE mount points that are on NFS filesystems
|
| 2018-09-24: |
Why I don't set master passwords in programs
Walking away from Google Chrome
|
| 2018-09-22: |
The ed(1) command in the Single Unix Specification (and the SVID)
Some differences between various versions of ed(1)
|
| 2018-09-21: |
Your databases always have a schema
Why I mostly don't use ed(1) for non-interactive edits in scripts
|
| 2018-09-20: |
Ubuntu pretty much is the 'universe' repository for us
|
| 2018-09-19: |
The Extended Validation TLS certificate endgame is here (to my surprise)
|
| 2018-09-17: |
Python 3 supports not churning memory on IO
The importance of explicitly and clearly specifying things
|
| 2018-09-16: |
CPython has a fairly strongly predictable runtime, which can be handy
|
| 2018-09-15: |
How to use uBlock Origin to block Javascript by default
|
| 2018-09-14: |
How you migrate ZFS filesystems matters
|
| 2018-09-13: |
I don't like getters and setters and prefer direct field access
|
| 2018-09-12: |
A surprise discovery about procmail (and wondering about what next)
|
| 2018-09-11: |
The Linux kernel's internals showing through in the specifics of an NFS bug
|
| 2018-09-09: |
Why I don't think browsers will ever standardize how 'Reader Mode' works
Cookie management models in Firefox Quantum in practice
|
| 2018-09-07: |
My view of the current state of Go's dependency management (as of Go 1.11)
I've slowly been improving my web experience by trusting uMatrix more
|
| 2018-09-06: |
Our future IPv6 access control problems due to non-DHCP6 machines
|
| 2018-09-04: |
Some views on the Go 2 Error Inspection early draft proposal
ZFS quietly discards all-zero blocks, but only sometimes
|
| 2018-09-02: |
Link: "The History of a Security Hole" (in various *BSD kernels)
An extravagant and dense piece of malware-laden email
If one phish spam doesn't succeed, maybe another will
NFS directory reading and directory file type information
|
| 2018-08-31: |
Link: A deep dive into the Go memory allocator
Configurations can quietly drift away from working over time, illustrated
Making Ubuntu bug reports seems to be useless (or pointless)
|
| 2018-08-29: |
Our problem with (Amanda) backups of many files, especially incrementals
How I recently used vendoring in Go
|
| 2018-08-28: |
An illustration of why it's hard to port outside code into the Linux kernel
|
| 2018-08-26: |
A little bit of the one-time MacOS version still lingers in ZFS
How ZFS maintains file type information in directories
|
| 2018-08-25: |
The history of file type information being available in Unix directories
|
| 2018-08-24: |
Incremental development in Python versus actual tests
|
| 2018-08-23: |
It's time for me to buckle down and add tests to our Django web app
|
| 2018-08-22: |
Why ed(1) is not a good editor today
|
| 2018-08-20: |
Explicit manipulation versus indirect manipulation UIs
It's worth testing that obvious things actually do work
|
| 2018-08-19: |
Why I'm mostly not interest in exploring new fonts (on Unix)
|
| 2018-08-17: |
Some malware apparently believes in covering its bases
Some Firefox addons I'm experimenting with (as of Firefox 62 or so)
|
| 2018-08-16: |
It matters where (or when) your programs ask questions
|
| 2018-08-14: |
Go's net package doesn't have opaque errors, just undocumented ones
Our problem with HTTPS and user-created content
|
| 2018-08-12: |
The evolution of our account creation script
A recent spate of ZIP attachments with everything
|
| 2018-08-10: |
Fetching really new Fedora packages with Bodhi
The benefits of driving automation through cron
One simple general pattern for making sure things are alive
|
| 2018-08-08: |
Systemd's DynamicUser feature is (currently) dangerous
A timesyncd total failure and systemd's complete lack of debugability
|
| 2018-08-06: |
Link: Where Vim Came From
Linux's /dev/disk/by-path names for disks change over time
|
| 2018-08-05: |
Some more notes on Firefox 63 and perhaps later media autoplay settings
Why email is often not as good as modern communication protocols
|
| 2018-08-03: |
Firefox now implements its remote control partly over D-Bus
How I want to use Go's versioned modules
|
| 2018-08-02: |
Ubuntu 18.04's problem with Amanda's amrecover
|
| 2018-07-31: |
The hidden danger of using rsync to copy files instead of cp
|
| 2018-07-30: |
My own configuration files don't have to be dotfiles in $HOME
Being reminded that an obvious problem isn't necessarily obvious
|
| 2018-07-29: |
Our ZFS fileservers aren't happy when you do NFS writes to a full filesystem
|
| 2018-07-28: |
Word-boundary regexp searches are what I usually want
|
| 2018-07-27: |
Today I saw a spammer parasite itself on another spammer (probably)
|
| 2018-07-25: |
One advantage of Go modules will be less mess in $HOME/go/src
|
| 2018-07-24: |
I doubt Chrome's new 'not secure' warning about HTTP sites will change much (at least right away)
|
| 2018-07-23: |
Some notes on lifting Python 2 code into Python 3 code
The irritatingly many executable formats of Windows
|
| 2018-07-22: |
The problem with some non-HiDPI aware applications (is that they're very small)
|
| 2018-07-21: |
How we're handling NFS exports for our ZFS on Linux systems
|
| 2018-07-20: |
Linux's NFS exports permissions model compared to Illumos's
|
| 2018-07-19: |
Sometimes it actually is a Linux kernel bug
|
| 2018-07-17: |
Some things on Illumos NFS export permissions
|
| 2018-07-16: |
Why people are probably going to keep using today's Unixes
|
| 2018-07-15: |
When I'll probably be able to use Python assignment expressions
Understanding ZFS System Attributes
|
| 2018-07-14: |
The challenge of storing file attributes on disk
|
| 2018-07-13: |
ZFS on Linux's sharenfs problem (of what you can and can't put in it)
|
| 2018-07-11: |
You should probably write down what your math actually means
|
| 2018-07-10: |
Some thoughts on performance shifts in moving from an iSCSI SAN to local SSDs
Remembering that Python lists can use tuples as the sort keys
|
| 2018-07-08: |
TLS Certificate Authorities and 'trust'
We've decided to write our future Python tools in Python 3
|
| 2018-07-06: |
Having your SSH server on an alternate port provides no extra security today
I'm seeing occasional mysterious POST requests without Content-Types
|
| 2018-07-04: |
How and why we sell storage to people here
The hardware and basic setup for our third generation of ZFS fileservers
|
| 2018-07-03: |
The history of our custom NFS mount authorization system (or some of it)
|
| 2018-07-01: |
Understanding the first imperative of a commercial Certificate Authority
|
| 2018-06-30: |
My interesting experience with rapid repeated PID rollover on Linux
|
| 2018-06-29: |
What 'PID rollover' is on Unix systems
How ZFS makes things like 'zfs diff' report filenames efficiently
|
| 2018-06-27: |
My Ryzen-based Linux office machine appears to finally be stable
I think it's still reasonable to run personal servers on the Internet
|
| 2018-06-25: |
Twitter probably isn't for you or me any more
|
| 2018-06-24: |
What ZFS block pointers are and what's in them
A broad overview of how ZFS is structured on disk
|
| 2018-06-22: |
When you make changes, ZFS updates much less stuff than I thought
Running servers (and services) well is not trivial
|
| 2018-06-20: |
Revising my view on Python 3 for new code again: you should use it
The time to be compatible with both Python 2 and Python 3 is past
|
| 2018-06-18: |
Getting Xorg to let you terminate the X server with Ctrl + Alt + Backspace
|
| 2018-06-17: |
The history of terminating the X server with Ctrl + Alt + Backspace
A broad overview of how modern Linux systems boot
|
| 2018-06-16: |
The 'on premise' versus 'off premise' approach to environments
|
| 2018-06-15: |
Default X resources are host specific (which I forgot today)
|
| 2018-06-14: |
Clearing cached HTTP redirections or HSTS status in Firefox
|
| 2018-06-13: |
Link: A Child’s Garden of Inter-Service Authentication Schemes
Link: About the memory management in the Bourne shell
The mess Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has made of libreadline
|
| 2018-06-11: |
A website's design shows its actual priorities
|
| 2018-06-10: |
People receiving email don't feel it should be their job to stop spam
|
| 2018-06-09: |
What ZFS messages about 'permanent errors in <0x95>:<0x0>' mean
How to run a mail sending service that will probably never send spam
|
| 2018-06-08: |
Networks form through usage and must be maintained through it
|
| 2018-06-07: |
The history of Unix's confusing set of low-level ways to allocate memory
|
| 2018-06-06: |
The downsides of processing files using too large a buffer size
|
| 2018-06-04: |
The superficial versus deep appeal of ZFS
What I use Github for and how I feel about it
|
| 2018-06-03: |
Why I believe that HTTPS-only JavaScript APIs make sense
|
| 2018-06-02: |
Intel versus AMD for me (in 2018)
|
| 2018-05-31: |
What is the long term future for Extended Validation TLS certificates?
Extended Validation TLS certificates are basically invisible
|
| 2018-05-30: |
Taking over program names in Linux is generally hard
|
| 2018-05-28: |
An incomplete list of reasons why I force-quit iOS apps
|
| 2018-05-27: |
ZFS pushes file renamings and other metadata changes to disk quite promptly
Most modern web spiders are parasites
|
| 2018-05-25: |
Some notes on Go's runtime.KeepAlive() function
There's real reasons for Linux to replace ifconfig, netstat, et al
|
| 2018-05-24: |
Registering for things on the Internet is dangerous these days
|
| 2018-05-23: |
Almost no one wants to run their own infrastructure
|
| 2018-05-21: |
Bad versions of packages in the context of minimal version selection
|
| 2018-05-20: |
'Minimal version selection' accepts that semantic versioning is fallible
Modern CPU power usage varies unpredictably based on what you're doing
|
| 2018-05-18: |
ZFS spare-N spare vdevs in your pool are mirror vdevs
How I usually divide up NFS (operation) metrics
|
| 2018-05-17: |
I'm worried about Wayland but there's not much I can do about it
|
| 2018-05-16: |
How you run out of inodes on an extN filesystem (on Linux)
|
| 2018-05-15: |
I have a boring desktop and I think I'm okay with that
|
| 2018-05-13: |
My GDPR pessimism
|
| 2018-05-12: |
ZFS on Linux's development version now has much better pool recovery for damaged pools
Sorting out some of my current views on operator overloading in general
|
| 2018-05-11: |
Notice to web spiders: an email address in your user-agent isn't good enough
|
| 2018-05-10: |
Python modules use operator overloading in two different ways
|
| 2018-05-09: |
Yubico fails to care that people give you email addresses for specific purposes
|
| 2018-05-08: |
How we're going to be doing custom NFS mount authorization on Linux
|
| 2018-05-07: |
One reason why Python doesn't let you overload the boolean AND and OR operations
|
| 2018-05-06: |
Firefox turns out to need some degree of 'autoplay' support
|
| 2018-05-05: |
Modern Unix GUIs now need to talk to at least one C library
|
| 2018-05-04: |
Why you can't put zero bytes in Unix command line arguments
|
| 2018-05-03: |
Using grep to hunt around for null bytes in text files
|
| 2018-05-02: |
An interaction of low ZFS recordsize, compression, and advanced format disks
|
| 2018-04-30: |
You probably need to think about how to handle core dumps on modern Linux servers
Microsoft's Bingbot crawler is on a relative rampage here
|
| 2018-04-29: |
My new 4K HiDPI display really does make a visible difference
|
| 2018-04-28: |
What sorts of good email attachments our users get (April 2018 edition)
|
| 2018-04-27: |
Some notes on Firefox's current media autoplay settings
|
| 2018-04-26: |
The shifting goals of our custom NFS mount authorization system
|
| 2018-04-25: |
An implementation difference in NSS netgroups between Linux and Solaris
|
| 2018-04-24: |
What the core practical problems with HiDPI seem to be on Linux
|
| 2018-04-23: |
ZFS's recordsize as an honest way of keeping checksum overhead down
|
| 2018-04-22: |
Thinking about why ZFS only does IO in recordsize blocks, even random IO
|
| 2018-04-20: |
The increasingly surprising limits to the speed of our Amanda backups
Spam from Yahoo Groups has quietly disappeared
|
| 2018-04-18: |
The sensible way to use Bourne shell 'here documents' in pipelines
A CPU's TDP is a misleading headline number
|
| 2018-04-17: |
Link: Parsing: a timeline
Go and the pragmatic problems of having a Python-like with statement
|
| 2018-04-16: |
Some notes and issues from trying out urxvt as an xterm replacement
|
| 2018-04-15: |
The unfortunate configuration choice Grub2 makes in UEFI configurations
|
| 2018-04-13: |
For the first time, my home PC has no expansion cards
A learning experience about the performance of our IMAP server
|
| 2018-04-12: |
I'm hoping that RHEL 8's decision on Python 2 isn't Ubuntu 20.04's decision
|
| 2018-04-10: |
Our real problem with a removal of Python 2 is likely to be our users
|
| 2018-04-09: |
Power consumption numbers for my 2018 home and work machines
|
| 2018-04-08: |
The interesting question of whether Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will include Python 2
A learning experience with iOS's fingerprint recognition
|
| 2018-04-07: |
Some numbers for how well various compressors do with our /var/mail backup
|
| 2018-04-06: |
Using Go finalizers can be a better option than not using them
|
| 2018-04-05: |
Switching over to Firefox Quantum was relatively painless
|
| 2018-04-04: |
Today's learning experience is that gzip is not fast
|
| 2018-04-03: |
Sorting out my systemd mistake with a script-based service unit
|
| 2018-04-02: |
Link: Closing the Loop: The Importance of External Engagement in Computer Science Research
I've retired my filtering HTTP proxy
|
| 2018-03-31: |
Using a local database to get consistent device names is a bad idea
My new Linux home machine for 2018
|
| 2018-03-30: |
My current set of Firefox Quantum (57+) addons
Sometimes, not trying to reject some sort of spam is the right answer
|
| 2018-03-29: |
The problem with Linux's 'predictable network interface names'
|
| 2018-03-28: |
The correlation between Spamhaus Zen listings and attachment types (March 2018 edition)
|
| 2018-03-27: |
My uncertainties around X drivers for modern Intel integrated graphics
|
| 2018-03-26: |
xprt: data for NFS mounts in /proc/self/mountstats is per-fileserver, not per-mount
|
| 2018-03-25: |
Our revised Dovecot IMAP configuration migration plans (and processes)
|
| 2018-03-24: |
Our current ugly hacks to Dovecot to help mitigate our IMAP problems
|
| 2018-03-23: |
Some things about Dovecot, its index files, and the IMAP LIST command
|
| 2018-03-22: |
Why seeing what current attributes a Python object has is hard
|
| 2018-03-21: |
You probably don't want to run Firefox Nightly any more
|
| 2018-03-20: |
Python and the 'bags of unstructured data' approach
|
| 2018-03-19: |
Some exciting ZFS features that are in OmniOS CE's (near) future
|
| 2018-03-18: |
Why I use Facebook (a story of web development)
|
| 2018-03-17: |
Much better ZFS pool recovery is coming (in open source ZFS)
|
| 2018-03-16: |
Wrestling with metrics to get meaningful, useful ones
|
| 2018-03-14: |
What I think I want out of a hypothetical nfsiotop for Linux
Why Let's Encrypt's short certificate lifetimes are a great thing
|
| 2018-03-12: |
A spammer misses a glorious opportunity
Linux is good at exposing the truth of how motherboards are wired
|
| 2018-03-11: |
A bad web scraper operating out of OVH IP address space
|
| 2018-03-09: |
In Fedora, your initramfs contains a copy of your sysctl settings
Some questions I have about DDR4 RAM speed and latency in underclocked memory
|
| 2018-03-07: |
Some things I mean when I talk about 'forged HTTP referers'
The lie in Ubuntu source packages (and probably Debian ones as well)
|
| 2018-03-05: |
Getting chrony to not try to use IPv6 time sources on Fedora
|
| 2018-03-04: |
The value locked up in the Unix API makes it pretty durable
The practical Unix API is more than system calls (or POSIX)
|
| 2018-03-02: |
Frequent versus infrequent developers (in languages and so on)
A sysadmin's perspective on Go vendoring and vgo
|
| 2018-02-28: |
egrep's -o argument is great for extracting unusual fields
Using Python 3 for example code here on Wandering Thoughts
|
| 2018-02-26: |
Meltdown and Spectre have made this a bad time to get a new x86 CPU
It feels good to have a fallback option for home computing
|
| 2018-02-25: |
What Python does when you subclass a __slots__ class is the right answer
|
| 2018-02-24: |
The question of what will be sending email spam over IPv6
|
| 2018-02-23: |
Github and publishing Git repositories
|
| 2018-02-21: |
Sorting out what exec does in Bourne shell pipelines
|
| 2018-02-20: |
How switching to uMatrix for JavaScript blocking has improved my web experience
I've now received my first spam email over IPv6
|
| 2018-02-19: |
Some consumer SSDs are moving to a 4k 'advance format' physical block size
|
| 2018-02-18: |
Memories of MGR
|
| 2018-02-17: |
Using lsblk to get extremely useful information about disks
|
| 2018-02-16: |
How I tend to label bad hardware
|
| 2018-02-15: |
DTrace being GPL (and thrown into a Linux kernel) is just the start
|
| 2018-02-14: |
Some things about ZFS block allocation and ZFS (file) record sizes
|
| 2018-02-12: |
Writing my first addon for Firefox wasn't too hard or annoying
|
| 2018-02-11: |
Sending emails to your inbox is a dangerous default
Access control security requires the ability to do revocation
|
| 2018-02-10: |
The interesting error codes from Linux program segfault kernel messages
|
| 2018-02-09: |
My failure to migrate my workstation from MBR booting to UEFI
|
| 2018-02-08: |
What the Linux kernel's messages about segfaulting programs mean on 64-bit x86
|
| 2018-02-07: |
Consumer SSDs and their nominal physical block sizes, now and in the future
|
| 2018-02-05: |
I should remember that sometimes C is a perfectly good option
|
| 2018-02-04: |
A surprise in how ZFS grows a file's record size (at least for me)
More notes on using uMatrix in Firefox 56 (in place of NoScript)
|
| 2018-02-02: |
Some practical tradeoffs involved in using HTTPS instead of HTTP
X's network transparency was basically free at the time
|
| 2018-01-31: |
Mozilla's Looking Glass 'retrospective' is unfortunately inadequate
How the IPs sending us malware break down (January 2018 edition)
|
| 2018-01-30: |
Reverse engineering some settings for Google Search
|
| 2018-01-28: |
Adding 'view page in no style' to the WebExtensions API in Firefox Quantum
Adding 'view page in no style' to Firefox Quantum's context menu
The limitations of Firefox's Reader mode
|
| 2018-01-26: |
A misbehaving SMTP sender can fool me about malware volume
X's network transparency has wound up mostly being a failure
|
| 2018-01-24: |
What the Linux rcu_nocbs kernel argument does (and my Ryzen issues again)
Some early notes on using uMatrix to replace NoScript in Firefox 56
|
| 2018-01-22: |
The addons that I would likely use with Firefox Quantum (57+)
Doing something when a Cinnamon-based laptop suspends or hibernates
|
| 2018-01-21: |
The temptation of Firefox Quantum for me
|
| 2018-01-19: |
I'm one of those people who never log out from their desktop
|
| 2018-01-18: |
Why Go cares about the difference between unsafe.Pointer and uintptr
A recent performance surprise with X on my Fedora Linux desktop
|
| 2018-01-17: |
My new Ryzen desktop is causing Linux to hang (and it's frustrating)
|
| 2018-01-16: |
You could say that Linux is AT&T's fault
|
| 2018-01-15: |
Meltdown and the temptation of switching to Ryzen for my new home machine
|
| 2018-01-14: |
Our small tools for running commands on multiple machines
|
| 2018-01-13: |
Some plans for migrating my workstation from MBR booting to UEFI
|
| 2018-01-12: |
Open source software licenses matter
|
| 2018-01-10: |
Linux's glibc monoculture is not a bad thing
Glibc and the Linux API
|
| 2018-01-09: |
Differences between keywords and constants in Python
|
| 2018-01-08: |
Link: Some fascinating details of cellular data transmission
|
| 2018-01-07: |
The challenges of having true constants in Python
Link: The Python decorators they won't tell you about
|
| 2018-01-06: |
What's happening when you change True and False in Python 2
What ZFS gang blocks are and why they exist
|
| 2018-01-05: |
Confirming the behavior of file block sizes in ZFS
|
| 2018-01-04: |
The goals and problems of our Dovecot IMAP configuration migration
|
| 2018-01-03: |
A brief review of the Dell XPS 13 as a Fedora laptop
|
| 2018-01-02: |
Some notes on relative imports and vendor/ in Go
|
| 2017-12-31: |
Is the C runtime and library a legitimate part of the Unix API?
Understanding IMAP path prefixes in clients and servers
|
| 2017-12-30: |
Some details of ZFS DVAs and what some of their fields store
|
| 2017-12-29: |
To get much faster, an implementation of Python must do less work
|
| 2017-12-28: |
How our IMAP server wound up running out of inodes
|
| 2017-12-27: |
When you have fileservers, they naturally become the center of the world
|
| 2017-12-26: |
I continue to have strong confidence in ZFS On Linux
|
| 2017-12-25: |
There were Unix machines with real DirectColor graphics hardware
|
| 2017-12-24: |
The interestingly different display colour models of X10 and X11
|
| 2017-12-23: |
Our next generation of fileservers will not be based on Illumos
|
| 2017-12-22: |
Our next generation of fileservers will not use any sort of SAN
|
| 2017-12-21: |
Checking RAM DIMM information from inside Linux
|
| 2017-12-20: |
I feel that Firefox forks that would be useful to me are doomed
|
| 2017-12-19: |
Attachment types that we see in email from Zen-listed IP addresses
|
| 2017-12-18: |
What file types we see inside ZIP archives with only a single file in email
|
| 2017-12-17: |
Some questions someone should ask Mozilla
|
| 2017-12-15: |
Mozilla betrays Firefox users and its nominal principles
How we automate acmetool
|
| 2017-12-14: |
How Python makes it hard to write well structured little utilities
|
| 2017-12-13: |
Our Apache file serving problem on our general purpose web server
|
| 2017-12-12: |
Some notes on systemd-resolved, the systemd DNS resolver
|
| 2017-12-11: |
Some things about booting with UEFI that are different from MBR booting
|
| 2017-12-10: |
Let's Encrypt and a TLS monoculture
|
| 2017-12-09: |
You don't have to authorize a machine for Let's Encrypt from the machine
We've switched over to using Let's Encrypt as much as possible
|
| 2017-12-08: |
Some thoughts on what StartCom's shutdown means in general
|
| 2017-12-06: |
My upgrade to Fedora 27, Secure Boot, and a mistake made somewhere
In practice, Go's slices are two different data structures in one
|
| 2017-12-04: |
Some notes on using Go to check and verify SSH host keys
|
| 2017-12-03: |
Some notes and considerations on SSH host key verification
My new Linux office workstation for fall 2017
|
| 2017-12-01: |
I'm basically giving up on syslog priorities
|
| 2017-11-30: |
We're broadly switching to synchronizing time with systemd's timesyncd
The cost of memory access across a NUMA machine can (probably) matter
|
| 2017-11-29: |
Sometimes the right thing to do about a spate of spam is nothing (probably)
|
| 2017-11-27: |
Code stability in my one Django web application
The dig program now needs some additional options for useful DNS server testing
|
| 2017-11-26: |
One way of capturing debugging state information in a systemd-based system
|
| 2017-11-25: |
Sequential scrubs and resilvers are coming for (open-source) ZFS
|
| 2017-11-24: |
Shooting myself in the foot by using exec in a shell script
|
| 2017-11-23: |
Understanding a tricky case of Bourne shell redirection and command parsing
|
| 2017-11-22: |
Delays on SMTP replies discourage apparently SMTP AUTH scanners
|
| 2017-11-20: |
Major version changes are often partly a signal about support
|
| 2017-11-19: |
StartCom gives up on its Certificate Authority business
Getting some information about the NUMA memory hierarchy of your server
|
| 2017-11-18: |
AMD Ryzens, their memory speed peculiarities, and ECC
|
| 2017-11-17: |
When you should run an NTP daemon on your servers
|
| 2017-11-16: |
I think you should mostly not run NTP daemons on your machines
|
| 2017-11-15: |
I've switched from ntpd to chrony as my NTP daemon
|
| 2017-11-14: |
We may have reached a point where (new) ARM servers will just work for Linux
|
| 2017-11-13: |
X11 PseudoColor displays could have multiple hardware colormaps
|
| 2017-11-12: |
The fun of X11 PseudoColor displays and window managers
|
| 2017-11-11: |
What X11's TrueColor means (with some history)
|
| 2017-11-10: |
A systemd mistake with a script-based service unit I recently made
|
| 2017-11-09: |
Why I'm not enthused about live patching kernels and systems
|
| 2017-11-08: |
What it means to support ECC RAM (especially for AMD Ryzen)
|
| 2017-11-07: |
Link: Citation Needed [on array indexing in programming languages]
My new Linux machine for fall 2017 (planned)
|
| 2017-11-05: |
How collections.defaultdict is good for your memory usage
Some early notes on WireGuard
|
| 2017-11-04: |
Why I've switched from GRE-over-IPSec to using WireGuard
|
| 2017-11-03: |
Illumos mountd caches netgroup lookups (relatively briefly)
|
| 2017-11-02: |
I think Certificate Transparency is better for the web than HTTP Key Pinning
|
| 2017-10-31: |
We've now seen malware in a tar archive
|
| 2017-10-30: |
There are two sorts of TLS certificate mis-issuing
The Illumos NFS server's caching of filesystem access permissions
|
| 2017-10-29: |
There are several ways to misread specifications
|
| 2017-10-28: |
Why I plan to pick a relatively high-end desktop CPU for my next PC
|
| 2017-10-27: |
HD usage can be limited by things other than cost per TB
|
| 2017-10-26: |
The 'standard set' of Unix programs is something that evolves over time
|
| 2017-10-25: |
Having different commands on different systems does matter
|
| 2017-10-24: |
Our frustrations with OmniOS's 'KYSTY' minimalism
|
| 2017-10-23: |
I've now seen something doing SMTP probing of IPv6 addresses
|
| 2017-10-22: |
Understanding what our wireless password protects
|
| 2017-10-21: |
Multi-Unix environments are less and less common now
|
| 2017-10-20: |
Ext4, SSDs, and RAID stripe parameters
|
| 2017-10-18: |
Using Shellcheck is good for me
I still like Python and often reach for it by default
|
| 2017-10-17: |
My current grumpy view on key generation for hardware crypto keys
|
| 2017-10-16: |
Getting ssh-agent working in Fedora 26's Cinnamon desktop environment
|
| 2017-10-15: |
Unbalanced reads from SSDs in software RAID mirrors in Linux
|
| 2017-10-14: |
A surprise about which of our machines has the highest disk write volume
|
| 2017-10-13: |
Working to understand PCI Express and how it interacts with modern CPUs
|
| 2017-10-12: |
I'm looking forward to using systemd's new IP access control features
|
| 2017-10-11: |
Understanding M.2 SSDs in practice and how this relates to NVMe
|
| 2017-10-10: |
An interesting way to leak memory with Go slices
|
| 2017-10-09: |
JavaScript as the extension language of the future
|
| 2017-10-08: |
Thinking about whether I'll upgrade my next PC partway through its life
|
| 2017-10-07: |
I'm trying out smooth scrolling in my browsers
|
| 2017-10-06: |
Spam issues need to be considered from the start
|
| 2017-10-05: |
Google is objectively running a spammer mailing list service
|
| 2017-10-04: |
My new worry about Firefox 56 and the addons that I care about
|
| 2017-10-03: |
Some thoughts on having both Python 2 and 3 programs
|
| 2017-10-02: |
My experience with using Fedora 26's standard font rendering (and fonts)
|
| 2017-09-30: |
The origin of POSIX as I learned the story (or mythology)
|
| 2017-09-29: |
Shell builtin versions of standard commands have drawbacks
More on systemd on Ubuntu 16.04 failing to reliably reboot some of our servers
|
| 2017-09-27: |
Putting cron jobs into systemd user slices doesn't always work (on Ubuntu 16.04)
ZFS's recordsize, holes in files, and partial blocks
|
| 2017-09-26: |
Using zdb to peer into how ZFS stores files on disk
|
| 2017-09-25: |
What I use printf for when hacking changes into programs
|
| 2017-09-24: |
Reading code and seeing what you're biased to see, illustrated
|
| 2017-09-23: |
A clever way of killing groups of processes
|
| 2017-09-22: |
Using a watchdog timer in system shutdown with systemd (on Ubuntu 16.04)
|
| 2017-09-21: |
My potential qualms about using Python 3 in projects
|
| 2017-09-20: |
Wireless is now critical (network) infrastructure
|
| 2017-09-18: |
Looking back at my mixed and complicated feelings about Solaris
Sorting out the world of modern USB (at least a bit)
|
| 2017-09-17: |
Why I didn't use the attrs module in a recent Python project
|
| 2017-09-15: |
Ignoring the domain when authenticating your Dovecot users
Firefox 57 and the state of old pre-WebExtensions addons
|
| 2017-09-14: |
Sorting out systemd's system.conf, user.conf, and logind.conf
|
| 2017-09-13: |
System shutdown is complicated and involves policy decisions
|
| 2017-09-12: |
The different contexts of stopping a Unix daemon or service
|
| 2017-09-11: |
Giving users what they want and expect, IMAP edition
|
| 2017-09-10: |
I failed to notice when my network performance became terrible
|
| 2017-09-09: |
Letting go of having an optical drive in my machine
|
| 2017-09-08: |
My view of the problem with Extended Validation TLS certificates
|
| 2017-09-07: |
Systemd, NFS mounts, and shutting down your system
|
| 2017-09-06: |
Systemd on Ubuntu 16.04 can't (or won't) reliably reboot your server
|
| 2017-09-05: |
If spam false positives are inevitable, should we handle them better?
|
| 2017-09-04: |
The idea of 'spam levels' may be a copout
|
| 2017-09-03: |
A fundamental limitation of systemd's per-user fair share scheduling
|
| 2017-09-02: |
Putting cron jobs into systemd user slices
|
| 2017-08-31: |
With git, it's useful to pick the right approach to your problem
People probably aren't going to tell you when your anti-spam systems are working
|
| 2017-08-30: |
We've wound up using the spam scores from some other mail systems
|
| 2017-08-28: |
OpenSSH has an annoyingly misleading sshd error log message
The types of attachments we see for malware-laden email
|
| 2017-08-27: |
Is bootstrapping Go from source faster using Go 1.9 or Go 1.8?
|
| 2017-08-25: |
The probable coming explosion of Firefox 57
Fedora 26 and a font rendering dilemma for me
|
| 2017-08-23: |
Why Go changes its minimum version requirements for OSes (and hardware)
An unexpected risk of using Go is it ending support for older OS versions
|
| 2017-08-22: |
Understanding rainbow tables
|
| 2017-08-21: |
Hashed Ethernet addresses are not anonymous identifiers
|
| 2017-08-20: |
The surprising longevity of Unix manpage formatting
|
| 2017-08-19: |
Subnets and early Unix implementations of TCP/IP networking
|
| 2017-08-18: |
How ZFS on Linux names disks in ZFS pools
|
| 2017-08-16: |
The three different names ZFS stores for each vdev disk (on Illumos)
Things I do and don't know about how ZFS brings pools up during boot
|
| 2017-08-15: |
How to get per-user fair share scheduling on Ubuntu 16.04 (with systemd)
|
| 2017-08-14: |
Chrome extensions are becoming a reason not to use Chrome
|
| 2017-08-13: |
Sorting out slice mutability in Go
|
| 2017-08-12: |
Notes on cgroups and systemd's interaction with them as of Ubuntu 16.04
|
| 2017-08-11: |
Some notes from my brief experience with the Grumpy transpiler for Python
Link: Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery
|
| 2017-08-10: |
On the Internet, merely blocking eavesdropping is a big practical win
|
| 2017-08-09: |
How encryption without authentication would still be useful on the web
|
| 2017-08-08: |
We care more about long term security updates than full long term support
|
| 2017-08-07: |
There will be no LTS release of the OmniOS Community Edition
|
| 2017-08-06: |
Our decision to restrict what we use for developing internal tools
|
| 2017-08-05: |
I've been hit by the startup overhead of small programs in Python
|
| 2017-08-04: |
The problem with distributed authentication systems for big sites
|
| 2017-08-03: |
Imposing temporary CPU and memory resource limits on a user on Ubuntu 16.04
|
| 2017-08-02: |
Why I'll never pick the 'sign in with a Facebook or Google account' option
|
| 2017-07-31: |
Using policy based routing to isolate a testing interface on Linux
Link: How does "the" X11 clipboard work?
Modern web page design and superstition
|
| 2017-07-30: |
Some terrible article page design elements on the modern web
|
| 2017-07-29: |
The differences between how SFTP and scp work in OpenSSH
|
| 2017-07-28: |
Our (Unix) staff groups problem
|
| 2017-07-26: |
The continuity of broad systems or environments in system administration
Why I care about Apache's mod_wsgi so much
|
| 2017-07-25: |
If you're going to use PyPy, I think you need servers
|
| 2017-07-24: |
Trying to understand the ZFS l2arc_noprefetch tunable
|
| 2017-07-23: |
Understanding a bit about the SSH connection protocol
|
| 2017-07-21: |
When the SSH protocol does and doesn't do user authentication
|
| 2017-07-20: |
I'm cautiously optimistic about the new OmniOS Community Edition
HTTPS is a legacy protocol
|
| 2017-07-19: |
I've become resigned to Firefox slowly leaking memory
|
| 2017-07-18: |
Python's complicating concept of a callable
|
| 2017-07-17: |
Link: NASA DASHlink - Real System Failures
Why I think Emacs readline bindings work better than Vi ones
|
| 2017-07-16: |
Why upstreams can't document their program's behavior for us
|
| 2017-07-14: |
Some people feel that all permanent SMTP failures are actually temporary
Link: ZFS Storage Overhead
SELinux's problem of keeping up with general Linux development
|
| 2017-07-12: |
Understanding the .io TLD's DNS configuration vulnerability
Recursive DNS servers send the whole original query to authoritative servers
|
| 2017-07-11: |
The BSD r* commands and the history of privileged TCP ports
|
| 2017-07-10: |
Ubuntu's 'Daily Build' images aren't for us
|
| 2017-07-09: |
Why we're not currently interested in PXE-based Linux installs
|
| 2017-07-08: |
I wish you could easily update the packages on Ubuntu ISO images
|
| 2017-07-07: |
Programming Bourne shell scripts is tricky, with dim corners
|
| 2017-07-06: |
Link: Survey of [floating point] Rounding Implementations in Go
My current views on Shellcheck
|
| 2017-07-05: |
How I shot my foot because the Bourne shell is different
|
| 2017-07-04: |
LinkedIn is still trying to send me email despite years of rejections
|
| 2017-07-02: |
Re-applying CPU thermal paste fixed my CPU throttling issues
Moving to smaller fileservers for us probably means no more iSCSI SAN
|
| 2017-06-30: |
Our current generation fileservers have turned out to be too big
Why big Exim queues are a problem for us in practice
|
| 2017-06-29: |
The TLDs of sender addresses for a week of our spam (June 2017 edition)
|
| 2017-06-28: |
I don't think you should increase ZFS on Linux's write buffering
|
| 2017-06-26: |
Our MTAs should probably be able to create backpressure
|
| 2017-06-25: |
Thinking through issues a mail client may have with SMTP-time rejections
One tradeoff in email system design is who holds problematic email
|
| 2017-06-23: |
In praise of uBlock Origin's new 'element zapper' feature
Links: Git remote branches and Git's missing terminology (and more)
My situation with Twitter and my Firefox setup (in which I blame pseudo-XHTML)
|
| 2017-06-22: |
Why we're not running the current version of Django
|
| 2017-06-21: |
The oddity of CVE-2014-9940 and the problem of recognizing kernel security patches
|
| 2017-06-19: |
Plan for manual emergency blocks for your overall mail system
How I'm currently handling the mailing lists I read
|
| 2017-06-17: |
One reason you have a mysterious Unix file called 2 (or 1)
|
| 2017-06-16: |
Go interfaces and automatically generated functions
The (current) state of Firefox Nightly and old extensions
|
| 2017-06-15: |
Why I am not installing your app on my phone
|
| 2017-06-14: |
The difference between ZFS scrubs and resilvers
|
| 2017-06-12: |
Resilvering multiple disks at once in a ZFS pool adds no real extra overhead
|
| 2017-06-11: |
Why filing away mailing lists for a while has improved my life
How to see raw USB events on Linux via usbmon
|
| 2017-06-10: |
One downside of the traditional style of writing Unix manpages
|
| 2017-06-09: |
My .procmailrc has quietly sort of turned into a swamp
|
| 2017-06-08: |
In practice, putting SSDs into 3.5" drive bays is a big hassle
|
| 2017-06-06: |
A humbling experience of misreading some simple (Go) code
The IPv6 address lookup problem (and brute force solution)
|
| 2017-06-05: |
Another case of someone being too clever in their User-Agent field
|
| 2017-06-04: |
Link: The evolution of Unix's overall architecture
Why the popen() API works but more complex versions blow up
|
| 2017-06-03: |
The Python Gilectomy project's performance problem
|
| 2017-06-02: |
My views on the JSON Feed syndication feed format
|
| 2017-05-31: |
How a lot of specifications are often read
Why one git fetch default configuration bit is probably okay
|
| 2017-05-29: |
Configuring Git worktrees to limit what's fetched on pulls
|
| 2017-05-28: |
My thoughts on git worktrees for me (and some notes on things I tried)
Specifications are ultimately defined by their implementations
|
| 2017-05-26: |
Why globally unique IDs are useful for syndication feed entries
|
| 2017-05-25: |
Using Linux's Magic Sysrq on modern keyboards without a dedicated Syrq key
URLs are terrible permanent identifiers for things
|
| 2017-05-24: |
Exploiting Python's Global Interpreter Lock for atomic operations is fun
|
| 2017-05-22: |
Safely using Python's Global Interpreter Lock is quite tricky and subtle
|
| 2017-05-21: |
We use jQuery and I've stopped feeling ashamed about it
A 'null MX' is also useful for blocking forged senders from non-email domains
|
| 2017-05-20: |
We now have an officially standardized 'null MX' record
|
| 2017-05-19: |
I'm not sure what I feel about this web spider's User-Agent value
|
| 2017-05-18: |
A shift in the proper sizes of images on web pages
|
| 2017-05-17: |
Unfortunately I don't feel personally passionate about OmniOS
|
| 2017-05-15: |
Thinking about how much asynchronous disk write buffering you want
How we failed at making all our servers have SSD system disks
|
| 2017-05-14: |
People don't like changes (in computer stuff)
|
| 2017-05-13: |
People don't patch systems and that's all there is to it
|
| 2017-05-12: |
Where bootstrapping Go with a modern version of Go has gotten faster
|
| 2017-05-11: |
The challenges of recovering when unpacking archives with damage
|
| 2017-05-10: |
Building the Go compiler from source from scratch (on Unix)
|
| 2017-05-08: |
Some things I've decided to do to improve my breaks and vacations
|
| 2017-05-07: |
ZFS's zfs receive has no error recovery and what that implies
A mistake I made when setting up my ZFS SSD pool on my home machine
|
| 2017-05-05: |
The temptation of a Ryzen-based machine for my next office workstation
Digging into BSD's choice of Unix group for new directories and files
|
| 2017-05-04: |
My views on using LVM for your system disk and root filesystem
|
| 2017-05-03: |
Sometimes, chmod can fail for interesting reasons
|
| 2017-05-01: |
When a TLS client's certificate is offered to the TLS server
|
| 2017-04-30: |
Some more feelings on nondeterministic garbage collection
Do we want to standardize the size of our root filesystems on servers?
|
| 2017-04-29: |
Some versions of sort can easily sort IPv4 addresses into natural order
|
| 2017-04-28: |
Hardware RAID and the problem of (not) observing disk IO
|
| 2017-04-27: |
Understanding Git's model versus understanding its magic
|
| 2017-04-26: |
Coming to a better understanding of what git rebase does
|
| 2017-04-24: |
What we need from an Illumos-based distribution
Corebird and coming to a healthier relationship with Twitter
|
| 2017-04-23: |
How I rebased changes on top of other rebased changes in Git
|
| 2017-04-21: |
OmniOS's (suddenly) changed future and us
Link: Rob Landley's Linux Memory Management Frequently Asked Questions
A surprising reason grep may think a file is a binary file
|
| 2017-04-20: |
The big motivation for a separate /boot partition
|
| 2017-04-19: |
Some things on how PCs boot the old fashioned BIOS way
For me Chrome clearly wins over Firefox on Javascript-heavy websites
|
| 2017-04-17: |
Shrinking the partitions of a software RAID-1 swap partition
Link: Introduction to Certificate Transparency for Server Operators
What I mostly care about for speeding up our Python programs
|
| 2017-04-16: |
Migrating a separate /boot filesystem into the root filesystem
|
| 2017-04-14: |
Planning out a disk shuffle for my office workstation
Sometimes laziness doesn't pay off
|
| 2017-04-12: |
On today's web, a local Certificate Authority is fairly dangerous
Generating good modern self-signed TLS certificates in today's world
|
| 2017-04-10: |
How TLS certificates specify the hosts they're for
|
| 2017-04-09: |
A single .jar recognized as several types of malware at once
|
| 2017-04-08: |
Doing things the clever way in Exim ACLs by exploiting ACL message variables
Wayland is now the future of Unix graphics and GUIs
|
| 2017-04-07: |
Spammers probably aren't paying any particular attention to you
|
| 2017-04-05: |
Making your SMTP rejection messages be useful for you
Why the modern chown command uses a colon to separate the user and group
|
| 2017-04-03: |
Some DNSBL developments I've just heard about
Why modules raising core exceptions mostly hurts, not helps, your users
|
| 2017-04-02: |
The Spamhaus CSS includes more than dedicated spam ranges
|
| 2017-03-31: |
I quite like the simplification of having OpenSSH canonicalize hostnames
What I know about process virtual size versus RSS on Linux
|
| 2017-03-30: |
What top's SHR field means in quite modern Linux kernels
|
| 2017-03-29: |
The work of safely raising our local /etc/group line length limit
|
| 2017-03-28: |
What affects automatically removing old kernels on Ubuntu
|
| 2017-03-27: |
Link: The Unix Heritage Society now has the 8th, 9th, and 10th editions of Research Unix
We're probably going to upgrade our OmniOS servers by reinstalling them
|
| 2017-03-26: |
Your exposure from retaining Let's Encrypt account keys
|
| 2017-03-24: |
An odd and persistent year old phish spammer
|
| 2017-03-23: |
ARM servers had better just work if vendors want to sell very many
|
| 2017-03-22: |
Setting the root login's 'full name' to identify the machine that sent email
Making sure you can identify what machine sent you a status email
|
| 2017-03-20: |
Modern Linux kernel memory allocation rules for higher-order page requests
My theory on why Go's gofmt has wound up being accepted
|
| 2017-03-19: |
Using Firefox's userContent.css for website-specific fixes
|
| 2017-03-18: |
Part of why Python 3.5's await and async have some odd usage restrictions
|
| 2017-03-17: |
Overcommitting virtual memory is perfectly sensible
|
| 2017-03-16: |
How we can use yield from to implement coroutines
|
| 2017-03-15: |
Sorting out Python generator functions and yield from in my head
|
| 2017-03-13: |
OpenSSH's IdentityFile directive only ever adds identity files (as of 7.4)
What should it mean for a system call to time out?
|
| 2017-03-12: |
CSS, <pre>, and trailing whitespace lead to browser layout weirdness
|
| 2017-03-11: |
Your live web server probably has features you don't know about
|
| 2017-03-10: |
Malware is sometimes sent through organized, purchased infrastructure
|
| 2017-03-09: |
I wish you could whitelist kernel modules, instead of blacklisting them
|
| 2017-03-08: |
An AMD Ryzen is unlikely to be my next desktop's CPU
|
| 2017-03-06: |
Modern X Windows can be a very complicated environment
|
| 2017-03-05: |
Why I (as a sysadmin) reflexively dislike various remote file access tools for editors
|
| 2017-03-04: |
Should you add MX entries for hosts in your (public) DNS?
|
| 2017-03-03: |
Why exposing only blocking APIs are ultimately a bad idea
Some notes on ZFS per-user quotas and their interactions with NFS
|
| 2017-03-01: |
Cheap concurrency is an illusion (at least on Unix)
|
| 2017-02-28: |
Using Certificate Transparency to monitor your organization's TLS activity
|
| 2017-02-27: |
The conflict between wildcard TLS certificates and Certificate Transparency
|
| 2017-02-26: |
In Python, strings are infinitely recursively iterable
How recursively flattening a list raises a Python type question
|
| 2017-02-25: |
A single email message with quite a lot of different malware
|
| 2017-02-24: |
What an actual assessment of Ubuntu kernel security updates looks like
How ZFS bookmarks can work their magic with reasonable efficiency
|
| 2017-02-22: |
ZFS bookmarks and what they're good for
Sometimes it can be hard to tell one cause of failure from another
|
| 2017-02-20: |
Some notes on moving a software RAID-1 root filesystem around (to SSDs)
Some views on the Corebird Twitter client
|
| 2017-02-19: |
Using pup to deal with Twitter's increasing demand for Javascript
|
| 2017-02-17: |
robots.txt is a hint and a social contract between sites and web spiders
Sometimes, firmware updates can be a good thing to do
|
| 2017-02-16: |
Waiting for a specific wall-clock time in Unix
|
| 2017-02-15: |
Another risk of hardware RAID controllers is the manufacturer vanishing
|
| 2017-02-14: |
Does CR LF as a line ending cause extra problems with buffers?
|
| 2017-02-13: |
What file types we see inside singleton nested zipfiles in email
|
| 2017-02-12: |
I'm too much of a perfectionist about contributing to open source projects
|
| 2017-02-11: |
Different ways you can initialize a RAID-[567+] array
|
| 2017-02-10: |
Python won't (and can't) import native modules from zip archives
|
| 2017-02-09: |
Malware strains may go away sometimes, but they generally come back
|
| 2017-02-08: |
How to see and flush the Linux kernel NFS server's authentication cache
|
| 2017-02-06: |
Systemd's slowly but steadily increased idealism about the world
Our advantage in reliable backups is that we get restore requests
|
| 2017-02-05: |
Systemd should be better than it is, but it is still our best init system
|
| 2017-02-04: |
My views on X (Windows)
|
| 2017-02-03: |
What it's sensible to use a bunch of Unix swap space for
|
| 2017-02-02: |
Link: Four Column ASCII
Sometimes you get lucky and apparently dead disks come back to life
|
| 2017-01-31: |
Email attachments of singleton nested zipfiles are suspicious
|
| 2017-01-30: |
Why having CR LF as your line ending is a mistake
How you can abruptly lose your filesystem on a software RAID mirror
|
| 2017-01-29: |
How Unix erases things when you type a backspace while entering text
|
| 2017-01-28: |
What we still use ASCII CR for today (on Unix)
|
| 2017-01-27: |
Conversations, conversational units, and Twitter
|
| 2017-01-26: |
Things that make Go channels expensive to implement
|
| 2017-01-25: |
I think docstrings in Python are for everything, not just public things
|
| 2017-01-23: |
Linux desktops and pre-packaged machines from big vendors
My still-mixed feelings about Python's docstrings
|
| 2017-01-22: |
An Ubuntu default Bash setup that irritates me, especially for root
|
| 2017-01-20: |
Why tiling window managers are not really for me (on the desktop)
Spam and virus filtering on email is a risk (although likely not a big one)
|
| 2017-01-19: |
Thinking about how to add some SSDs on my home machine
|
| 2017-01-18: |
Exim, IPv6, and hosts that MX to localhost
|
| 2017-01-17: |
Making my machine stay responsive when writing to USB drives
|
| 2017-01-16: |
Linux is terrible at handling IO to USB drives on my machine
|
| 2017-01-15: |
Link: Let's Stop Ascribing Meaning to Code Points
Some notes on 4K monitors and connecting to them
|
| 2017-01-14: |
My picks for mind-blowing Git features
|
| 2017-01-13: |
The ZFS pool history log that's used by 'zpool history' has a size limit
|
| 2017-01-12: |
Modern ad networks are why adblockers are so effective
|
| 2017-01-11: |
ZFS's potentially very useful 'zpool history -i' option
|
| 2017-01-10: |
Picking FreeType CJK fonts for xterm on a modern Linux system
|
| 2017-01-09: |
Making modern FreeType-using versions of xterm display CJK characters
|
| 2017-01-08: |
One downside of a queued IO model is memory consumption for idle connections
|
| 2017-01-07: |
How ready my Firefox extensions are for Firefox Electrolysis
|
| 2017-01-06: |
Web adblockers and the potential for recreating the Usenet killfile problem
|
| 2017-01-05: |
Mail submission by users versus by your machines
|
| 2017-01-04: |
Make sure that (system) email works on every machine
|
| 2017-01-02: |
Software should support configuring overall time limits
ZFS may panic your system if you have an exceptionally slow IO
|
| 2016-12-31: |
I wish new editors thought about their overall ecology too
Ubuntu's AppArmor system is reasonably and pleasantly non-obnoxious
|
| 2016-12-30: |
A few useful standard readline bindings
|
| 2016-12-29: |
One reason why Go's increment and decrement statements are good to have
|
| 2016-12-28: |
The HTML IMG attributes and styling that I think I want
|
| 2016-12-26: |
A perhaps surprising consequence of Requires dependencies in systemd
Some new-to-me Vim motion commands that I want to try to remember
|
| 2016-12-25: |
What can be going on with your custom management commands in Django 1.10
|
| 2016-12-24: |
I should stop reading some mailing lists during breaks and vacations
|
| 2016-12-23: |
Why the gosimple program is great
|
| 2016-12-22: |
Malware is definitely out there and it's targeting us specifically
|
| 2016-12-21: |
An important little detail of our ZFS spares setup
|
| 2016-12-20: |
In praise of zpool history
|
| 2016-12-19: |
Don't assume you can renew TLS certificates whenever you want to
The great thing about using Let's Encrypt is the automation
|
| 2016-12-18: |
People may be accepting that security questions are a bad idea
|
| 2016-12-17: |
Some conference spammers mutate to show they're definitely spammers
|
| 2016-12-15: |
I now think you should have lots of Let's Encrypt accounts
Understanding the Let's Encrypt authorization process
|
| 2016-12-14: |
Vi, movement commands, efficiency, and me
|
| 2016-12-12: |
Some of my views on Naftali Harris's 'Python 2.8'
Realizing that I'm not actively attracted to FreeBSD for my desktop
|
| 2016-12-11: |
Fedora has become something you can't run if security matters much
|
| 2016-12-10: |
My view of using a docked laptop as my main machine
|
| 2016-12-09: |
It's a good idea to test your spare disks every so often
|
| 2016-12-08: |
Trailing text, a subtle gotcha with Go's fmt.Sscanf
|
| 2016-12-07: |
One reason why user namespaces keep enabling Linux kernel security issues
|
| 2016-12-05: |
My RPM build setup no longer works on Fedora for some packages
One advantage of 'self-hosted' languages
|
| 2016-12-04: |
Terminals are not enough (personal edition)
|
| 2016-12-03: |
One reason why rogue wireless access points are a bigger risk at universities
|
| 2016-12-02: |
IPv6, point to point links, and subnet lengths
|
| 2016-11-30: |
I suspect that lots of IPv6 hosts won't have reverse DNS
Terminals are not enough (sysadmin version)
|
| 2016-11-28: |
Some thoughts about options for light Unix laptops
Some impressions after a brief exposure to a Dell Chromebook 13
|
| 2016-11-27: |
The Chromebook login problem
|
| 2016-11-26: |
What I did to set up IPv6 on my wireless network so it really worked
|
| 2016-11-25: |
Why we don't and can't use the pam_exec PAM module
|
| 2016-11-23: |
Sometimes a little change winds up setting off a large cascade of things
We may have seen a ZFS checksum error be an early signal for later disk failure
|
| 2016-11-21: |
Link: RFC 6919: Further Key Words for Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels
What I'd like in Illumos/OmniOS: progressive crash dumps
I've wound up feeling tentatively enthusiastic about Python 3
|
| 2016-11-20: |
Is it time to not have platform-dependent integer types in languages?
|
| 2016-11-19: |
Why I don't think subscription-based charging gets you stability
|
| 2016-11-18: |
Unix shells and the problem of too-smart autocompletion
|
| 2016-11-17: |
Link: Twice the bits, twice the trouble: vulnerabilities induced by migrating to 64-bit platforms
The somewhat odd subject of Django versus Python
|
| 2016-11-16: |
Go's arbitrary-precision constants and cross compilation
|
| 2016-11-14: |
Open source and the problem of pure maintenance
|
| 2016-11-13: |
Why I believe native apps are not doomed by progressive web apps
Modern shells and running shell scripts while seteuid
|
| 2016-11-11: |
My view on accepting bounces and replies to your email
Yahoo Groups slides further down the spam source slope
|
| 2016-11-09: |
Getting a Yubikey 4 working on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and other older Linuxes (in PIV mode)
I assume that it's always possible to compromise our security somehow
|
| 2016-11-08: |
Security often involves not doing things
|
| 2016-11-07: |
Why we have multiple wireless networks around here
The other reason why I've wound up not interested in firewall managers
|
| 2016-11-06: |
Admitting that I have have a non-simple firewall setup
|
| 2016-11-05: |
Web pages versus APIs, or my views on handling 'bad' requests
|
| 2016-11-04: |
Caution is a mistake in modern web servers and apps
|
| 2016-11-03: |
I suspect that browsers are not fully prepared for bad CAs
|
| 2016-11-01: |
Encouragingly, browsers have not backed down over WoSign
|
| 2016-10-31: |
DKMS kind of has a problem with its error messages
Link: Linux containers in 500 lines of code
Why I'm interested in nftables, the theoretical Linux iptables replacement
|
| 2016-10-30: |
How modern SSH key exchange provides (strong) protection against attacks
|
| 2016-10-29: |
More on SSH, public key authentication, and 'man in the middle' attacks
|
| 2016-10-28: |
How I set up a DHCP client for my backup Internet connection
|
| 2016-10-26: |
Why I'm unhappy with how Debian builds from source packages right now
What I'm doing to use a Yubikey in Fedora 24's Cinnamon desktop environment
|
| 2016-10-24: |
On classifying phish spam as malware, an update
How I've wound up being one of the people who don't update IoT firmware
|
| 2016-10-23: |
I should keep a released version of the Go compiler suite
|
| 2016-10-22: |
The shutdown program on a modern systemd-based Linux system
|
| 2016-10-21: |
The shutdown command is a relic of BSD's historical origins
|
| 2016-10-20: |
I like the Python 3 string .translate() method
|
| 2016-10-19: |
Writing in Python 3 has been a positive experience so far
|
| 2016-10-17: |
Making my Yubikey work reasonably with my X screen locking
|
| 2016-10-16: |
Why we care about long uptimes
How I managed to shoot myself in the foot with my local DNS resolver
|
| 2016-10-15: |
ZFS's 'panic on on-disk corruption' behavior is a serious flaw
|
| 2016-10-14: |
Watch out for web server configurations that 'cross over' between sites
|
| 2016-10-13: |
How I've set up SSH keys on my Yubikey 4 (so far)
|
| 2016-10-12: |
I have yet to start using any smartphone two-factor authentication
|
| 2016-10-10: |
How and why the new iptables -w option is such a terrible fumble
The modern web is an unpredictable and strange place to develop for
|
| 2016-10-09: |
What I think I want out of CPU performance in a new PC
|
| 2016-10-08: |
I have a blind spot where it comes to using chmod's symbolic modes
|
| 2016-10-07: |
Why OmniOS boot environments don't solve our upgrade issues
|
| 2016-10-06: |
How we could update our iSCSI backends and why we probably won't
|
| 2016-10-05: |
Linux can be really stable under the right circumstances
|
| 2016-10-03: |
My take on Git rebasing versus cherry-picking
|
| 2016-10-02: |
Why I've put a Twitter client on my smartphone
The MyDoom worm is still out there
|
| 2016-09-30: |
Some git repository manipulations that I don't know how to do well
In search of modest scale structured syslog analysis
|
| 2016-09-29: |
Making systemd-networkd really skip trying IPv6 on your networks
|
| 2016-09-28: |
Why I switched to the rc shell
|
| 2016-09-27: |
Why we're going to switch from SunSSH to OpenSSH on our fileservers
|
| 2016-09-25: |
How I live without shell job control
A surprising benefit of command/program completion in my shell
|
| 2016-09-23: |
You probably want to start using the -w option with iptables
Git's selective commits plus Magit are a killer feature for me
|
| 2016-09-22: |
Why we've wound up without ZFS ZILs or L2ARCs on our pools
|
| 2016-09-20: |
Today I learned that you want to use strace -fp
|
| 2016-09-19: |
A surprise with switching to holding keys in ssh-agent
My view on spam and potential denial of service attacks on anti-spam systems
|
| 2016-09-18: |
A little shift in malware packaging that I got to watch
|
| 2016-09-17: |
What encoding the syslog module uses in Python 3
|
| 2016-09-16: |
A shell thing: globbing operators versus expansion operators
|
| 2016-09-15: |
What I did to set up IPv6 on my wireless network
|
| 2016-09-14: |
When iptables SNAT and routing happens, and how this is annoying
|
| 2016-09-13: |
I don't understand Linux iptables NAT as well as I should
|
| 2016-09-12: |
A bunch of my sysadmin work seems to be like gardening
|
| 2016-09-11: |
We're probably going to see a major Certificate Authority de-trusted
|
| 2016-09-10: |
Link: Actually using ed
Some notes on curating the set of CAs that Firefox trusts
|
| 2016-09-09: |
Someone's exploiting Google's account recovery system to send spam
|
| 2016-09-08: |
Why my smartphone is going to be an iPhone
|
| 2016-09-06: |
Modules should never raise core Python exceptions
|
| 2016-09-05: |
Using Magit to selectively discard changes in your git working tree
An argparse limitation with nargs="*" and choices=...
|
| 2016-09-04: |
What I want in Vim with the mouse (and why I don't think I can have it)
|
| 2016-09-03: |
Why semantic versioning is not going to solve all our problems
|
| 2016-09-02: |
Some thoughts on Python 3 module APIs and Unicode conversion errors
|
| 2016-08-31: |
Python 3 module APIs and the question of Unicode conversion errors
The various IDs of disks, filesystems, software RAID, LVM, et al in Linux
|
| 2016-08-30: |
Bourne's getopts sadly makes simple shell scripts more cluttered and verbose
|
| 2016-08-29: |
Phones and tablets are going to change what sort of passwords I use
|
| 2016-08-28: |
My logic of blocking certain sorts of attachments outright
|
| 2016-08-26: |
Why ZFS L2ARC is probably not a good fit for our setup
|
| 2016-08-25: |
The single editor myth(ology)
|
| 2016-08-24: |
Blindly trying to copy a web site these days is hazardous
more, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization
|
| 2016-08-23: |
Link: File crash consistency and filesystems are hard
Link: Git from the inside out
|
| 2016-08-22: |
A belated realization about 'TLS suicide' and user CGIs et al
An interesting case of NFS traffic (probably) holding a ZFS snapshot busy
|
| 2016-08-21: |
My pragmatic decision on GNU Emacs versus vim for my programming
|
| 2016-08-19: |
My current Go autocompletion setup in GNU Emacs
Localhost is (sometimes) a network
|
| 2016-08-17: |
A surprising missing Unix command: waiting until a time is reached
|
| 2016-08-16: |
How you tell what signals a Linux process is ignoring
|
| 2016-08-15: |
My ambivalent view on Vim superintelligence, contrasted with GNU Emacs
Some options for reindenting (some of) my existing Python code
|
| 2016-08-14: |
Code alone can tell you the what but it cannot tell you why
|
| 2016-08-13: |
What I did to set up a wireless network and what I have left to do
|
| 2016-08-12: |
I think I'm going to shift my style of Python indentation
|
| 2016-08-10: |
Systemd has a problem with SATA disks behind port multipliers
A look into a future where things assume you have a smartphone
|
| 2016-08-08: |
I need more than one way to get on the Internet from home
|
| 2016-08-07: |
Why I like the sam editor
The harm that comes from ZFS not being GPL-compatible
|
| 2016-08-05: |
Free software licenses are social things, not just legal ones
It's likely worth re-detecting your system's sensor chips every so often
|
| 2016-08-03: |
Some malware that sends interesting fake mailing list messages
Containerization as the necessary end point of deployment automation
|
| 2016-08-01: |
My new key binding hack for xcape and dmenu
|
| 2016-07-31: |
I've become mostly indifferent to what language something is written in
(Not) changing the stop timeout for systemd login session scopes
|
| 2016-07-30: |
The perils of having an ancient $HOME (a yak shaving story)
|
| 2016-07-29: |
My surprise problem with considering a new PC: actually building it
|
| 2016-07-28: |
A bit about what we use DTrace for (and when)
|
| 2016-07-27: |
When 'simple' DNS blocklists work well for you
|
| 2016-07-25: |
An irritating systemd behavior when you tell it to reboot the system
I should learn more about Grub2
|
| 2016-07-24: |
My view on people who are assholes on the Internet
|
| 2016-07-23: |
My current set of Chrome extensions (as of July 2016)
|
| 2016-07-22: |
Ubuntu 16.04's irritatingly broken MySQL updates
|
| 2016-07-21: |
My current set of essential extensions for Firefox profiles
|
| 2016-07-20: |
Official source release builds should not abort on (compilation) warnings
|
| 2016-07-19: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 23)
An interesting (and alarming) Grub2 error and its cause
|
| 2016-07-17: |
A good solution to our Unbound caching problem that sadly won't work
DNS resolution cannot be segmented (and what I mean by that)
|
| 2016-07-16: |
A caching and zone refresh problem with Unbound
|
| 2016-07-15: |
Sudo and changes in security expectations (and user behaviors)
|
| 2016-07-14: |
Your C compiler's optimizer can make your bad programs compile
|
| 2016-07-13: |
Our central web server, Apache, and slow downloads
|
| 2016-07-12: |
How we do MIME attachment type logging with Exim
|
| 2016-07-11: |
Why Python can't have a full equivalent of Go's gofmt
|
| 2016-07-10: |
Some options for logging attachment information in an Exim environment
|
| 2016-07-09: |
How Exim's ${run ...} string expansion operator does quoting
|
| 2016-07-08: |
Some notes on UID and GID remapping in the Illumos/OmniOS NFS server
|
| 2016-07-06: |
Keeping around an index to the disk bays on our iSCSI backends
It turns out that viruses do try to conceal their ZIP files
|
| 2016-07-04: |
A feature I wish the Linux NFS client had: remapping UIDs and GIDs
|
| 2016-07-03: |
An irritating little bug in the latest GNU Emacs Python autoindent code
|
| 2016-07-02: |
cal's unfortunate problem with argument handling
|
| 2016-07-01: |
How backwards compatibility causes us pain with our IMAP servers
|
| 2016-06-30: |
Some advantages of using argparse to handle arguments as well as options
What makes a email MIME part an attachment?
|
| 2016-06-29: |
Modern DNS servers (especially resolvers) should have query logging
|
| 2016-06-27: |
Today's lesson on the value of commenting your configuration settings
If you send email, don't expect people to help you with abuse handling
|
| 2016-06-26: |
How not to maintain your DNS (part 22)
|
| 2016-06-25: |
What Python 3 versions Django supports, and when this changes
|
| 2016-06-24: |
Our new plan for creating our periodic long term backups
|
| 2016-06-22: |
I need to cultivate some new coding habits for Python 3 ready code
Moving from Python 2 to Python 3 calls for a code inventory
|
| 2016-06-20: |
A tiny systemd convenience: it can reboot the system from RAM alone
|
| 2016-06-19: |
A lesson to myself: know your emergency contact numbers
Why ZFS can't really allow you to add disks to raidz vdevs
|
| 2016-06-18: |
It's easier to shrink RAID disk volumes than to reshape them
|
| 2016-06-17: |
Why you can't remove a device from a ZFS pool to shrink it
|
| 2016-06-15: |
How (some) syndication feed readers deal with HTTP to HTTPS redirections
ZFS on Linux has just fixed a long standing little annoyance
|
| 2016-06-14: |
Some notes on how xdg-open picks which web browser to use
How xdg-mime searches for MIME type handlers (more or less)
|
| 2016-06-12: |
There are (at least) two sorts of DNS blocklists
Some notes on adding exposed statistics to a (Go) program
|
| 2016-06-11: |
I accept that someday I'll give up MH and move to IMAP mail clients
|
| 2016-06-10: |
An email mistake I've made as a long-term university sysadmin
|
| 2016-06-09: |
My concern about the potential dominance of the mobile web
|
| 2016-06-08: |
How dominant is the mobile web (versus the desktop web)?
|
| 2016-06-06: |
My views of Windows 10 (from the outside)
I work in what is increasingly a pretty different sysadmin environment
|
| 2016-06-05: |
My approach for inspecting Go error values
|
| 2016-06-04: |
The (Unix) shell is not just for running programs
|
| 2016-06-03: |
One thing that makes the Bourne shell an odd language
|
| 2016-06-02: |
Spammers can abandon SMTP connections not infrequently
|
| 2016-05-31: |
Understanding the modern view of security
|
| 2016-05-30: |
The browser security dilemma
'Command line text editor' is not the same as 'terminal-based text editor'
|
| 2016-05-29: |
What does 'success' mean for a research operating system?
|
| 2016-05-28: |
A problem with using old OmniOS versions: disconnection from the community
|
| 2016-05-27: |
Your overall anti-spam system should have manual emergency blocks
|
| 2016-05-26: |
Why SELinux is inherently complex
|
| 2016-05-25: |
SELinux is beyond saving at this point
|
| 2016-05-23: |
How fast fileserver failover could matter to us
|
| 2016-05-22: |
Our problem with OmniOS upgrades: we'll probably never do any more
My view of Barracuda's public DNSBL
|
| 2016-05-21: |
Please stop the Python 2 security scaremongering
|
| 2016-05-20: |
Some notes on abusing the pexpect Python module
|
| 2016-05-19: |
Some basic data on the hit rate of the Spamhaus DBL here
|
| 2016-05-18: |
Go does not have atomic variables, only atomic access to variables
|
| 2016-05-16: |
A quick trick: using Go structs to create namespaces
Discovering my personal limit on how much I care about security
|
| 2016-05-15: |
It's time for me to upgrade my filtering HTTP proxy
|
| 2016-05-14: |
IPv6 is the future of the Internet
|
| 2016-05-13: |
You can call bind() on outgoing sockets, but you don't want to
|
| 2016-05-11: |
We're never going to be able to have everyone use two factor authentication
The difference between 'Delete' and 'Destroy' in X window managers
|
| 2016-05-09: |
An Apache trick: using directories to create redirections
You can't use expvar.Func to expose a bunch of expvar types
|
| 2016-05-08: |
Issues in fair share scheduling of RAM via resident set sizes
|
| 2016-05-07: |
'Fair share' scheduling pretty much requires a dynamic situation
|
| 2016-05-06: |
A weird little Firefox glitch with cut and paste
|
| 2016-05-04: |
My annoyance with Chrome's cut and paste support under X
The better way to clear SMART disk complaints, with safety provided by ZFS
|
| 2016-05-02: |
How I think you set up fair share scheduling under systemd
The state of supporting many groups over NFS v3 in various Unixes
|
| 2016-04-30: |
I should keep and check notes even on my own little problems
A story of the gradual evolution of network speeds without me noticing
|
| 2016-04-29: |
You should plan for your anti-spam scanner malfunctioning someday
|
| 2016-04-28: |
You should probably track what types of files your users get in email
|
| 2016-04-26: |
How 'there are no technical solutions to social problems' is wrong
Bad slide navigation on the web and understanding why it's bad
|
| 2016-04-25: |
Why you mostly don't want to do in-place Linux version upgrades
|
| 2016-04-24: |
Why we have CentOS machines as well as Ubuntu ones
|
| 2016-04-23: |
Why I think Illumos/OmniOS uses PCI subsystem IDs
|
| 2016-04-22: |
What Illumos/OmniOS PCI device names seem to mean
|
| 2016-04-20: |
A brief review of the HP three button USB optical mouse
How to get Unbound to selectively add or override DNS records
|
| 2016-04-19: |
Today's odd spammer behavior for sender addresses
|
| 2016-04-18: |
Why your Apache should have mod_status configured somewhere
|
| 2016-04-17: |
Why Unix needs a standard way to deal with the file durability problem
|
| 2016-04-16: |
Why I think Let's Encrypt won't be a threat to commercial CAs for now
|
| 2016-04-15: |
Unbound illustrates the Unix manpage mistake with its ratelimits documentation
|
| 2016-04-14: |
Unix's file durability problem
|
| 2016-04-13: |
How I'm trying to do durable disk writes here on Wandering Thoughts
|
| 2016-04-12: |
There's a spectrum of 'pets versus cattle' in servers
|
| 2016-04-11: |
Why I don't use HTTP Key Pinning and I'm not likely to any time soon
|
| 2016-04-10: |
SPF is not a security feature, as it solves the wrong problem
|
| 2016-04-09: |
Why your Ubuntu server stalls a while on boot if networking has problems
|
| 2016-04-08: |
How to shoot yourself in the foot with /etc/network/interfaces on Ubuntu
|
| 2016-04-06: |
What is behind Unix's 'Text file is busy' error
How options in my programs conflict, and where argparse falls short
|
| 2016-04-05: |
Some notes on Go's expvar package
|
| 2016-04-04: |
The three types of challenges that Let's Encrypt currently supports
|
| 2016-04-03: |
Let's Encrypt certificates can be used for more than HTTPS
|
| 2016-04-01: |
A surprise to watch out for with Go's expvar package (in expvar.Var)
|
| 2016-03-31: |
My initial experience of using NSD as a simple authoritative DNS server
|
| 2016-03-30: |
I've now used Python's argparse module and I like it
My view of Debian's behavior on package upgrades with new dependencies
|
| 2016-03-28: |
An awkward confession and what we should do about it
Why I don't think upgrading servers would save us much power
|
| 2016-03-27: |
The limits of open source with Illumos and OmniOS
|
| 2016-03-26: |
The sensible update for my vintage 2011 home machine
|
| 2016-03-25: |
There's a relationship between server utilization and server lifetime
|
| 2016-03-23: |
How old our servers are (as of 2016)
Wayland and graphics card uncertainty
|
| 2016-03-21: |
Current PC technology churn that makes me reluctant to think about a new PC
When you want non-mutating methods in Go
|
| 2016-03-20: |
What broad hit rate the Spamhaus DBL might get for us
|
| 2016-03-18: |
The Spamhaus DBL does get hits even with basic checks
Some things I believe about importance and web page design
|
| 2016-03-16: |
How 'from module import ...' is not doing what you may expect
I wish I could split up code more easily in Python
|
| 2016-03-14: |
An additional small detail of how writes work on ZFS raidzN pools
How RPM handles configuration files, both technically and socially
|
| 2016-03-13: |
I've started using the Firefox addon Self-Destructing Cookies for some stuff
|
| 2016-03-11: |
Why it's irritating when Ubuntu packages don't include their configuration files
I need to use getopts sooner (and more often) in Bourne shell scripts
|
| 2016-03-09: |
A sensible surprise (to me) in the Bourne shell's expansion of "$@"
Some thoughts on ways of choosing what TLS ciphers to support
|
| 2016-03-07: |
Why it makes sense for true and false to ignore their arguments
Apt-get and its irritating lack of easy selective upgrades
|
| 2016-03-06: |
Firefox addons seem unfortunately prone to memory leaks
|
| 2016-03-05: |
What happens when a modern Linux system boots without /bin/sh
|
| 2016-03-04: |
Some notes on supporting readline (tab) completion in your Python program
|
| 2016-03-03: |
My views on clients for Lets Encrypt
|
| 2016-03-02: |
Some notes on OpenSSH's optional hostname canonicalization
|
| 2016-02-29: |
Turning over a rock on some weird HTTP requests to our web server
Sometimes, doing a bunch of programming can be the right answer
|
| 2016-02-28: |
The status of null-sender spam from outlook.com
|
| 2016-02-27: |
Link: A Short History Of Removable Media Behind The Iron Curtain
Sometimes brute force is the answer, Samba edition
|
| 2016-02-26: |
Our problem with iSCSI connections at boot on OmniOS
|
| 2016-02-24: |
Mozilla, Symantec, SHA-1 certificates, and the balance of power
I'm often an iterative and experimental programmer
|
| 2016-02-22: |
We've permanently disabled overlayfs on our servers
The university's coordination problem
|
| 2016-02-21: |
Why the Ubuntu package update process makes me irritated
|
| 2016-02-20: |
My two usage cases for Let's Encrypt certificates
|
| 2016-02-19: |
We can't use Let's Encrypt on our production systems right now
|
| 2016-02-18: |
Two models of dealing with cookies in Firefox with addons
|
| 2016-02-17: |
The many load averages of Unix(es)
|
| 2016-02-16: |
Whether or not to use cgo for Go packages, illustrated in a dilemma
|
| 2016-02-15: |
SMTP submission ratelimits should have delays too
|
| 2016-02-14: |
Your outgoing mail system should have a per-sender stop switch
|
| 2016-02-12: |
We need to deploy anti-spam precautions even if they're a bit imperfect
Adding a new template filter in Django 1.9, and a template tag annoyance
|
| 2016-02-11: |
My current views on using OpenSSH with CA-based host and user authentication
|
| 2016-02-10: |
The fundamental practical problem with the Certificate Authority model
|
| 2016-02-08: |
Old Unix filesystems and byte order
Clearing SMART disk complaints, with safety provided by ZFS
|
| 2016-02-07: |
Your SSH keys are a (potential) information leak
|
| 2016-02-06: |
You can have many matching stanzas in your ssh_config
|
| 2016-02-05: |
Some notes on SMF manifests (on OmniOS) and what goes in them
|
| 2016-02-03: |
Django, the timesince template filter, and non-breaking spaces
You aren't entitled to good errors from someone else's web app
|
| 2016-02-02: |
A justification for some odd Linux ARP behavior
|
| 2016-01-31: |
One thing I don't like about Fedora is slow security updates
The tradeoffs of having ssh-agent hold all of your SSH keys
|
| 2016-01-30: |
Some good practices for handling OpenSSH keypairs
|
| 2016-01-29: |
What SSH identities will be offered to a remote server and when
|
| 2016-01-28: |
Modern Django makes me repeat myself in the name of something
|
| 2016-01-26: |
Why my home backup situation is currently a bit awkward
Low level issues can have quite odd high level symptoms (again)
|
| 2016-01-25: |
A Python wish: an easy, widely supported way to turn a path into a module
|
| 2016-01-24: |
Hostile HTTPS interception on the modern web is now increasingly costly and risky
|
| 2016-01-22: |
Browsers are increasingly willing to say no to users over HTTPS issues
Memory-safe languages and reading very sensitive files
|
| 2016-01-21: |
One example of why I like ZFS on Linux
|
| 2016-01-20: |
Illumos's ZFS prefetching has recently become less superintelligent than it used to be
|
| 2016-01-18: |
Today I learned that a syslog server can be very silent on the network
A limitation of tcpdump is that you can't tell in from out
|
| 2016-01-17: |
My theory on how network loop caused the problem we observed
|
| 2016-01-15: |
Network loops can have weird effects (at least sometimes)
Things I learned from OpenSSH about reading very sensitive files
|
| 2016-01-13: |
What I want out of backups for my home machine (in the abstract)
Your system's performance is generally built up in layers
|
| 2016-01-11: |
The drawback of setting an explicit mount point for ZFS filesystems
The benefits of flexible space usage in filesystems
|
| 2016-01-10: |
Updating software to IPv6 is often harder than you might think
|
| 2016-01-09: |
The convenience of having keyboard controls for sound volume
|
| 2016-01-08: |
Getting to watch a significant spam campaign recently
|
| 2016-01-07: |
The format of strings in early (pre-C) Unix
|
| 2016-01-06: |
A fun Bash buffering bug (apparently on Linux only)
|
| 2016-01-05: |
Illumos's problem with its VCS commit messages
|
| 2016-01-04: |
How I do per-address blocklists with Exim
|
| 2016-01-03: |
One anti-spam thing I like is per-person (or per-address) blocklists
|
| 2016-01-02: |
I've realized I need to change how I read Twitter
|
| 2015-12-31: |
A defense of C's null-terminated strings
How I've wound up taking my notes
|
| 2015-12-30: |
Some notes on entering unusual characters in various X applications
|
| 2015-12-29: |
Take notes when (and as) you do things and keep them
|
| 2015-12-28: |
The limits of what ZFS scrubs check
|
| 2015-12-27: |
A confession: I find rejecting spam at SMTP time to be more satisfying
|
| 2015-12-26: |
Adjusting mouse sensitivity on Linux, and why you might want to
|
| 2015-12-25: |
I like Magit, the GNU Emacs package for Git
|
| 2015-12-24: |
There is a surprising amount of old SSL code in running MTAs
|
| 2015-12-23: |
Where cryptographic hashes come into TLS certificates
|
| 2015-12-21: |
Some opinions on how package systems should allow you to pin versions
The Apache mod_qos module worked for us
|
| 2015-12-20: |
There are three places spam filtering can happen these days
|
| 2015-12-18: |
A fun tale of network troubleshooting involving VLANs and MACs
Some things about the XSettings system
|
| 2015-12-17: |
Fixing the GTK UI font in my Fedora 23 setup
|
| 2015-12-16: |
I just had another smooth Fedora version upgrade with ZFS on Linux
|
| 2015-12-14: |
Some things that force Go to call the C library for name resolution on Linux
Getting xterm and modern X applications to do cut and paste together
|
| 2015-12-13: |
I still believe in shimming modules for tests
|
| 2015-12-12: |
My views on the choice of Linux distribution
|
| 2015-12-11: |
The ArchLinux wiki has quietly become a good resource for me
|
| 2015-12-09: |
Goroutines, network IO streams, and the resulting synchronization problem
A surprise about cryptographic signatures
|
| 2015-12-07: |
What I like web templating languages for
The old-fashioned and modern ways to remap keys in X (some notes)
|
| 2015-12-06: |
The (peculiar) freedom of having a slow language
|
| 2015-12-05: |
The details behind zpool list's new fragmentation percentage
|
| 2015-12-04: |
One limit to how much TLS can do for you against MITM attacks
|
| 2015-12-02: |
What zpool list's new FRAG fragmentation percentage means
|
| 2015-12-01: |
Red Hat has really doubled down on being email spammers
|
| 2015-11-30: |
My current dilemma: is it worth putting the root filesystem on a SSD
A new piece of my environment: xcape, an X modifier key modifier
|
| 2015-11-29: |
My feelings about my mechanical mini keyboard
|
| 2015-11-27: |
Documentation should explain why things are security issues, at least briefly
A thought on the apparent popularity of new static typing languages
|
| 2015-11-26: |
Some notes on Apache's suexec
|
| 2015-11-25: |
Why speeding up (C)Python matters
|
| 2015-11-23: |
PC laptop and desktop vendors are now clearly hostile parties
Why I care about how fast CPython is
|
| 2015-11-22: |
I should find some good small packages for templates and forms for CGIs
|
| 2015-11-21: |
What I think I want out of autocompletion in GNU Emacs (for Go coding)
|
| 2015-11-20: |
What modern version control systems are
|
| 2015-11-18: |
VCS bisection steps should always be reversible
Increasingly, I no longer solidly and fully know Python
|
| 2015-11-16: |
On public areas on the Net and conversations therein
The problems with creating a new template language
|
| 2015-11-15: |
I should remember that I can cast things in Go
|
| 2015-11-14: |
ZFS pool import needs much better error messages
|
| 2015-11-13: |
We killed off our SunSolve email contact address yesterday
|
| 2015-11-12: |
Don't have support registrations in the name of a specific sysadmin
|
| 2015-11-11: |
No new web templating languages; use an existing one
|
| 2015-11-10: |
Why I spent a lot of time agonizing over an error message recently
|
| 2015-11-09: |
What sysadmins want out of logging means that it can't be too simple
|
| 2015-11-08: |
The great Delete versus Backspace split
|
| 2015-11-07: |
Why I (still) care about SELinux and its flaws
|
| 2015-11-06: |
Revisiting a bit of my X keymapping history
|
| 2015-11-04: |
SELinux's usability, illustrated once again
Outlook.com now has collected some SBL listings
|
| 2015-11-02: |
When setting up per-thing email addresses, make sure you can turn them off
Status reporting commands should have script-oriented output too
|
| 2015-10-31: |
One advantage of System V is that it was available
In practice, anything involving the JVM is often a heavyweight thing
|
| 2015-10-30: |
My discovery that the USB mouse polling rate matters
|
| 2015-10-29: |
USB mouse polling rates under Linux
|
| 2015-10-28: |
System V was kind of backwards for a long time
|
| 2015-10-27: |
Some theories about what spammers get out of using null sender addresses
|
| 2015-10-26: |
The null sender spammers now seem to be entrenched on outlook.com
|
| 2015-10-25: |
More on chroot()'s history, and my blind spot about System III
|
| 2015-10-24: |
How my PS/2 to USB conversion issues have shaken out
|
| 2015-10-23: |
Perhaps it's a good idea to reboot everything periodically
|
| 2015-10-22: |
CPython's trust of bytecode is not a security problem
|
| 2015-10-21: |
Python bytecode is quite heavily trusted by CPython
|
| 2015-10-20: |
Why I never tell people how I voted
|
| 2015-10-19: |
Installing and pinning specific versions of OmniOS packages
|
| 2015-10-18: |
In Go, unsafe.Pointer is a built in type in the compiler
|
| 2015-10-17: |
Do generic stock servers have a future in a cloud world?
|
| 2015-10-16: |
Inside a Go 'terrible hack' in the reflect package
|
| 2015-10-15: |
Some notes on finding package versions in OmniOS with pkg
|
| 2015-10-14: |
OS installers should be easy to open up and modify
|
| 2015-10-13: |
Why I've come to really like git
|
| 2015-10-12: |
Why we hold kernels and other packages on our Ubuntu machines
|
| 2015-10-11: |
Bad news about how we detect and recover from NFS server problems
|
| 2015-10-09: |
How much space ZFS reserves in your pools varies across versions
Our low-rent approach to verifying that NFS mounts are there
|
| 2015-10-08: |
Why you (probably) want to have blog categories (and topics and more)
|
| 2015-10-07: |
The irritation of all of the Ubuntu kernels you wind up with
|
| 2015-10-05: |
How many recent sender domains are in the Spamhaus DBL
I don't trust Linux distributions to leave directories alone
|
| 2015-10-04: |
There's no point in multiple system filesystems any more
|
| 2015-10-03: |
There are two approaches to disaster recovery plans
|
| 2015-10-02: |
What creates a good wikitext dialect depends on how it's going to be used
|
| 2015-09-30: |
There are good and bad wikitext dialects
Why I can't see IPv6 as a smooth or fast transition
|
| 2015-09-29: |
Maybe I should try to find another good mini keyboard
|
| 2015-09-28: |
On not having people split their time between different bosses
|
| 2015-09-27: |
Wikitext not having errors creates a backtracking problem
|
| 2015-09-26: |
I've decided I'll port DWiki to Python 3, but not any time soon
|
| 2015-09-25: |
Do we want to continue using a SAN in our future fileserver design?
|
| 2015-09-24: |
We're probably going to need new Linux iSCSI target software
|
| 2015-09-23: |
One thing I'm hoping for in our third generation fileservers
|
| 2015-09-22: |
The Go 'rolling errors' pattern, in function call form
|
| 2015-09-21: |
When chroot() started to confine processes inside the new root
|
| 2015-09-20: |
Spam from outlook.com has gotten worse (well, for me)
|
| 2015-09-19: |
Experimenting with Firefox's 'Reader' mode (or view)
|
| 2015-09-18: |
Modern Linux laptop suspending and screenlocking makes me twitch
|
| 2015-09-17: |
We know what you are
|
| 2015-09-16: |
There are two different scenarios for replacing disks in a RAID
|
| 2015-09-14: |
A caution about cgo's error returns for errno
Tweaking code when I'm faced with the urge to replace it entirely
|
| 2015-09-13: |
I should have started blocking web page elements well before now
|
| 2015-09-12: |
How NFS deals with the pending delete problem
|
| 2015-09-11: |
ZFS scrub rates, speeds, and how fast is fast
|
| 2015-09-10: |
Changing kernel tunables can drastically speed up ZFS scrubs
|
| 2015-09-09: |
Some notes on my experience using Go's cgo system
|
| 2015-09-08: |
How we disable accounts here (and why)
|
| 2015-09-07: |
Getting gocode based autocompletion working for Go in GNU Emacs
Why we wind up deleting user accounts
|
| 2015-09-06: |
Optimizing finding unowned files on our ZFS fileservers
|
| 2015-09-05: |
Why we aren't tempted to use ACLs on our Unix machines
|
| 2015-09-04: |
Consistency and durability in the context of filesystems
|
| 2015-09-03: |
How I've decided to coordinate multiple git repos for a single project
|
| 2015-09-02: |
Thinking about the different models of supplying computing
|
| 2015-08-31: |
CGo's Go string functions explained
Turning, well copying blobs of memory into Go structures
|
| 2015-08-30: |
Getting C-compatible structs in Go with and for cgo
|
| 2015-08-29: |
The mailing list thread to bug tracking system problem
|
| 2015-08-28: |
The somewhat surprising history of chroot()
|
| 2015-08-27: |
Some notes on using Solaris kstat(s) in a program
|
| 2015-08-26: |
Why I wind up writing my own (sysadmin) tools
|
| 2015-08-25: |
One view on practical blockers for IPv6 adoption
|
| 2015-08-24: |
PS/2 to USB converters are complex things with interesting faults
|
| 2015-08-23: |
I think you should get your TLS configuration advice from Mozilla
|
| 2015-08-21: |
What surprised me about the Python assignment puzzle
What's going on with a Python assignment puzzle
|
| 2015-08-20: |
Using abstract namespace Unix domain sockets and SO_PEERCRED in Python
|
| 2015-08-19: |
Linux's abstract namespace for Unix domain sockets
|
| 2015-08-17: |
Getting dd's skip and seek straight once and for all
Why languages like 'declare before use' for variables and functions
|
| 2015-08-16: |
My irritation with Intel's CPU segmentation (and why it probably exists)
|
| 2015-08-15: |
Spam scoring systems are often not deliberately designed
|
| 2015-08-14: |
My current views on using DomainKeys (DKIM) here
|
| 2015-08-13: |
Enabling services on package updates is a terrible mistake
|
| 2015-08-12: |
What common older versions of free are telling you
|
| 2015-08-11: |
What free is really telling you, and some bits from /proc/meminfo
|
| 2015-08-10: |
My irritation with 'systemctl status'
|
| 2015-08-09: |
One potential problem with cloud computing for us is the payment model
|
| 2015-08-08: |
The ARC now seems to work right in ZFS on Linux
|
| 2015-08-07: |
One thing I now really want in ZFS: faster scrubs (and resilvers)
|
| 2015-08-06: |
Two factor authentication and emergency access to systems
|
| 2015-08-05: |
What I want out of two factor authentication for my own use
|
| 2015-08-04: |
A lesson to myself: commit my local changes in little bits
|
| 2015-08-03: |
Running Fedora 22's dnf as a normal user versus as root
|
| 2015-08-02: |
My view on the potential death of the ad-supported web
|
| 2015-07-31: |
The future problem with Firefox's Electrolysis project
Ubuntu once again fails at a good kernel security update announcement
|
| 2015-07-29: |
My workflow for testing Github pull requests
A cynical view on needing SSDs in all your machines in the future
|
| 2015-07-28: |
Why I still report bugs
|
| 2015-07-27: |
Spammers mine everything, Github edition
|
| 2015-07-26: |
Why I increasingly think we're unlikely to ever use Docker
|
| 2015-07-25: |
Everything that does TLS should log the SSL parameters used
|
| 2015-07-24: |
Fedora 22's problem with my scroll wheel
|
| 2015-07-22: |
A modest little change I'd like to see in bug reporting systems
Some thoughts on log rolling with date extensions
|
| 2015-07-20: |
My brush with the increasing pervasiveness of smartphone GPS mapping
The OmniOS kernel can hold major amounts of unused memory for a long time
|
| 2015-07-19: |
'Retail' versus 'wholesale' spam
|
| 2015-07-18: |
Some data on how long it is between fetches of my Atom feed
|
| 2015-07-17: |
Your standard input is a tty in a number of surprising cases
|
| 2015-07-15: |
Eating memory in Python the easy way
Mdb is so close to being a great tool for introspecting the kernel
|
| 2015-07-14: |
Don't support shortened versions of your domain names in email addresses
|
| 2015-07-13: |
My personal view of OpenBSD
|
| 2015-07-12: |
A Linux software RAID message flood
|
| 2015-07-11: |
OpenBSD and the impact of culture
|
| 2015-07-10: |
What SSH keys in your .ssh/config will be offered to servers
|
| 2015-07-09: |
When SSH needs you to decrypt your keys
|
| 2015-07-08: |
Making GTK applications in alternate locations, settings edition
|
| 2015-07-07: |
The Git 'commit local changes and rebase' experience is a winning one
|
| 2015-07-06: |
My Django form field validation and cleanup pain
|
| 2015-07-05: |
Sysadmin use of email is often necessarily more or less interrupt driven
|
| 2015-07-04: |
Googlebot and Feedfetcher are still aggressively grabbing syndication feeds
|
| 2015-07-03: |
Wandering Thoughts is now ten years old
Some notes on my 'commit local changes and rebase' Git workflow
|
| 2015-07-02: |
Some thoughts on Go compiler directives being in source comments
|
| 2015-06-30: |
My early impressions of Fedora 22, especially of DNF
The probable and prosaic explanation for a socket() API choice
|
| 2015-06-29: |
BSD Unix developed over more time than I usually think
|
| 2015-06-28: |
Faster SSDs matter to companies because they sell things
|
| 2015-06-27: |
The next (or coming) way to connect SSDs to your system
|
| 2015-06-26: |
The status of our problems with overloaded OmniOS NFS servers
|
| 2015-06-25: |
Multiple set matches with Linux's iptables 'ipset' extension
|
| 2015-06-24: |
I've finally turned SELinux fully off even on my laptop
|
| 2015-06-23: |
A Bash test limitation and the brute force way around it
|
| 2015-06-22: |
Modern *BSDs have a much better init system than I was expecting
|
| 2015-06-21: |
Why System V init's split scripts approach is better than classical BSD
|
| 2015-06-20: |
Thinking about people's SSD inflection points in general
|
| 2015-06-19: |
Sometimes looking into spam for a blog entry has unexpected benefits
|
| 2015-06-18: |
The cost of OmniOS not having /etc/cron.d
|
| 2015-06-17: |
Exploring the irritating thing about Python's .join()
|
| 2015-06-16: |
NFS writes and whether or not they're synchronous
|
| 2015-06-15: |
My view of NFS protocol versions
|
| 2015-06-14: |
What I plug into my home Linux machine as far as peripherals go
|
| 2015-06-12: |
My pragmatic view of HTTPS versus caching
Red Hat are marketing email spammers now (in the traditional way)
|
| 2015-06-11: |
HTTP should be dropped even as a pure Internet transport mechanism
|
| 2015-06-10: |
My pragmatic view on switching to HTTPS and TLS everywhere
|
| 2015-06-09: |
How I use virtual screens in my desktop environment
|
| 2015-06-08: |
Exceptions as aggregators of error handling
|
| 2015-06-07: |
You won't get people off Python 2 by making their lives worse
|
| 2015-06-06: |
The security danger of exploitable bugs in file format libraries
|
| 2015-06-05: |
My current views on Rust (the programming language)
|
| 2015-06-04: |
Linux evolution through de facto quiet standards
|
| 2015-06-03: |
What makes for a simple web application environment
|
| 2015-06-01: |
The problem with 'what is your data worth?'
|
| 2015-05-31: |
Unix has been bad before
My view of setting up sane web server application delegations
|
| 2015-05-30: |
What I'm doing in reaction to Logjam (for HTTPS, SSH, and IKE)
|
| 2015-05-29: |
I don't commit changes in my working repos
|
| 2015-05-28: |
I don't find Github pull requests an easy way to submit patches
|
| 2015-05-27: |
The impact on you of making 'bad' bug reports
|
| 2015-05-25: |
One of the problems with 'you should submit a patch'
Email providers cannot stop spam by scanning outgoing email
|
| 2015-05-24: |
A mod_wsgi problem with serving both HTTP and HTTPS from the same WSGI app
|
| 2015-05-23: |
The right way for your WSGI app to know if it's using HTTPS
|
| 2015-05-22: |
Unsurprisingly, Amazon is now running a mail spamming service
|
| 2015-05-21: |
It's time for me to stop using lighttpd
|
| 2015-05-20: |
On the modern web, ISPs are one of your threats
|
| 2015-05-19: |
Converting filesystems from ext3 to ext4, and concerns attached to it (plus bad news for me)
|
| 2015-05-17: |
Why I'm interested in converting my ext3 filesystems to ext4
A bit more on the ZFS delete queue and snapshots
|
| 2015-05-15: |
Your Illumos-based NFS fileserver may be 'leaking' deleted files
The ZFS delete queue: ZFS's solution to the pending delete problem
The pending delete problem for Unix filesystems
|
| 2015-05-14: |
In Go, you need to always make sure that your goroutines will finish
|
| 2015-05-13: |
Go goroutines as a way to capture and hold state
|
| 2015-05-12: |
It's time to stop coddling software that can't handle HTTPS URLs
|
| 2015-05-11: |
The problem with proportional fonts for editing code and related things
|
| 2015-05-10: |
Our mail submission system winds up handling two sorts of senders
|
| 2015-05-09: |
What addresses we accept and reject during mail submission
|
| 2015-05-08: |
Sometimes it's useful to have brute force handy: an amusing IPMI bug
|
| 2015-05-06: |
Why keeping output to 80 columns (or less) is still sensible
Unix's pipeline problem (okay, its problem with file redirection too)
|
| 2015-05-04: |
Monitoring tools should report timestamps (and what they're monitoring)
What I want to have in shell (filename) completion
|
| 2015-05-03: |
Sometimes knowing causes does you no good (and sensible uses of time)
|
| 2015-05-02: |
OmniOS as a NFS server has problems with sustained write loads
|
| 2015-04-30: |
I'm considering ways to mass-add URLs to Firefox's history database
Why I have a perpetual browser history
|
| 2015-04-29: |
The 'EHLO ylmf-pc' plague of SMTP authentication guessers
|
| 2015-04-28: |
There's no portable way to turn a file descriptor read only or write only
|
| 2015-04-27: |
The fading out of tcpwrappers and its idea
|
| 2015-04-26: |
My complicated feelings on abandoning old but good code
|
| 2015-04-25: |
I'm still running a twelve year old Python program
|
| 2015-04-24: |
A DKMS problem I had with lingering old versions
|
| 2015-04-23: |
Upgrading machines versus reinstalling them
|
| 2015-04-22: |
Don't make /opt a filesystem on OmniOS (or probably Illumos generally)
|
| 2015-04-20: |
I don't think I'm interested in containers
An interesting trick for handling line numbers in little languages
|
| 2015-04-19: |
A potential path to IPv6 (again), but probably not a realistic one today
|
| 2015-04-18: |
A core problem of IPv6 adoption is the lack of user benefits
|
| 2015-04-17: |
In practice, programmers mostly understand complexity by superstition
|
| 2015-04-16: |
Are Python dictionaries necessarily constant-time data structures?
|
| 2015-04-15: |
Illusory security is terrible and is worse than no security
|
| 2015-04-14: |
Allowing people to be in more than 16 groups with an OmniOS NFS server
|
| 2015-04-12: |
One speed limit on your ability to upgrade your systems
Spam victims don't care what business unit is responsible for the spam
|
| 2015-04-10: |
I wish systemd would get over its thing about syslog
My Firefox 37 extensions and addons (sort of)
|
| 2015-04-09: |
Probably why Fedora puts their release version in package release numbers
|
| 2015-04-08: |
Your entire download infrastructure needs to use HTTPS
|
| 2015-04-07: |
How Ubuntu and Fedora each do kernel packages
|
| 2015-04-06: |
What adblockers block
|
| 2015-04-05: |
A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers
|
| 2015-04-04: |
An important note if you want to totally stop an IKE IPSec connection
A weird new IKE IPSec problem that I just had on Fedora 21's latest kernel
|
| 2015-04-03: |
Understanding the (original) meaning of Unix load average
|
| 2015-04-02: |
When the Unix load average was added to Unix
|
| 2015-03-31: |
Btrfs's mistake in limiting itself to two-way mirroring
|
| 2015-03-30: |
My preliminary views on mosh
The 'cattle' model for servers is only a good fit in certain situations
|
| 2015-03-29: |
SSH connection sharing and erratic networks
|
| 2015-03-28: |
All browsers need a (good) way to flush memorized HTTP redirects
|
| 2015-03-27: |
Looking more deeply into some SMTP authentication probes
|
| 2015-03-26: |
Why systemd should have ignored SysV init script LSB dependencies
|
| 2015-03-25: |
A significant amount of programming is done by superstition
|
| 2015-03-24: |
What is and isn't a bug in software
|
| 2015-03-23: |
Systemd is not fully backwards compatible with System V init scripts
|
| 2015-03-22: |
I now feel that Red Hat Enterprise 6 is okay (although not great)
|
| 2015-03-21: |
Spammers show up fast when you open up port 25 (at least sometimes)
|
| 2015-03-20: |
Unix's mistake with rm and directories
|
| 2015-03-19: |
A brief history of fiddling with Unix directories
|
| 2015-03-18: |
The real speed advantage static rendering has over dynamic rendering
|
| 2015-03-16: |
Solving our authenticated SMTP problem by rethinking it
Our difficulties with OmniOS upgrades
|
| 2015-03-15: |
The importance of user interface, illustrated by the Go flag package
|
| 2015-03-14: |
Using an automounter doesn't always help with bad NFS servers
|
| 2015-03-13: |
The puzzle of packets to your host that your host doesn't respond to
|
| 2015-03-12: |
My feelings about GRUB 1 versus GRUB 2
|
| 2015-03-11: |
The irritation of being told 'everyone who cares uses ECC RAM'
|
| 2015-03-10: |
Why installing packages is almost always going to be slow (today)
|
| 2015-03-09: |
I should document my test plans and their results
|
| 2015-03-08: |
Why ZFS's 'directory must be empty' mount restriction is sensible
|
| 2015-03-06: |
Our brute force solution for port isolation without port isolated switches
The simple way CPython does constant folding
|
| 2015-03-05: |
An interesting excursion with Python strings and is
|
| 2015-03-04: |
What creates inheritance?
|
| 2015-03-03: |
The latest xterm versions mangle $SHELL in annoying ways
|
| 2015-03-02: |
My view of the difference between 'pets' and 'cattle'
|
| 2015-02-28: |
Sometimes why we have singleton machines is that failover is hard
|
| 2015-02-27: |
Email from generic word domains is usually advance fee fraud spam
What limits how fast we can install machines
|
| 2015-02-25: |
My current issues with systemd's networkd in Fedora 21
My Linux container temptation: running other Linuxes
|
| 2015-02-24: |
How we do and document machine builds
|
| 2015-02-23: |
In shell programming, I should be more willing to write custom tools
|
| 2015-02-22: |
Unsurprisingly, random SMTP servers do get open relay probes
|
| 2015-02-21: |
It turns out that I routinely use some really old Linux binaries
|
| 2015-02-20: |
All of our Solaris 10 machines are now out of production
|
| 2015-02-19: |
Exploiting Python metaclasses to forbid subclassing and where it fails
|
| 2015-02-18: |
I wish Python didn't allow any callable to be a 'metaclass'
|
| 2015-02-17: |
Your example code should work and be error-free
|
| 2015-02-16: |
Web ads considered as a security exposure
|
| 2015-02-15: |
My current views on Firefox adblocker addons
|
| 2015-02-14: |
Planning ahead in documentation: kind of a war story
|
| 2015-02-13: |
The technical side of Python metaclasses (a pointer)
|
| 2015-02-11: |
Good technical writing is not characterless and bland
ZFS can apparently start NFS fileservice before boot finishes
|
| 2015-02-10: |
Our ZFS fileservers have a serious problem when pools hit quota limits
|
| 2015-02-09: |
'Inbox zero' doesn't seem to work for me but it's still tempting
|
| 2015-02-08: |
The history of commercial Unix and my pragmatism
|
| 2015-02-07: |
Trying to move towards Ed25519 OpenSSH host keys: a stumbling block
|
| 2015-02-06: |
A thought on containerization, isolation, and deployment
|
| 2015-02-05: |
All of our important machines are pets and special snowflakes
|
| 2015-02-04: |
How our console server setup works
|
| 2015-02-03: |
Why we've wound up moving away from serial consoles on our machines
|
| 2015-02-02: |
Why people were enthused about gcc early on in its life
|
| 2015-01-31: |
The problem with punishing people over policy violations
Upgrades and support periods
|
| 2015-01-30: |
I've come to believe Django's way of defining database tables is wrong
|
| 2015-01-29: |
The practical result of OpenBSD's support policy
|
| 2015-01-28: |
A thought about social obligations to report bugs
|
| 2015-01-27: |
Our current email anti-virus system is probably ineffective now
|
| 2015-01-26: |
Some notes on keeping up with Go packages and commands
|
| 2015-01-25: |
The long term problem with ZFS on Linux is its license
|
| 2015-01-24: |
Web applications and generating alerts due to HTTP requests
|
| 2015-01-23: |
A problem with gnome-terminal in Fedora 21, and tracking it down
|
| 2015-01-22: |
How to set up static networking with systemd-networkd, or at least how I did
|
| 2015-01-21: |
Why I'm switching to systemd's networkd stuff for my networking
|
| 2015-01-19: |
A gotcha with Python tuples
Why user-hostile policies are a bad thing and a mistake
|
| 2015-01-18: |
Limited retention policies for email are user-hostile
|
| 2015-01-16: |
Node.js is not for me (and why)
Using systemd-run to limit something's RAM consumption on the fly
|
| 2015-01-15: |
Link: Against DNSSEC by Thomas Ptacek
General ZFS pool shrinking will likely be coming to Illumos
|
| 2015-01-14: |
What /etc/shells is and isn't
|
| 2015-01-13: |
Our tradeoffs on ZFS ZIL SLOG devices for pools
|
| 2015-01-12: |
I've now seen comment spam attempts from Tor exit nodes
|
| 2015-01-11: |
The effects of losing a ZFS ZIL SLOG device, as I understand them
|
| 2015-01-10: |
Autoplaying anything is a terrible decision, doubly so for video
|
| 2015-01-09: |
Why filesystems need to be where data is checksummed
|
| 2015-01-08: |
ZFS should be your choice today if you need an advanced filesystem on Unix
|
| 2015-01-07: |
Forwarding access to only a subset of ssh-agent's identities
|
| 2015-01-06: |
Choices filesystems make about checksums
|
| 2015-01-05: |
Today on Linux, ZFS is your only real choice for an advanced filesystem
|
| 2015-01-04: |
What makes a 'next generation' or 'advanced' modern filesystem, for me
|
| 2015-01-03: |
The effects of our fileserver multi-tenancy
|
| 2015-01-02: |
Where we have multi-tenancy in our fileserver environment
|
| 2014-12-31: |
I love Apache (well, like it at least)
A retrospective on my one Django web application
|
| 2014-12-30: |
Somewhat to my surprise, classical viruses by email are still a thing
|
| 2014-12-29: |
How I have partitioning et al set up for ZFS On Linux
|
| 2014-12-28: |
How I think DNSSec will have to be used in the real world
|
| 2014-12-27: |
My ZFS On Linux memory problem: competition from the page cache
|
| 2014-12-26: |
My experience with ZFS on Linux: it's worked pretty well for me
|
| 2014-12-25: |
DNSSec in the real world: my experience with DNSSec
|
| 2014-12-24: |
The security effects of tearing down my GRE tunnel on IPSec failure
|
| 2014-12-22: |
The future of OmniOS here if we can't get 10G-T working on it
Why Go's big virtual size for 64-bit programs makes sense
|
| 2014-12-21: |
A steady change in the source of blog comment spam attempts
|
| 2014-12-20: |
Unsurprisingly, laptops make bad to terrible desktops
|
| 2014-12-19: |
Our likely long road to working 10G-T on OmniOS
|
| 2014-12-17: |
The potential end of public clients at the university?
|
| 2014-12-16: |
Does having a separate daemon manager help system resilience?
|
| 2014-12-15: |
How a Firefox update just damaged practical security
Why your 64-bit Go programs may have a huge virtual size
|
| 2014-12-14: |
How init wound up as Unix's daemon manager
|
| 2014-12-13: |
There are two parts to making your code work with Python 3
|
| 2014-12-12: |
The bad side of systemd: two recent systemd failures
|
| 2014-12-10: |
What good kernel messages should be about and be like
How to delay your fileserver replacement project by six months or so
|
| 2014-12-09: |
Why I do unit tests from inside my modules, not outside them
|
| 2014-12-08: |
Why I don't believe in generic TLS terminator programs
|
| 2014-12-07: |
How we install Ubuntu machines here
|
| 2014-12-06: |
Browser addons can effectively create a new browser
|
| 2014-12-05: |
How security sensitive is information about your network architecture?
|
| 2014-12-04: |
Log retention versus log analysis, or really logs versus log analysis
|
| 2014-12-03: |
Security capabilities and reading process memory
|
| 2014-12-02: |
The unreasonable effectiveness of web crawlers
|
| 2014-11-30: |
You should keep your system logs for longer than you probably are
TLS versions in connections to my spam-catching sinkhole SMTP server
|
| 2014-11-29: |
Sometimes you need to turn things into small, readily solvable problems
|
| 2014-11-28: |
How I made IPSec IKE work for a point to point GRE tunnel on Fedora 20
|
| 2014-11-26: |
Using iptables to block traffic that's not protected by IPSec
Using go get alone is a bad way to keep track of interesting packages
|
| 2014-11-25: |
My Linux IPSec/VPN setup and requirements
|
| 2014-11-24: |
Delays on bad passwords considered harmful, accidental reboot edition
Using the SSH protocol as a secure transport protocol
|
| 2014-11-23: |
I'm happier ignoring the world of spam and anti-spam
|
| 2014-11-22: |
The effects of a moderate Hacker News link to here
|
| 2014-11-21: |
Lisp and data structures: one reason it hasn't attracted me
|
| 2014-11-20: |
Sometimes the way to solve a problem is to rethink the problem
|
| 2014-11-18: |
Finding free numbers in a range, crudely, with Unix tools
|
| 2014-11-17: |
Why I need a browser that's willing to accept bad TLS certificates
|
| 2014-11-16: |
We've started to decommission our Solaris 10 fileservers
States in a state machine aren't your only representation of state
|
| 2014-11-15: |
Our current problems with 10G Intel networking on OmniOS
|
| 2014-11-14: |
Sometimes there are drawbacks to replicating configuration files
|
| 2014-11-13: |
I want opportunistic, identity-less encryption on the Internet
|
| 2014-11-12: |
A wish: setting Python 3 to do no implicit Unicode conversions
|
| 2014-11-10: |
Why I don't have a real profile picture anywhere
What it took to get DWiki running under Python 3
|
| 2014-11-09: |
NFS hard mounts versus soft mounts
|
| 2014-11-07: |
What you're saying when you tell people to send in patches
Porting to Python 3 by updating to modern Python 2
|
| 2014-11-05: |
(Probably) Why Bash imports functions from the environment
The weakness of doing authentication over a side channel
|
| 2014-11-03: |
Hassles with getting our NFS mount authentication working on Linux
What I'm worried about with retina displays on Linux
|
| 2014-11-02: |
A drawback in how DWiki parses its wikitext
|
| 2014-10-31: |
With ZFS, rewriting a file in place might make you run out of space
A drawback to handling errors via exceptions
|
| 2014-10-29: |
Quick notes on the Linux iptables 'ipset' extension
Unnoticed nonportability in Bourne shell code (and elsewhere)
|
| 2014-10-28: |
My current somewhat tangled feelings on operator.attrgetter
|
| 2014-10-27: |
Practical security and automatic updates
|
| 2014-10-26: |
Things that can happen when (and as) your ZFS pool fills up
|
| 2014-10-25: |
The difference in available pool space between zfs list and zpool list
|
| 2014-10-24: |
In Go I've given up and I'm now using standard packages
|
| 2014-10-23: |
The clarity drawback of allowing comparison functions for sorting
|
| 2014-10-22: |
Exim's (log) identifiers are basically unique on a given machine
|
| 2014-10-20: |
Some numbers on our inbound and outbound TLS usage in SMTP
Revisiting Python's string concatenation optimization
|
| 2014-10-19: |
Vegeta, a tool for web server stress testing
|
| 2014-10-18: |
During your crisis, remember to look for anomalies
|
| 2014-10-17: |
My experience doing relatively low level X stuff in Go
|
| 2014-10-16: |
Don't use dd as a quick version of disk mirroring
|
| 2014-10-15: |
Why system administrators hate security researchers every so often
|
| 2014-10-14: |
Bashisms in #!/bin/sh scripts are not necessarily bugs
|
| 2014-10-13: |
System metrics need to be documented, not just to exist
|
| 2014-10-12: |
Phish spammers are apparently exploiting mailing list software
|
| 2014-10-11: |
Thinking about how to create flexible aggregations from causes
|
| 2014-10-10: |
Where your memory can be going with ZFS on Linux
|
| 2014-10-09: |
How /proc/slabinfo is not quite telling you what it looks like
|
| 2014-10-08: |
Simple web application environments and per-request state
|
| 2014-10-07: |
Why blocking writes are a good Unix API (on pipes and elsewhere)
|
| 2014-10-06: |
Why it's sensible for large writes to pipes to block
|
| 2014-10-05: |
Making bug reports is exhausting, frustrating, and stressful
|
| 2014-10-03: |
Why people are almost never going to be reporting bugs upstream
When using Illumos's lockstat, check the cumulative numbers too
|
| 2014-10-02: |
The problem with making bug reports about CentOS bugs
|
| 2014-09-30: |
NetworkManager and network device races
Don't split up error messages in your source code
|
| 2014-09-28: |
Learning a lesson about spam-related logging (again)
|
| 2014-09-27: |
Changing major version numbers does not fix compatibility issues
DWiki, Python 3, Python, and me
|
| 2014-09-26: |
The practical problems with simple web apps that work as HTTP servers
|
| 2014-09-25: |
Why CGI-BIN scripts are an attractive thing for many people
|
| 2014-09-24: |
One thing I've come to dislike about systemd
|
| 2014-09-22: |
Go is mostly easy to cross-compile (with notes)
Another side of my view of Python 3
|
| 2014-09-21: |
One reason why Go can have methods on nil pointers
|
| 2014-09-19: |
My view on using VLANs for security
What I mean by passive versus active init systems
|
| 2014-09-18: |
Ubuntu's packaging failure with mcelog in 14.04
|
| 2014-09-17: |
In praise of Solaris's pfiles command
|
| 2014-09-15: |
My collection of spam and the spread of SMTP TLS
I want my signed email to work a lot like SSH does
|
| 2014-09-14: |
My current hassles with Firefox, Flash, and (HTML5) video
|
| 2014-09-13: |
What can go wrong with polling for writability on blocking sockets
|
| 2014-09-12: |
How not to do IO multiplexing, as illustrated by Amanda
|
| 2014-09-10: |
The cause of our slow Amanda backups and our workaround
Does init actually need to do daemon supervision?
|
| 2014-09-08: |
What an init system needs to do in the abstract
|
| 2014-09-07: |
Systemd's fate will be decided by whether or not it works
The kernel should not generate messages at the behest of the Internet
|
| 2014-09-05: |
A DTrace script to help figure out what process IO is slow
Some uses for SIGSTOP and some cautions
|
| 2014-09-04: |
Some other benefits of using non-HTTP frontend to backend transports
|
| 2014-09-03: |
Why we don't want to do any NAT with IPv6
|
| 2014-09-01: |
An IPv6 dilemma for us: 'sandbox' machine DNS
|
| 2014-08-31: |
We don't believe in DHCP for (our) servers
The downside of expanding your storage through bigger disks
|
| 2014-08-30: |
How to change your dm-cache write mode on the fly in Linux
|
| 2014-08-29: |
A hazard of using synthetic data in tests, illustrated by me
|
| 2014-08-27: |
One reason why we have to do a major storage migration
The difference between Linux and FreeBSD boosters for me
|
| 2014-08-26: |
Why I don't like HTTP as a frontend to backend transport mechanism
|
| 2014-08-24: |
10G Ethernet is a sea change for my assumptions
My spam is (mostly) boring
|
| 2014-08-23: |
Some notes on Python packaging stuff that wasn't obvious to me
|
| 2014-08-22: |
Where DTrace aggregates are handled for printing et al
|
| 2014-08-21: |
How data flows around on the client during an Amanda backup
|
| 2014-08-20: |
Explicit error checking and the broad exception catching problem
|
| 2014-08-18: |
An example of a subtle over-broad try in Python
The potential issue with Go's strings
|
| 2014-08-17: |
The challenges of diagnosing slow backups
|
| 2014-08-15: |
Caches should be safe by default
A consequence of NFS locking and unlocking not necessarily being fast
|
| 2014-08-13: |
Bind mounts with systemd and non-fstab filesystems
How you create a systemd .mount file for bind mounts
|
| 2014-08-11: |
Copying GPT partition tables from disk to disk
|
| 2014-08-10: |
The problem with self-contained 'application bundle' style packaging
What I want out of a Linux SSD disk cache layer
|
| 2014-08-09: |
Intel has screwed up their DC S3500 SSDs
|
| 2014-08-08: |
Hardware can be weird, Intel 10G-T X540-AT2 edition
|
| 2014-08-06: |
A peculiarity: I'm almost never logged in to websites
|
| 2014-08-05: |
Why LinkedIn's 'you must join to unsubscribe' is evil
Another piece of my environment: running commands on multiple machines
|
| 2014-08-04: |
Why our new SAN environment is separate from our old SAN environment
|
| 2014-08-03: |
Our second generation ZFS fileservers and their setup
|
| 2014-08-02: |
The benchmarking problems with potentially too-smart SSDs
|
| 2014-07-31: |
The temptation to rebuild my office machine with its data in ZFS on Linux
|
| 2014-07-30: |
Why I like ZFS in general
My view on FreeBSD versus Linux, primarily on the desktop
|
| 2014-07-28: |
FreeBSD, cultural bad blood, and me
|
| 2014-07-27: |
Go is still a young language
Save your test scripts and other test materials
|
| 2014-07-25: |
An interesting picky difference between Bourne shells
The OmniOS version of SSH is kind of slow for bulk transfers
|
| 2014-07-23: |
What influences SSH's bulk transfer speeds
One of SELinux's important limits
|
| 2014-07-21: |
What I know about the different types of SSH keys (and some opinions)
|
| 2014-07-20: |
The CBL has a real false positive problem
HTTPS should remain genuinely optional on the web
|
| 2014-07-19: |
Some consequences of widespread use of OCSP for HTTPS
|
| 2014-07-18: |
In practice, 10G-T today can be finicky
|
| 2014-07-16: |
My (somewhat silly) SSD dilemma
|
| 2014-07-15: |
A data point on how rapidly spammers pick up addresses from the web
|
| 2014-07-14: |
Unmounting recoverable stale NFS mounts on Linux
|
| 2014-07-13: |
An obvious reminder: disks can and do die abruptly
Early impressions of CentOS 7
|
| 2014-07-11: |
You want to turn console blanking off on your Linux servers
Some notes on bisecting a modified Firefox source base with Mercurial
|
| 2014-07-10: |
The core security problem of SSL on the web is too much trust
|
| 2014-07-09: |
What the differences are between Python bools and ints
|
| 2014-07-08: |
Exploring a surprise with equality in Python
Some thoughts on SAN long-term storage migration
|
| 2014-07-06: |
Goroutines versus other concurrency handling options in Go
The problem with filenames in IO exceptions and errors
|
| 2014-07-05: |
Another reason to use frameworks like Django
|
| 2014-07-04: |
An interesting Go concurrency bug that I inflicted on myself
|
| 2014-07-02: |
Bash is letting locales destroy shell scripting (at least on Linux)
Why Solaris's SMF is not a good init system
|
| 2014-07-01: |
An index of non-letter control characters
|
| 2014-06-30: |
Comparing RPM versions in the shell
My .screenrc
|
| 2014-06-29: |
The tradeoffs for us in a SAN versus disk servers
|
| 2014-06-27: |
A retrospective on our overall fileserver architecture et al
A retrospective on our Solaris ZFS-based NFS fileservers (part 2)
|
| 2014-06-25: |
A retrospective on our Solaris ZFS-based NFS fileservers (part 1)
How my new responsive design here works
|
| 2014-06-23: |
Python 3 has already succeeded in the long run
|
| 2014-06-22: |
Things I like about Go
I need some responsive website design around here
|
| 2014-06-21: |
Sometimes 'unsubscribing' does seem to reduce spam activity
|
| 2014-06-20: |
What Python versions I can use (June 2014 edition)
|
| 2014-06-19: |
Some notes on Go's godoc and what it formats how
|
| 2014-06-18: |
Would I be comfortable documenting our systems in some sort of public?
|
| 2014-06-16: |
My view: a wiki by itself will not solve your problems
|
| 2014-06-15: |
The web is social, and thus minor features can matter a lot
Weird spammer behavior: a non-relaying relay attempt
|
| 2014-06-14: |
I'm not very impressed with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so far
|
| 2014-06-13: |
Undoing an errant 'git commit --amend'
|
| 2014-06-12: |
An init system has two jobs
|
| 2014-06-11: |
Some thoughts on testing parsers
|
| 2014-06-10: |
An irritating and interesting su change from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04
|
| 2014-06-09: |
A challenge in new languages: learning to design good APIs
|
| 2014-06-08: |
The fundamental problem that created su
|
| 2014-06-07: |
Some ways to do sleazy duck typing in Go (from a Python perspective)
|
| 2014-06-06: |
On the Internet, weirdness is generally uncommon
|
| 2014-06-05: |
SMTP's crazy address formats didn't come from nowhere
|
| 2014-06-04: |
Why I don't like SMTP command parameters
|
| 2014-06-03: |
My just-used Go logging idiom and why it is in fact wrong
|
| 2014-06-02: |
Vi's composability antecedent (or one of them)
|
| 2014-05-31: |
Wnen trying to unsubscribe from spam can be not completely crazy
One of my test based development imperfections: use driven testing
|
| 2014-05-30: |
In Go, sometimes a nil is not a nil
|
| 2014-05-29: |
The state of limits on how many groups you can be in (especially for NFS)
|
| 2014-05-28: |
Yahoo Groups has a bad spam problem and they don't care
|
| 2014-05-27: |
Some things for enumerated constants in Go
|
| 2014-05-25: |
Firefox, DRM, and reality
Computing has two versions of 'necessary'
|
| 2014-05-23: |
What ssh-agent does with multiple keys loaded
Why Java is a compiled language and Python is not
|
| 2014-05-22: |
Why Python uses bytecode (well, probably): it's simpler
|
| 2014-05-21: |
How I wish ZFS pool importing could work
|
| 2014-05-19: |
A building block of my environment: sps, a better tree-based process list
Why desktop Linuxes want you to reboot after updates
|
| 2014-05-18: |
What it would take to replace Firefox as my web browser
|
| 2014-05-17: |
The problem of encrypted SSH keys and screen
|
| 2014-05-16: |
Some notes from migrating towards encrypted SSH keys
|
| 2014-05-15: |
My personal and biased view of sudo versus su
|
| 2014-05-14: |
Modern mail forwarding is leaky
|
| 2014-05-13: |
The security model of sudo versus su
|
| 2014-05-12: |
The advantages of editors over database programs for modifying your data
|
| 2014-05-11: |
Why I don't use relational databases in practice
|
| 2014-05-09: |
Some uses for Python's 'named' form of string formatting
Operating systems cannot be hermetically sealed environments
|
| 2014-05-08: |
The modern world of spliced together multi-layer DNS resolution
|
| 2014-05-07: |
How I use Unbound on Fedora 20 to deal with the VPN DNS issue
|
| 2014-05-06: |
Another problem with building your own packages: dependency issues
|
| 2014-05-05: |
The power of meaningless identifiers
|
| 2014-05-04: |
How I set up my Firefox 29's UI
|
| 2014-05-03: |
My Firefox 29 extensions and addons
|
| 2014-05-02: |
An important addition to how ZFS deduplication works on the disk
|
| 2014-04-30: |
Failover versus sparing in theory and in practice
Backup systems, actual hosts, and logical hosts
|
| 2014-04-29: |
Static sites are stable sites
|
| 2014-04-28: |
How dynamic language code gets optimized
|
| 2014-04-27: |
Thoughts about Python classes as structures and optimization
|
| 2014-04-26: |
What I can see about how ZFS deduplication seems to work on disk
|
| 2014-04-25: |
A Unix semantics issue if your filesystem can snapshot arbitrary directories
|
| 2014-04-23: |
How Yahoo's and AOL's DMARC 'reject' policies affect us
At least partially understanding DMARC
|
| 2014-04-21: |
The question of language longevity for new languages
Thinking about how to split logging up in multiple categories et al
|
| 2014-04-20: |
A heresy about memorable passwords
|
| 2014-04-19: |
Cross-system NFS locking and unlocking is not necessarily fast
|
| 2014-04-18: |
What modern filesystems need from volume management
|
| 2014-04-17: |
Partly getting around NFS's concurrent write problem
|
| 2014-04-16: |
Where I feel that btrfs went wrong
|
| 2014-04-14: |
Chasing SSL certificate chains to build a chain file
My reactions to Python's warnings module
|
| 2014-04-13: |
A problem: handling warnings generated at low levels in your code
|
| 2014-04-11: |
The relationship between SSH, SSL, and the Heartbleed bug
What sort of kernel command line arguments Fedora 20's dracut seems to want
|
| 2014-04-10: |
My current choice of a performance metrics system and why I picked it
|
| 2014-04-09: |
Pragmatic reactions to a possible SSL private key compromise
|
| 2014-04-08: |
My goals for gathering performance metrics and statistics
|
| 2014-04-07: |
Giving in: pragmatic If-Modified-Since handling for Tiny Tiny RSS
|
| 2014-04-06: |
How not to generate If-Modified-Since headers for conditional GETs
|
| 2014-04-05: |
An important additional step when shifting software RAID mirrors around
|
| 2014-04-03: |
Shifting a software RAID mirror from disk to disk in modern Linux
The scariness of uncertainty
|
| 2014-04-02: |
I'm angry that ZFS still doesn't have an API
|
| 2014-03-31: |
I'm done with building tools around 'zpool status' output
Why I sometimes reject patches for my own software
|
| 2014-03-30: |
One of my worries: our spam filtering in the future
|
| 2014-03-28: |
Recovering from a drive failure on Fedora 20 with LVM on software RAID
How we wound up with a RFC 1918 IP address visible in our public DNS
|
| 2014-03-26: |
Why people keep creating new package managers
The DNS TTL problem
|
| 2014-03-24: |
The importance of having full remote consoles on crucial servers
Why I don't trust transitions to single-user mode
|
| 2014-03-23: |
Differences in URL and site layout between static and dynamic websites
|
| 2014-03-22: |
Avoiding reboots should not become a fetish
|
| 2014-03-21: |
Thinking about when rsync's incremental mode doesn't help
|
| 2014-03-20: |
Killing (almost) all processes on Linux is not recoverable
|
| 2014-03-19: |
Why I like ZFS's zfs send and zfs receive
|
| 2014-03-17: |
Simple versus complex marshalling in Python (and benchmarks)
Rebooting the system if init dies is a hack
|
| 2014-03-16: |
You don't have to reboot the system if init dies
|
| 2014-03-14: |
Guessing whether people will unsubscribe from your mailing lists
Logins and related things really do change, and for good reasons
|
| 2014-03-13: |
The argument about unbound methods versus functions
|
| 2014-03-11: |
How functions become bound or unbound methods
|
| 2014-03-10: |
The problem of conditional GET and caches for dynamic websites
|
| 2014-03-09: |
Solaris gives us a lesson in how not to write documentation
Why we don't change Unix login names for people
|
| 2014-03-08: |
Why I think 10G-T will be the dominant form of 10G Ethernet
|
| 2014-03-07: |
Coming to terms with D-Bus
|
| 2014-03-05: |
A bit more about the various levels of IPC: whether or not they're necessary
ZFS's problem with boot time magic
|
| 2014-03-03: |
The multiple levels of interprocess communication
|
| 2014-03-02: |
Googlebot is now aggressively crawling syndication feeds
Cool URL fragments don't change either
|
| 2014-02-28: |
Yet another problem with configuration by running commands
Arguments for explicit block delimiters in programming languages
|
| 2014-02-26: |
PCI slot based device names are not necessarily stable
Saying goodbye to the PHP pokers the easy way
|
| 2014-02-24: |
Nerving myself up to running experimental setups in production
The origins of DWiki and its drifting purpose
|
| 2014-02-23: |
The problem with indentation in programming languages
|
| 2014-02-22: |
A subtle advantage of generating absolute path URLs during HTML rendering
|
| 2014-02-21: |
You should segregate different traffic to different mailing lists
|
| 2014-02-19: |
Some rough things about the naming of SAS drives on Linux
The reasoning problem with describing things with a programming language
|
| 2014-02-18: |
People can always unsubscribe from your mailing lists
|
| 2014-02-17: |
File based engines and the awkward problem of special URLs
|
| 2014-02-16: |
Why comments aren't immediately visible on entries here
|
| 2014-02-14: |
'Broken by design: systemd' is itself kind of broken
The good and bad of the System V init system
|
| 2014-02-13: |
Init's (historical) roles
|
| 2014-02-11: |
Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't
|
| 2014-02-10: |
My dividing line between working remotely and working out of the office
|
| 2014-02-09: |
Why I want a solid ZFS implementation on Linux
Why I'm not looking at installing OmniOS via Kayak
|
| 2014-02-08: |
You cannot have just one network install server
|
| 2014-02-07: |
A followup to what sudo emails to ignore and not ignore
A surprise with OmniOS disk sizing: the rpool/dump ZVOL
|
| 2014-02-06: |
Some thoughts on what sudo emails to ignore and to not ignore
|
| 2014-02-05: |
An interesting internal Django error we just got
|
| 2014-02-03: |
The big attraction of SQLite
Technological progress and efficiency
|
| 2014-02-02: |
An illustration of the problem of noise
|
| 2014-01-31: |
Why I now believe that duck typed metaclasses are impossible in CPython
Linux has at least two ways that disks can die
|
| 2014-01-30: |
OmniOS (and by extension Illumos) is pretty much Solaris
|
| 2014-01-29: |
One cause of Linux's popularity among Unixes
|
| 2014-01-28: |
Building software packages yourself is generally a waste (why package selection matters)
|
| 2014-01-27: |
Things that affect how much support you get from a Linux distribution
|
| 2014-01-26: |
Why writing sysadmin tools in Go is getting attractive
|
| 2014-01-25: |
The origin of RCS (the version control system)
|
| 2014-01-24: |
Things I want to remember during a security incident
|
| 2014-01-22: |
Microsoft has become a spam emitter
Security is everyone's job (why Ruby is wrong about OpenSSL)
|
| 2014-01-21: |
Fake versus real metaclasses and what a fully functional metaclass is
|
| 2014-01-20: |
A thought about the popularity of server-side JavaScript
|
| 2014-01-19: |
Some thoughts on structured logging, especially in and for databases
|
| 2014-01-18: |
Your web application should have an audit log
|
| 2014-01-16: |
Link: Armin Ronacher's 'More About Unicode in Python 2 and 3'
Debian does not have long term support
|
| 2014-01-15: |
SELinux fails again (Fedora 20 edition)
Real support periods versus nominal official ones
|
| 2014-01-14: |
The problem with OmniOS's 'build your own' view for Perl and Python
|
| 2014-01-13: |
Sadly, we're moving away from Red Hat Enterprise Linux
|
| 2014-01-12: |
Why I don't want fully automated installs
|
| 2014-01-11: |
Why I am not enthused about Red Hat Enterprise 6
|
| 2014-01-10: |
An interesting recent spam run against one of my machines
|
| 2014-01-09: |
Using different sshd options for different origin hosts
|
| 2014-01-08: |
The good and bad of Linux's NetworkManager
|
| 2014-01-06: |
The problem with compiling your own version of Python 3
Some thoughts on blog front pages in the modern era
|
| 2014-01-05: |
Hard drives really do wear out, so you need a a hardware budget
|
| 2014-01-04: |
One aspect of partial versus full entries on blog front pages
|
| 2014-01-03: |
What determines Python 2's remaining lifetime?
|
| 2014-01-02: |
Python 3's core compatibility problem and decision
|
| 2013-12-31: |
Two uses of fmt
Reversing my view on Python 3 for new general code: avoid it
Link: Alex Gaynor's 'About Python 3'
|
| 2013-12-30: |
My growing entanglement into vi
|
| 2013-12-29: |
Broad thoughts on tags for blog entries
|
| 2013-12-28: |
The era of known top-level domains or valid TLD patterns is mostly over
|
| 2013-12-27: |
A reason to keep tags external in 'entry as file' blog engines
|
| 2013-12-26: |
How ZFS scrubs routinely save us
|
| 2013-12-25: |
Procedures are not documentation
|
| 2013-12-24: |
The 'entry as file' blog engine problem with tags
|
| 2013-12-23: |
A good reason to use write-intent bitmaps
|
| 2013-12-22: |
The benefits of using expendable email addresses for most things
|
| 2013-12-21: |
If you're using Linux's magic SysRq, increase the log level right away
|
| 2013-12-20: |
A realization: on the modern web, everything gets visited
|
| 2013-12-19: |
Your (HTML) template language should have conditionals
|
| 2013-12-18: |
Thinking about what we'll need for reproducible OmniOS installs
|
| 2013-12-17: |
You probably don't want to use Make to build your generated files
|
| 2013-12-16: |
My computers are increasingly sort of Internet terminals
|
| 2013-12-15: |
Making large selections in xterm (and urxvt and Gnome Terminal)
|
| 2013-12-14: |
Why I'm not likely to use Chrome much in the future
|
| 2013-12-13: |
Using cgroups to limit something's RAM consumption (a practical guide)
|
| 2013-12-12: |
Some observations from playing with PyPy on DWiki
|
| 2013-12-11: |
The problem with nondeterministic garbage collection
|
| 2013-12-10: |
My current view of PyPy
|
| 2013-12-09: |
Hardware is weird (disk enclosure edition)
|
| 2013-12-08: |
Sometimes the right thing to do is to stop (and even to give up)
|
| 2013-12-07: |
Things get weird with read-only NFS mounts and atime on Linux
|
| 2013-12-06: |
The three levels of read-only NFS mounts
|
| 2013-12-05: |
Some thoughts on a body of knowledge for system administration
|
| 2013-12-04: |
sudo is not an auditing mechanism
|
| 2013-12-03: |
The three faces of sudo
|
| 2013-12-02: |
What Go has become for me: Python with performance
|
| 2013-11-30: |
Why 'hotplug' approaches to device handling are the right way
The case of the disappearing ESATA disk
|
| 2013-11-29: |
How modern Linux software RAID arrays are assembled on boot (and otherwise)
|
| 2013-11-28: |
A quick analysis of bounces here
|
| 2013-11-27: |
The difference between CPython and Python
|
| 2013-11-25: |
From CPython bytecode up to function objects (in brief)
Track your disk failures
|
| 2013-11-24: |
Baidu's web spider ignores robots.txt (at least sometimes)
|
| 2013-11-23: |
You are not fooling us with broken bounce addresses
|
| 2013-11-22: |
My hack use for Chrome's Incognito mode
|
| 2013-11-20: |
test is surprisingly smart
The difference between no argument and an empty argument
|
| 2013-11-18: |
Why booting Linux from a ZFS root filesystem with GRUB can be hard
|
| 2013-11-17: |
The 10G Ethernet performance problem on Linux
Sending and receiving file descriptors in Python
|
| 2013-11-16: |
Unix getopt versus Google's getopt variant and why Unix getopt wins
|
| 2013-11-15: |
Professional knowledge, certification, and regulation
|
| 2013-11-14: |
One reason I like Go: it seems natural to avoid object churn
|
| 2013-11-13: |
The cost of expensive hardware and the benefit of hindsight
|
| 2013-11-11: |
Go's getopt problem
|
| 2013-11-10: |
Are those chassis fans actually still spinning?
My views on network booting as an alternative to system disks
|
| 2013-11-09: |
Google Feedfetcher is still fetching feeds and a User-Agent caution
|
| 2013-11-08: |
The spectrum of options when netbooting systems
|
| 2013-11-06: |
Why you might not want to use SSDs as system disks just yet
Modern versions of Unix are more adjustable than they used to be
|
| 2013-11-04: |
How writes work on ZFS raidzN pools, with implications for 4k disks
|
| 2013-11-03: |
Wikitext needs a better way of writing tables
Why we're switching to SSDs for system disks
|
| 2013-11-02: |
Revising our peculiar ZFS L2ARC trick
|
| 2013-10-31: |
Our likely future backend and fileserver hardware
Naming disk devices: drive IDs versus drive locations
|
| 2013-10-30: |
An open question: part uniformity versus unit cost
|
| 2013-10-28: |
If you're on the IPv4 Internet, you really are in public now
|
| 2013-10-27: |
Old and new addresses and spam
Some things I've learned from transitioning a website to HTTPS
|
| 2013-10-26: |
10G Ethernet and network buffer sizes (at least on Linux)
|
| 2013-10-25: |
Modern disk write caches and how they get dealt with (a quick overview)
|
| 2013-10-24: |
How to force a disk write cache flush operation on Linux
|
| 2013-10-23: |
Paying for services is not necessarily enough
|
| 2013-10-21: |
NFS's problem with (concurrent) writes
Thinking about how I want to test disk IO on an iSCSI backend
|
| 2013-10-20: |
Thoughts inspired by the abstract idea of Docker-like things
|
| 2013-10-19: |
I should never have allowed 'outside' content to break my layout
|
| 2013-10-18: |
ZFS uberblock rollback and the top level metadata change rate
|
| 2013-10-17: |
There are two cases for changing SSL/TLS cipher settings
|
| 2013-10-16: |
Disused addresses and the impact of spam
|
| 2013-10-15: |
Why I'm not looking for any alternatives to iSCSI for us
|
| 2013-10-14: |
The importance of small UI tweaks (for me), dmenu edition
|
| 2013-10-13: |
Revisiting some bits of ZFS's ZIL with separate log devices
|
| 2013-10-11: |
Some pain points of parsing wikitext (and simplifications that avoid them)
How DWiki parses its wikitext (part 1)
|
| 2013-10-10: |
Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-server windowing systems
|
| 2013-10-09: |
An interesting bug with module garbage collection in Python
|
| 2013-10-07: |
What happens when CPython deletes a module
|
| 2013-10-06: |
What reloading a Python module really does
The per-NFS-operation data for NFS mounts in /proc/self/mountstats
|
| 2013-10-05: |
The xprt: data for NFS mounts in /proc/self/mountstats
|
| 2013-10-04: |
The bytes and events data for NFS mounts in /proc/self/mountstats
|
| 2013-10-03: |
What is in /proc/self/mountstats for NFS mounts: an introduction
|
| 2013-10-02: |
What your User-Agent header should include and why
|
| 2013-09-30: |
Centralizing syslogs as an easy way to improve your environment
|
| 2013-09-29: |
Spammers illustrating, well, something
Universities and long term perspectives
|
| 2013-09-28: |
Why I put configuration management systems over packaging systems
|
| 2013-09-27: |
The long term future of any particular configuration management system
|
| 2013-09-26: |
Trying to explain my harshness on configuration management tools
|
| 2013-09-24: |
A semi-wish for an official 'null MX' standard
|
| 2013-09-23: |
The FTE pricing gamble (for vendors)
ZFS filesystem compression and quotas
|
| 2013-09-22: |
An example of optimizing C in the face of undefined behavior
|
| 2013-09-20: |
Nested conditional expressions in Python (and code golf)
|
| 2013-09-19: |
Processes waiting for NFS IO do show in Linux %iowait statistics
Load is a whole system phenomenon
|
| 2013-09-18: |
Reconsidering external disk enclosures versus disk servers
|
| 2013-09-17: |
The pain (or annoyance) of deploying a simple WSGI thing
|
| 2013-09-15: |
Regular expression performance and performance folklore
Identities, trust, and work
|
| 2013-09-14: |
A basic overview of SAS and using SATA with SAS
|
| 2013-09-13: |
Why I think dir() excludes metaclass methods
|
| 2013-09-12: |
I am not a (Unix) purist
|
| 2013-09-11: |
Understanding why CSRF protection really needs cookies
|
| 2013-09-09: |
Why the RPM source and binary package format is superior to Debian .debs
A slow realization: many of my dotfiles don't need to be dotfiles
|
| 2013-09-07: |
Why wiring things up physically instead of virtually is better for us
Good SSL for your website is absurdly difficult in practice
|
| 2013-09-06: |
Making switch configuration changes is not as easy as it looks
|
| 2013-09-05: |
The physical versus the virtual approach to network wiring
|
| 2013-09-04: |
What (and how) I use HTML tables for layout here
|
| 2013-09-02: |
The current weak areas of ZFS on Linux
A little bit more on ZFS RAIDZ read performance
|
| 2013-08-31: |
Simple availability doesn't capture timing and the amount of warning
HTML quoting as I currently understand it
|
| 2013-08-30: |
I'm done with feeling guilty about using HTML tables for layout
|
| 2013-08-29: |
A new piece of my environment: clearing the X selection
|
| 2013-08-28: |
I'm vaguely yearning for a simpler framework than Django
|
| 2013-08-26: |
An example GNU Readline quoting function
|
| 2013-08-25: |
On classifying phish spam as malware
Adding basic quoting to your use of GNU Readline
|
| 2013-08-24: |
My personal view of Fedora versus Ubuntu on the desktop
|
| 2013-08-23: |
Looking at how many viruses we've seen in email recently
|
| 2013-08-22: |
I've changed my thinking about redundant power supplies
|
| 2013-08-21: |
Disk enclosures versus 'all in one case' designs
|
| 2013-08-20: |
The challenge for ARM servers, at least here
|
| 2013-08-19: |
My views on various bits of disk drive technology today
|
| 2013-08-16: |
SSDs may make ZFS raidz viable for general use
A peculiar use of ZFS L2ARC that we're planning
Funding and the size of hardware you want to buy
|
| 2013-08-15: |
My understanding of modern C undefined behavior and its effects
|
| 2013-08-14: |
The pragmatics of an HTTP to HTTPS transition
|
| 2013-08-13: |
You should convert wikitext to HTML through an AST
|
| 2013-08-11: |
The feature (or features) I really want added to xterm
Multi-mount protection and SAN failover
|
| 2013-08-10: |
The importance of names, illustrated through my mistake
|
| 2013-08-09: |
Link: My current dmenu changes
|
| 2013-08-08: |
How to accidentally reboot a server
My Cinnamon desktop customizations
|
| 2013-08-07: |
Understanding how generators help asynchronous programming
|
| 2013-08-05: |
Who or what your website is for and more on HTTP errors
|
| 2013-08-04: |
What's changed in Unix networking in the last decade or so
|
| 2013-08-03: |
The paucity of generally useful HTTP error codes
The pragmatic issues around HTTP error codes mattering (or not)
|
| 2013-08-02: |
I'm giving up on a custom laptop environment for Fedora 19
|
| 2013-07-31: |
The problem with a custom laptop environment: designing it
A Python code structure problem: exception handling with flags
|
| 2013-07-30: |
Phish spam and outside events
|
| 2013-07-29: |
A consistent preference in APIs for kernel and other low-level APIs
|
| 2013-07-28: |
The constraints shaping kernel APIs
|
| 2013-07-27: |
The easy path versus the virtuous path (in system setup)
|
| 2013-07-26: |
Communication is work and a corollary
|
| 2013-07-25: |
An important thing about security issues in HTTP error responses
|
| 2013-07-24: |
Why vendor prices are important things to have
|
| 2013-07-23: |
When Python regexp alternation is faster than separate regexps
|
| 2013-07-22: |
External disk enclosures versus disk servers
|
| 2013-07-21: |
A fun problem: monitoring randomness reduces it
|
| 2013-07-19: |
A bit on the performance of lexers in Python
Thinking about the security issues in HTTP 403 versus 404 errors
|
| 2013-07-18: |
Fedora 19 and the search for volume management
|
| 2013-07-17: |
Do specific HTTP error codes actually matter?
|
| 2013-07-15: |
Systemd needs sensible, non-truncated output
Git's petty little irritation for me
|
| 2013-07-14: |
Why single vendor solutions are a hard sell
|
| 2013-07-13: |
What we need in our fileservers (in the abstract)
|
| 2013-07-11: |
The ZFS ZIL's optimizations for data writes
ZFS transaction groups and the ZFS Intent Log
|
| 2013-07-10: |
Knowing when to go your own way with open source programs
|
| 2013-07-09: |
How we want to recover our ZFS pools from SAN outages
|
| 2013-07-07: |
Sometimes the right thing to do is nothing (at least right then)
A mistake to avoid with summer interns
|
| 2013-07-06: |
Is it particularly useful to have old Unix source sitting around?
|
| 2013-07-05: |
ZFS deduplication is terribly documented
|
| 2013-07-04: |
My version of the story of universities and Unix source code
|
| 2013-07-03: |
You can re-connect() UDP sockets (portably)
|
| 2013-07-02: |
Today's question: are anti-spam statistics useful for us?
|
| 2013-06-30: |
Our pragmatic approach to updating machines to match our baseline
Some very basic DNS blocklist hit information for the last 30 days
|
| 2013-06-29: |
connect() plus write() versus sendto() for UDP sockets
|
| 2013-06-28: |
The limitations of not actually knowing a language
|
| 2013-06-27: |
How much of our incoming email is checked at SMTP DATA time
|
| 2013-06-26: |
What I want from a future version of NFS
|
| 2013-06-25: |
Balancing Illumos against ZFS on Linux
|
| 2013-06-24: |
How to get your syndication feed fetcher at least temporarily banned here
|
| 2013-06-23: |
'Human error' is not a root cause of problems
|
| 2013-06-22: |
Automatedly overwriting changed files is not a feature
|
| 2013-06-21: |
A Django application design puzzle about modularity
|
| 2013-06-20: |
The question of whether to rewrite an old but working service
|
| 2013-06-19: |
Our approach to configuration management
|
| 2013-06-18: |
What's in the way of us using automated configuration management
|
| 2013-06-17: |
My job versus my career: some thoughts
|
| 2013-06-16: |
Python 3 has very little benefit for ordinary Python programmers
|
| 2013-06-15: |
I'm considering building a custom laptop environment
|
| 2013-06-14: |
The core issue in the Python 3 transition (from my view)
|
| 2013-06-13: |
I don't usually think about IO transfer times
|
| 2013-06-12: |
UI details that you don't expect to can matter a lot
|
| 2013-06-11: |
The good and bad of IPS (as I see it)
|
| 2013-06-10: |
What the SELinux community should be doing
|
| 2013-06-09: |
SELinux should have its own errno value
|
| 2013-06-08: |
The Flickr redesign and knowing your site's focus
|
| 2013-06-07: |
My current understanding of 'software defined networking'
|
| 2013-06-06: |
Why building RPMs for a different architecture is a hard problem
|
| 2013-06-05: |
The case against blog sidebars
|
| 2013-06-04: |
SELinux's toxic mistake
|
| 2013-06-02: |
Security is not the most important thing to most people
Why I do IPSec improperly and reduce my security
|
| 2013-05-31: |
The mystery of POSTs with a zero Content-Length
Understanding the MongoDB code that people are laughing at
|
| 2013-05-30: |
I find Systemtap oddly frustrating
|
| 2013-05-28: |
How you should package local-use configuration files
|
| 2013-05-27: |
Understanding SQL placeholders
Our situation with ZFS and 4 Kb physical sector disks
|
| 2013-05-26: |
Empirically, modern mailing list services are spam senders
|
| 2013-05-24: |
Understanding how CVE-2013-1979 might be exploited
My issue with infinite scrolling web pages: the lack of a stopping point
|
| 2013-05-23: |
Why web robots sending Referer headers is wrong
|
| 2013-05-21: |
Diffbot's bad Referer header
|
| 2013-05-20: |
A serious potential danger with Exim host lists in ACLs
|
| 2013-05-19: |
Today's comment spammer trick: regurgitated comments
The technical effects of being an out of tree Linux kernel module
|
| 2013-05-18: |
A little habit of our documentation: how we write logins
|
| 2013-05-17: |
Why I'm not considering btrfs for our future fileservers just yet
|
| 2013-05-16: |
Why ZFS's CDDL license matters for ZFS on Linux
|
| 2013-05-15: |
Why I've so far been neglecting functional programming languages
|
| 2013-05-13: |
My language irritations with Go (so far) and why I'm wrong about them
The Unix philosophy is not an end to itself
|
| 2013-05-11: |
The consequences of importing a module twice
|
| 2013-05-10: |
Illustrating the tradeoff of security versus usability
Disk IO is what shatters the VM illusion for me right now
|
| 2013-05-08: |
Thoughts on when to replace disks in a ZFS pool
How ZFS resilvering saved us
|
| 2013-05-07: |
Python's relative import problem
|
| 2013-05-05: |
Unix is not necessarily Unixy
The original vision of RISC was that it would be pervasive
|
| 2013-05-04: |
What I see as RISC's big bets
|
| 2013-05-03: |
Virtual disks should be treated as 4k 'Advanced Format' drives
|
| 2013-05-01: |
Two xargs gotchas that you may not know about
|
| 2013-04-30: |
The two stories of RISC
|
| 2013-04-29: |
My practical problem with preconfigured virtual machine templates
My view of ARM versus other RISCs
|
| 2013-04-28: |
My sysadmin view of Python virtualenvs
|
| 2013-04-27: |
Some theories on why DNSBLs may be dwindling away
|
| 2013-04-26: |
Are there less anti-spam DNS blocklists than there used to be?
|
| 2013-04-25: |
How SuS probably requires the 'run at least once' xargs behavior
|
| 2013-04-24: |
Two mistakes I made with VMs today
|
| 2013-04-23: |
Goodbye, djb dnscache
|
| 2013-04-21: |
RCS should not be your first choice for version control
Why a free SSL Certificate Authority is not horrifying
|
| 2013-04-19: |
How ZFS deals with 'advanced format' disks with 4 Kb physical sectors
How I want storage systems to handle disk block sizes
|
| 2013-04-18: |
How SCSI devices tell you their logical and physical block sizes
|
| 2013-04-17: |
Some thoughts on going to HTTPS by default
|
| 2013-04-15: |
The basics of 4K sector hard drives (aka 'Advanced Format' drives)
Go's friction points for me (and a comparison to Python)
|
| 2013-04-14: |
Python's data structures problem
|
| 2013-04-13: |
Classic linked lists versus Python's list (array) type
|
| 2013-04-12: |
My view on software RAID and the RAID write hole
|
| 2013-04-11: |
Something I'd like to be easier in Solaris's IPS
|
| 2013-04-10: |
Some important things about OpenBSD PF's max-* options
|
| 2013-04-08: |
Fedora 18's TexLive packaging failure
Why ZFS still needs an equivalent of fsck
|
| 2013-04-07: |
The apparent source of my Firefox memory bloat problems
|
| 2013-04-06: |
What I needed to do with Grub2 to change my boot disk
|
| 2013-04-05: |
Authoritative, non-recursive DNS servers now need ratelimiting
|
| 2013-04-04: |
An irritating OpenBSD PF limitation on redirections
|
| 2013-04-03: |
How to make sysadmins unhappy with your project's downloads
|
| 2013-04-02: |
Why listen(2)'s backlog parameter has such an odd meaning
|
| 2013-03-31: |
Why we'll continue to have local compute servers in the future
Can we really use the cloud?
|
| 2013-03-30: |
One irritation in xargs's interface
|
| 2013-03-29: |
Illumos-based distributions are currently not fully mature
|
| 2013-03-27: |
What checksums in your filesystem are usually actually doing
|
| 2013-03-26: |
Reconsidering a ZFS root filesystem
|
| 2013-03-25: |
Rethinking avoiding Apache
My (current) view of using branches in VCSes
|
| 2013-03-24: |
Looking at how many external recipients inbound email goes to
|
| 2013-03-22: |
Looking at how many recipients our average inbound email has
The problem with trying to make everything into a Python module
|
| 2013-03-21: |
The FreeBSD iSCSI initiator is not ready for serious use (as of 9.1)
|
| 2013-03-20: |
Don't use ab for your web server stress tests (I like siege instead)
|
| 2013-03-18: |
The wrong way for a framework to lay out projects
|
| 2013-03-17: |
The power of suggestion that documentation has
Argument validation using functions
|
| 2013-03-16: |
I'm giving up on upgrading my laptop from Fedora 14
|
| 2013-03-15: |
A dive into the depths of yes `yes no`
|
| 2013-03-14: |
What I want out of a web-based syndication feed reader
|
| 2013-03-12: |
MATE Desktop's failure in Fedora 18
In universities, computers are not an essential service
|
| 2013-03-10: |
The easy way to wind up with multiple subnets on a single (V)LAN segment
The systemd dependency problem
|
| 2013-03-09: |
Why .rpmnew files are evidence of packaging failures
|
| 2013-03-08: |
Debian shows how to do Apache configuration right (and Fedora fumbles it)
|
| 2013-03-06: |
How we make Exim cut off bounce loops
Turning off delays on failed password authentications
|
| 2013-03-04: |
Why you should never use '/bin/sh -c ...' in configuration files
|
| 2013-03-03: |
Why a netcat-like program is a good test of a language
Go: when I'd extend an interface versus making a new one
|
| 2013-03-02: |
The mythology of spending money on things, or not doing so
|
| 2013-02-28: |
A decorator for decorators that accept additional arguments
Looking at whether Zen-listed IPs keep trying to send us email
|
| 2013-02-27: |
Link: Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering
|
| 2013-02-26: |
How Linux servers should boot with software RAID
Thinking about how much Solaris 11 is worth to us
Looking at whether (some) IP addresses persist in zen.spamhaus.org
|
| 2013-02-24: |
You should avoid using socket.SOMAXCONN
What limits the number of concurrent connections to a server
|
| 2013-02-22: |
(Ab)using awk on the fly
|
| 2013-02-21: |
Go: using type assertions to safely reach through interface types
Some notes on my first experience with Go
|
| 2013-02-20: |
The meaning of listen(2)'s backlog parameter
|
| 2013-02-19: |
The source of C's dependency hell for linking
|
| 2013-02-18: |
The strikes against Solaris 11 for us
|
| 2013-02-17: |
Some brief opinions and notes on uWSGI
|
| 2013-02-16: |
Finding out what TLS/SSL cryptography people actually get with your servers
|
| 2013-02-15: |
SSL/TLS cipher names (aka 'cipher suites') and what goes into them
|
| 2013-02-14: |
The cost of an API mistake in the socket module's fromfd()
|
| 2013-02-12: |
Some notes on Linux's ionice
|
| 2013-02-11: |
The sinking feeling of discovering a design mistake in your code
Thinking about how I use email
|
| 2013-02-10: |
A little irritating (but understandable) limitation on Go interfaces
|
| 2013-02-09: |
Solve your command parsing problems by using scripts
|
| 2013-02-08: |
Linux's great advantage as a Unix is its willingness to make wrenching changes
|
| 2013-02-07: |
Today's learning experience with CSS: don't be indirect
|
| 2013-02-05: |
What makes DWiki and other dynamic file based blog engines slow
|
| 2013-02-04: |
Dynamic web sites and blogs need not be slow, illustrated
What good cryptography error messages need to include
|
| 2013-02-03: |
Systems with cryptography should always have minimal workarounds
|
| 2013-02-02: |
A fundamental problem with the trackback protocol
|
| 2013-01-31: |
The shifting SBL, as experienced here
Why you should support specifying comparison keys (and functions)
|
| 2013-01-30: |
Thinking about FreeBSD versus Illumos for our ZFS fileservers
|
| 2013-01-28: |
Some patterns for easy to parse Domain Specific Languages in Python
|
| 2013-01-27: |
How the modern web 2.0 social web irritates me by hiding discussions
User mode servers versus kernel mode servers
|
| 2013-01-25: |
Some places where I think that Unix is incomplete or imperfect
Unix needs to grow and a consequence of that
|
| 2013-01-23: |
My Unix is a general purpose operating system
What I want to know about kernel security updates
|
| 2013-01-22: |
Disaster recovery preparation is not the same as a DR plan
|
| 2013-01-20: |
Disaster recovery for computers is a means, not an end to itself
Real disaster recovery plans require preallocated resources
|
| 2013-01-18: |
SLAs, downtime, and planning
More on my favorite way of marking continued lines
|
| 2013-01-16: |
My favorite way of marking continued lines
How I drafted (okay, wrote) an entry in public by accident
|
| 2013-01-14: |
Why JavaScript (or something like it) is in demand
Good JavaScript usage is a good thing
|
| 2013-01-13: |
Blogspot's massive web 1.0 failure
|
| 2013-01-12: |
Runtime loading of general code usually requires general dynamic linking
|
| 2013-01-11: |
A thought about static linking and popularity
|
| 2013-01-10: |
The fundamental problem faced by user-level NFS servers
|
| 2013-01-09: |
It turns out I'm biased towards kernel iSCSI target implementations
|
| 2013-01-08: |
Why we wound up using Linux for our iSCSI targets
|
| 2013-01-07: |
Why bad support matters (war story included)
|
| 2013-01-06: |
24 hours of Atom feed requests here
|
| 2013-01-05: |
What I think changed to make spam deliveries not cost-free
|
| 2013-01-04: |
DTrace's stable providers are not good enough
|
| 2013-01-03: |
An alterate pattern for polymorphism in C
|
| 2013-01-02: |
Some patterns for polymorphism in C
|
| 2012-12-31: |
How our fileserver infrastructure is a commodity setup (and inexpensive)
GNU sort's -h option
|
| 2012-12-30: |
What I'd have liked to hear about Python 3 from the developers
|
| 2012-12-29: |
Why I think that stupid spamming is actively wasteful
|
| 2012-12-28: |
A spammer that is not the brightest light in the box
|
| 2012-12-27: |
Why I somewhat irrationally have a distrust of ZFS on Linux
|
| 2012-12-26: |
Does Python 2 need to evolve?
|
| 2012-12-25: |
A confession: Python 3 has always made me kind of angry
|
| 2012-12-24: |
Why we're almost certainly staying with ZFS
|
| 2012-12-23: |
What we (probably) want in a future version of Solaris
|
| 2012-12-22: |
Packaging in compiled versus interpreted languages
|
| 2012-12-21: |
Version control comes first
|
| 2012-12-20: |
Sysadmins should pretty much version control everything
|
| 2012-12-19: |
Part of good awk programming is getting the clause order right
|
| 2012-12-18: |
Why I'm still using VMware
|
| 2012-12-17: |
Should you alert on the glaringly obvious?
|
| 2012-12-16: |
Alerts should be actionable (and the three sorts of 'alerts')
|
| 2012-12-15: |
A few small notes about OpenBSD PF (as of 4.4 and 5.1)
|
| 2012-12-13: |
A drawback of short servers
|
| 2012-12-12: |
fork() and closing file descriptors
One good use for default function arguments
|
| 2012-12-10: |
The general lesson from the need for metrics
Things that systemd gets right
|
| 2012-12-09: |
When I'd use a web server other than Apache
|
| 2012-12-08: |
Why Apache is such a temptation
|
| 2012-12-07: |
How I use virtualization (and what for)
|
| 2012-12-05: |
One way to break down how people use virtualization
In praise of KVM-over-IP systems
|
| 2012-12-04: |
You can't assume that your performance problems will be obvious
|
| 2012-12-03: |
A reason for detailed commit messages: as a guard against errors
|
| 2012-12-02: |
What goes into the terminal's 'cbreak' and 'raw' modes
|
| 2012-11-30: |
All kernel messages should be usefully ratelimited. No exceptions.
My new view on why you need to profile code
|
| 2012-11-29: |
One reason why having metrics is important
|
| 2012-11-28: |
When you make a harmless change, check to make sure that it is
|
| 2012-11-27: |
You don't necessarily know what matters for performance
|
| 2012-11-25: |
More thoughts on why Python doesn't see much monkey-patching
The limits of monkey patching in Python
|
| 2012-11-24: |
Simple markup as a style guide and limiter
|
| 2012-11-22: |
A little Unix difference that irritates: what word erase erases
Optional features are in practice not optional to understand
|
| 2012-11-21: |
The varying appeal of wikitext and other simple markup
|
| 2012-11-20: |
Where my Firefox performance problem seems to be
|
| 2012-11-19: |
Python 3's print() annoys me (although maybe it shouldn't)
|
| 2012-11-18: |
Linux is less divergent than commercial Unixes used to be
|
| 2012-11-17: |
Why Google's handling of multiple domains on inbound messages is okay
|
| 2012-11-16: |
Why DTrace does not attract people to Solaris very often
|
| 2012-11-15: |
A learning experience: internal mail flow should never be allowed to bounce
|
| 2012-11-13: |
The problem with SELinux (still)
A potential path to IPv6
|
| 2012-11-11: |
Explaining an RPM oddity
A reminder: string concatenation really is string concatenation
|
| 2012-11-10: |
Why Unix doesn't have user-changeable namespaces
|
| 2012-11-09: |
Some amusing cut and paste work from spammers
|
| 2012-11-08: |
Devops, the return of system programmers?
|
| 2012-11-07: |
DTrace: figuring out what you have access to at tracepoints
|
| 2012-11-06: |
Why I want to do full end-to-end performance tests
|
| 2012-11-04: |
Your logs should always include IP addresses (in addition to hostnames)
Good and bad formats for your log messages
|
| 2012-11-03: |
Another go-around on the drawbacks and balances of automation
|
| 2012-11-02: |
Why our ZFS fileservers sometimes boot slowly
|
| 2012-10-31: |
Our DTrace scripts for NFS server, ZFS, and iSCSI initiator monitoring
Some stats and notes on relay attempts for our external mail gateway
|
| 2012-10-30: |
How I am doing randomized read IO to avoid ZFS prefetching
|
| 2012-10-29: |
How ZFS file prefetching seems to work
|
| 2012-10-28: |
Some unusual SMTP activity from would-be spammers
|
| 2012-10-27: |
The difference between cryptographic and normal random number generators
|
| 2012-10-26: |
Thinking about an unusual sequence
|
| 2012-10-25: |
Always make sure you really understand what your problem is
|
| 2012-10-24: |
Why you should support 'reload' as well as 'restart'
|
| 2012-10-23: |
The problem of simulating random IO
|
| 2012-10-22: |
Why parsers matter
|
| 2012-10-21: |
Why fork() is a good API
|
| 2012-10-20: |
The issue with measuring disk performance through streaming IO
|
| 2012-10-19: |
An old Unix trick for saving databases
|
| 2012-10-18: |
A danger of default values for function arguments (in illustrated form)
|
| 2012-10-17: |
Operators and system programmers: a bit of System Administrator history
|
| 2012-10-16: |
Switch flow control and buffering: what we think was wrong in our iSCSI network
|
| 2012-10-15: |
The anatomy of a performance problem with our mail spool
|
| 2012-10-14: |
DTrace: two mistakes you can make in DTrace scripts
|
| 2012-10-13: |
DTrace: counting, aggregates, and a nice undocumented printa() feature
|
| 2012-10-12: |
SSL CAs have an impossible job (if you want them to be thorough)
|
| 2012-10-11: |
Controlling Linux TCP socket send buffer sizes
|
| 2012-10-10: |
Disk IO latency is often what matters
|
| 2012-10-09: |
The negative results problem with search engines
|
| 2012-10-08: |
Acclimatization makes competition in web search engines hard(er)
|
| 2012-10-06: |
Python can execute zip files
How averages mislead you
|
| 2012-10-05: |
Notes on Linux's blktrace
|
| 2012-10-04: |
Averages mislead: an illustrated example
|
| 2012-10-03: |
DTrace: notes on quantization and aggregates
|
| 2012-10-02: |
Some notes on getting durations in DTrace
|
| 2012-09-30: |
A new anti-spam precaution after our local spam incident
|
| 2012-09-29: |
A recent spam oddity that I've been mulling over
What I would like in colour-specification interfaces
|
| 2012-09-28: |
fork() versus strict virtual memory overcommit handling
|
| 2012-09-27: |
Microkernels and device drivers
|
| 2012-09-26: |
Microkernels and modularity: do microkernels ever make sense?
|
| 2012-09-25: |
The jaundiced C programmer's view of object orientation
|
| 2012-09-24: |
The wrong way to harvest system-level performance stats
|
| 2012-09-23: |
How we handle Ubuntu LTS versions
|
| 2012-09-22: |
Speculation about what comment spammers think they're doing here
|
| 2012-09-21: |
How I enter URLs in my browser
|
| 2012-09-20: |
My alternative to bookmarks: a page of links as the browser start page
|
| 2012-09-19: |
Two views of the argparse module
|
| 2012-09-18: |
My Python versions
|
| 2012-09-17: |
The options problem in Python
|
| 2012-09-16: |
The problem with noise
|
| 2012-09-15: |
Sensible reboot monitoring
|
| 2012-09-14: |
What determines how much work a ZFS resilver has to do
|
| 2012-09-13: |
Why you need mass package rebuilds in some circumstances
|
| 2012-09-12: |
The core problem with developers doing their own packaging
|
| 2012-09-11: |
A realization about ratelimit time horizons
|
| 2012-09-09: |
The core difference between Debian source packages and RPMs
When I've interned Python strings
|
| 2012-09-08: |
When you can log bad usernames for failed authentications
|
| 2012-09-07: |
What the standard(s) say about the order of readdir()'s results
|
| 2012-09-06: |
A little trick and gotcha with Exim ratelimits
|
| 2012-09-05: |
Some thoughts on logging failed login attempts (for existing users)
|
| 2012-09-03: |
People are not ignorant (usually)
|
| 2012-09-02: |
What I would like: testable mailers
Solaris 11 is still closed source (and Oracle is careless with words)
|
| 2012-08-31: |
A realization about one bit of test-driven development
A small rant about looking down on Linux users
|
| 2012-08-30: |
My perspective on why we do in-place reinstalls of machines
|
| 2012-08-29: |
A realization: install configuration files before packages
|
| 2012-08-28: |
When Exim generates bounce messages
|
| 2012-08-27: |
You should log all successful user authentication
|
| 2012-08-26: |
Some brief information about a local spam incident
|
| 2012-08-25: |
Some odd behavior from blog comment spammers
|
| 2012-08-24: |
The theoretical right way to check if an account is in a Unix group
|
| 2012-08-23: |
Illustrating the Ubuntu clown car, AccountsService edition
|
| 2012-08-22: |
My view on the understandability of language idioms
|
| 2012-08-21: |
Another problem with how Debian builds from source packages
|
| 2012-08-20: |
Sysadmins hate updates (more or less)
|
| 2012-08-19: |
Why I don't like the Debian source package format
|
| 2012-08-18: |
What everyone needs in source packages
|
| 2012-08-17: |
How Firefox performs (and doesn't) for me
|
| 2012-08-16: |
Why I hate vendors, printers edition
|
| 2012-08-15: |
The historical background of the *BSD 'base system' versus Linux
|
| 2012-08-13: |
When and where I fell out of love with Firefox
|
| 2012-08-12: |
A nice illustration of the cost of creating and destroying objects in Python
The CPython bytecode difference between iteration and looping
|
| 2012-08-11: |
How not to write kernel messages
|
| 2012-08-09: |
Learning something from not testing jQuery 1.8's beta releases
Ubuntu 12.04 and symbolic links in world-writeable sticky-bitted directories
|
| 2012-08-08: |
Linux ps's problem with login names
|
| 2012-08-06: |
The theoretical legality of shadowing builtins in Python
The (possibly apocryphal) story of System V IPC's origins
|
| 2012-08-05: |
Reasoning backwards (a story about what can happen to SATA disks)
|
| 2012-08-04: |
Oracle, ZFS, and Linux (and Solaris)
|
| 2012-08-03: |
What makes an operating system attractive
|
| 2012-08-02: |
Can Oracle make ZFS much more attractive?
|
| 2012-07-31: |
Would GPL'ing ZFS have worked or been a good idea?
Ruminations on the future of ZFS
|
| 2012-07-30: |
IPv6 is going to be a fruitful source of configuration mistakes
|
| 2012-07-29: |
The periodic strangeness of idiomatic Python
|
| 2012-07-28: |
The ecological niches of current open source Unixes
|
| 2012-07-27: |
What 32-bit x86 Linux's odd 896 MB kernel memory boundary is about
|
| 2012-07-25: |
The kernel memory addressing problem
My dislike for what I call 'perverse Test Driven Development'
|
| 2012-07-24: |
Unicode's two new problems
|
| 2012-07-22: |
The history of booting Linux with software RAID
A sleazy trick to capture debugging output from an initramfs
|
| 2012-07-20: |
Ubuntu 12.04 can't reliably boot with software RAID (and why)
The temptation of selective sender address verification
|
| 2012-07-19: |
Unicode code points and abstract characters
|
| 2012-07-18: |
Strings in Python 2 and Python 3
|
| 2012-07-16: |
Getting an Ubuntu 12.04 machine to give you boot messages
My arrogance about Unicode and character encodings
|
| 2012-07-15: |
My general issue with Unicode in Python 3
|
| 2012-07-14: |
ZFS's problem with generic messages
|
| 2012-07-13: |
Why system administration certifications have worked so far
|
| 2012-07-12: |
Why formal sysadmin education isn't likely any time soon
|
| 2012-07-11: |
The extremely cynical take on DevOps
|
| 2012-07-10: |
A theory on why defaults for tunable parameters stay unchanged
|
| 2012-07-09: |
Why the defaults for tunable kernel parameters matter
|
| 2012-07-08: |
Why System V shared memory may normally be limited
|
| 2012-07-06: |
Why Exim has a single queue for all email
Exploring an ARP mystery: a little Linux surprise
|
| 2012-07-04: |
How to irritate sysadmins and give mailers heartburn with your MXes
|
| 2012-07-03: |
The secure web voting problem
The well behaved Unix program and job control signals
|
| 2012-07-01: |
Another cynical take on the nofollow tag
|
| 2012-06-30: |
What Linux distributions should do to help their Python 3 transitions
|
| 2012-06-29: |
The magnitude of the migration to Python 3, illustrated
More about my issues with DTrace's language
|
| 2012-06-28: |
Why I don't like implicit string interpolation
|
| 2012-06-27: |
One root of my problem with GNU Emacs
|
| 2012-06-26: |
A little gotcha with SSH connection sharing
|
| 2012-06-25: |
Why sophisticated line editing is not in the kernel
|
| 2012-06-24: |
My take on fancy editors for programming
|
| 2012-06-22: |
How the Linux kernel command line is processed (more or less)
The effects of DTrace's problems
|
| 2012-06-21: |
How I want to do redirects in Apache, especially in .htaccess files
|
| 2012-06-20: |
An update on comment spammer behavior here on WanderingThoughts (once again)
|
| 2012-06-19: |
How I'm doing AJAX with Django in my web app
|
| 2012-06-17: |
A realization about whether I can contribute to Python development
Why our server had its page allocation failure
|
| 2012-06-16: |
Decoding the Linux kernel's page allocation failure messages
|
| 2012-06-15: |
How the Linux kernel divides up your RAM
|
| 2012-06-13: |
Some tricky bits in in-browser form mangling and validation
Client side form validation can let people explore their options
|
| 2012-06-11: |
What bits of a form are useful to check on the client side
Choosing how slowly your mailer should time out email
|
| 2012-06-10: |
The anti-spam implications of email being multiple things in one
Modern email is actually multiple things in one system (mailer timeouts edition)
|
| 2012-06-09: |
Rethinking when your mailer sends 'not-yet-delivered' warning messages
|
| 2012-06-08: |
An (accessible) explanation of the Flame malware's Windows Update compromise
|
| 2012-06-07: |
My experience doing a Fedora 17 upgrade with yum: it worked fine
|
| 2012-06-06: |
A feature that Linux installers should have: restoring your backups
|
| 2012-06-04: |
Why the TTY line discipline exists in the kernel
|
| 2012-06-03: |
Another view of the merge versus rebase debate in version control
My view on Mercurial versus Git
|
| 2012-06-01: |
Some things that strike me about Linux and UEFI secure booting
The secure boot problem
|
| 2012-05-31: |
What OSes have succeeded or failed here
Thinking about why Solaris has failed here
|
| 2012-05-30: |
What it means for an OS to succeed or fail
|
| 2012-05-28: |
Yes, git add makes a difference (no matter what people think)
How to do a very cautious LVM storage migration
|
| 2012-05-27: |
Complications in spam filter stats in our environment
|
| 2012-05-25: |
How CSLab currently does server side email anti-spam stuff (version 2)
|
| 2012-05-24: |
Today's Mercurial command alias: a short form hg incoming
How we do milter-based spam rejection with Exim
|
| 2012-05-23: |
Some notes on using XFT fonts in TK 8.5
|
| 2012-05-22: |
Our pragmatic experiences with (ZFS) disk errors in our infrastructure
|
| 2012-05-21: |
More on CISC (well, x86) versus RISC
|
| 2012-05-20: |
The XFT font naming issue
|
| 2012-05-19: |
A semi-brief history and overview of X fonts and font rendering technology
|
| 2012-05-17: |
My Firefox memory bloat was mostly from All-in-One Gestures
The Go language's problem on 32-bit machines
|
| 2012-05-15: |
Some stuff on 'time since boot' timestamps
|
| 2012-05-14: |
My Firefox 12 extensions and addons
|
| 2012-05-13: |
My experiment with Firefox Nightly builds: a failure
A basic step in measuring and improving network performance
|
| 2012-05-12: |
The death of paging on the web
|
| 2012-05-10: |
All your servers should have Linux's magic SysRq enabled
|
| 2012-05-09: |
Using rsync to pull a directory tree to client machines
Things I will do differently in the next building power shutdown (part 2)
|
| 2012-05-07: |
Third party Linux kernel modules should build against non-running kernels
|
| 2012-05-06: |
Why I wound up using Django
Counting your syndication feed readers
|
| 2012-05-05: |
Look for your performance analysis tools now
|
| 2012-05-04: |
Explaining a piece of deep weirdness with Python's exec
|
| 2012-05-03: |
Python scopes and the CPython bytecode opcodes that they use
|
| 2012-05-01: |
Into the depths of a Python exec scope-handling bug
|
| 2012-04-30: |
Notes to myself about progressive JavaScript
|
| 2012-04-29: |
The Python language tutorial is a gem
My two approaches to learning (programming) languages
|
| 2012-04-28: |
ZFS and various sorts of read errors
|
| 2012-04-27: |
The case of the Twitter spam I don't understand
|
| 2012-04-26: |
When we replace disks in our ZFS fileserver environment
|
| 2012-04-25: |
Models of providing computing access in a university department
|
| 2012-04-24: |
Universities and their non-employees
|
| 2012-04-23: |
My perspective on the 'Bring Your Own Device' controversy
|
| 2012-04-22: |
I may be wrong about my simple answer being the right one
|
| 2012-04-21: |
Bash's superintelligent errors about exec failures
|
| 2012-04-20: |
Sometimes the simple answers are the right ones (a lesson from bash)
|
| 2012-04-19: |
An interesting experience with IP-based SMTP blocks
|
| 2012-04-18: |
Why you should never use file (or libmagic) to identify files
|
| 2012-04-17: |
ls -l should show the presence of Linux capabilities
|
| 2012-04-16: |
What you need for migrating web content
|
| 2012-04-15: |
My view on why CISC (well, x86) won over RISC in the end
|
| 2012-04-14: |
The wiki trap (that we've fallen into)
|
| 2012-04-12: |
Tanenbaum was wrong in the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate
Hypervisors are not microkernels
|
| 2012-04-11: |
Faking (or not) a ternary if operator with && and ||
|
| 2012-04-10: |
Revisiting checksum functions
|
| 2012-04-09: |
Understanding hashing in Python
|
| 2012-04-08: |
My story of running scripts from the web
|
| 2012-04-06: |
Checksums and hashes
Why we haven't taken to DTrace
|
| 2012-04-05: |
Why I hate having /tmp as a tmpfs
|
| 2012-04-04: |
More on equality in Python (well, mostly Python 2.7)
|
| 2012-04-03: |
Python's two versions of equality, with a long digression on hash()
|
| 2012-04-02: |
The problem of ZFS pool and filesystem version numbers
|
| 2012-03-31: |
Our sysadmin environment
Why I no longer believe that you need Solaris if you want ZFS
|
| 2012-03-29: |
Scalable system management is based on principles
|
| 2012-03-28: |
How I (once) did change management with scripts
Ultimately, abuse issues have to be handled by humans
|
| 2012-03-26: |
Microkernels are quite attractive to academic computer science researchers
What it means to become another user on Unix
|
| 2012-03-25: |
Atom feeds and constrained (web) environments
Link: Getting Real About Distributed System Reliability
|
| 2012-03-24: |
Garbage collection and modern virtual memory systems
|
| 2012-03-23: |
Sometimes you get lucky
|
| 2012-03-22: |
The problems of operations and sysadmin heroism
|
| 2012-03-21: |
My view of where the Unix community is
|
| 2012-03-20: |
How I use objects in Python
|
| 2012-03-19: |
A modest suggestion: increase your text size
|
| 2012-03-18: |
The standard trajectory of a field
|
| 2012-03-16: |
Parsing versus rewriting: how to tell them apart
|
| 2012-03-15: |
Part of the cleverness of Unix permissions (a little thought)
|
| 2012-03-14: |
The right way to do wikitext transitions
Configuration management is not documentation, at least not of intentions
|
| 2012-03-12: |
Why it matters whether your software works when virtualized
Why ZFS log devices aren't likely to help us
|
| 2012-03-11: |
A CBL false positive reveals a significant issue with the CBL
|
| 2012-03-09: |
Why you do not want to patch your source code in place
|
| 2012-03-08: |
What I have to run for my custom environment on Fedora 16
|
| 2012-03-07: |
The hard part of custom environments on Fedora (or any Linux)
How not to use Apache's ProxyPass directive
|
| 2012-03-05: |
Web frameworks should be secure by default
Convenience in web frameworks is often insecure
|
| 2012-03-04: |
Some stuff on Python 2.7.x support periods
|
| 2012-03-03: |
Two ways I increase the security of SSH personal keys
|
| 2012-03-01: |
A trick for dealing with irregular multi-word lines in shell scripts
|
| 2012-02-29: |
SSDs and understanding your bottlenecks
The two sorts of display resolution improvements
|
| 2012-02-28: |
In place migration to Linux software RAID
|
| 2012-02-26: |
What information I want out of ZFS tools and libraries
How much spam is forged as being from who it's sent to?
|
| 2012-02-25: |
The (future) problem with Python 2.7
|
| 2012-02-24: |
Blogs and the problem of indexes
|
| 2012-02-22: |
How I can be wrong about the death of sysadmin jobs
|
| 2012-02-21: |
Using and understanding Python metaclasses (an index)
|
| 2012-02-20: |
Why I still have a custom-compiled Firefox
My view of where TCL went wrong
|
| 2012-02-18: |
The most popular sender domains for spam messages sent to here
The downside of automation versus the death of system administration
|
| 2012-02-16: |
Handling modern IPv6 in programming environments
|
| 2012-02-15: |
The temptation of LVM mirroring
A downside of automation
|
| 2012-02-13: |
The problem with long-term production support of things
|
| 2012-02-12: |
Some things about changing from old X fonts to modern TrueType fonts
Understanding FVWM States, with better FVWM code for selecting terminal windows
|
| 2012-02-11: |
How I select (terminal) windows from the keyboard in FVWM
|
| 2012-02-09: |
What supporting a production OS means for me
A general point about SSH personal keys
|
| 2012-02-08: |
Choosing the superblock format for Linux's software RAID
|
| 2012-02-06: |
The advantage of HDMI for dual displays
|
| 2012-02-05: |
My view on what will kill 'traditional' system administration
Link: Filenames.WTF
What five years of PC technology changed for me
|
| 2012-02-03: |
Understanding a subtle Twitter feature
Understanding Resident Set Size and the RSS problem on modern Unixes
|
| 2012-02-01: |
A ZFS pool scrub wish: suspending scrubs
|
| 2012-01-31: |
The solution to the modern X font handling mystery
Where is Oracle going with Solaris?
|
| 2012-01-30: |
HTML is not a SGML dialect and never really has been
|
| 2012-01-29: |
Dealing with Fitts' Law on widescreen displays
Thinking about spam rejection and abuse addresses
|
| 2012-01-28: |
How I use FvwmIconMan
|
| 2012-01-27: |
Why metaclasses work in Python
|
| 2012-01-26: |
The drawback of modern X font handling gets mysterious
|
| 2012-01-25: |
The death of system administration: I'm all for it
|
| 2012-01-24: |
Why I use exec in my shell scripts
|
| 2012-01-23: |
Every so often, I solve a problem with a hammer
|
| 2012-01-22: |
My view of the purpose of object orientation
|
| 2012-01-21: |
The C juggernaut illustrated
|
| 2012-01-20: |
Another Russ Cox regexp article: How Google Code Search Worked
|
| 2012-01-19: |
How not to do repeated fields in web forms
Let's make it official: Solaris 11 is closed source
|
| 2012-01-18: |
SOPA and PIPA matter for everyone
|
| 2012-01-17: |
The first browser blinks on XHTML parsing
|
| 2012-01-16: |
Understanding isinstance() on Python classes
What you can find out about the memory usage of your Linux programs
|
| 2012-01-15: |
Understanding the basic shape of Unix virtual memory management
|
| 2012-01-14: |
What do we mean when we talk about something's memory usage?
|
| 2012-01-13: |
Notes on what Linux's /proc/<pid>/smaps fields mean
|
| 2012-01-11: |
A Yum plugin I would like: using a local DVD as a repo source
How to use systemd to just run some stuff on boot
|
| 2012-01-10: |
An insight on the purpose of comments: volume control
|
| 2012-01-09: |
What my physical desk is like
|
| 2012-01-08: |
The latest annoyance with Google Groups
|
| 2012-01-07: |
Why you might want multiple keys for disk encryption
|
| 2012-01-05: |
Nailing down RPM epoch numbers
Disk encryption, backups, and your threat model
|
| 2012-01-03: |
How to lose your data with full disk encryption the easy way
The drawback of full disk encryption
|
| 2012-01-02: |
An example sort that needs a comparison function
|
| 2011-12-31: |
Why CA-based SSL is not likely to be replaced any time soon
My thoughts on the mockist versus classicalist testing approaches
|
| 2011-12-30: |
Why I don't like Python 3 dropping the comparison function for sorting
|
| 2011-12-29: |
An empirical exploration of whether spammers take Christmas off
|
| 2011-12-28: |
Blog entries should have visible dates (usually)
|
| 2011-12-27: |
Python 3 from the perspective of someone writing new Python code
|
| 2011-12-26: |
Labs versus offices for sysadmins (or at least us)
More wiring for sysadmins: sysadmins and gigabit networking
|
| 2011-12-25: |
Why office switches plus VLANs aren't the answer for sysadmins
|
| 2011-12-24: |
Wiring offices for sysadmins
|
| 2011-12-23: |
Disk space in the modern world
|
| 2011-12-21: |
Python 3 from the perspective of someone with existing Python code
|
| 2011-12-20: |
SSH, man in the middle attacks, and public key authentication
A little script: nssh
|
| 2011-12-19: |
An advance fee fraud spam aphorism
|
| 2011-12-18: |
Understanding the close() and EINTR situation
|
| 2011-12-17: |
Python 3 from the perspective of a Unix sysadmin
|
| 2011-12-16: |
Avoiding the classic C quoting bug in your language
|
| 2011-12-14: |
Practical issues with REST's use of the Accept header
What makes backups real
Shell functions versus shell scripts
|
| 2011-12-13: |
I'm on Twitter now
DWiki's code is now on Github (among other things)
|
| 2011-12-12: |
How not to improve your package updater application
What debugging info I want from things like SMF and systemd
|
| 2011-12-11: |
head versus sed
|
| 2011-12-10: |
ZFS pool activation and iSCSI (part II)
|
| 2011-12-09: |
A quiet advantage of the systemd approach to service management
|
| 2011-12-08: |
Another reason sysadmins should program
|
| 2011-12-07: |
Understanding the Solaris iSCSI initiator (a bit)
|
| 2011-12-06: |
What I know about boot time ZFS pool activation (part I)
|
| 2011-12-05: |
Debuggers and two sorts of bugs
|
| 2011-12-04: |
The current state of GPT, EFI, and Linux
|
| 2011-12-03: |
Why I have comments here
Link: Russ Cox's articles on regular expressions
|
| 2011-12-02: |
The many ways PCs can dual boot multiple OSes
|
| 2011-11-30: |
On how PCs boot and hard disk partitioning
My mouse button bindings in fvwm, my window manager
|
| 2011-11-29: |
The alternate screen terminal emulator plague
|
| 2011-11-28: |
The login name problem
|
| 2011-11-27: |
Why processing things in inode order is a good idea
|
| 2011-11-26: |
About the order that readdir() returns entries in
|
| 2011-11-25: |
Python instance dictionaries, attribute names, and memory use
|
| 2011-11-24: |
About SATA port multipliers
|
| 2011-11-23: |
The many names of Linux SATA devices
|
| 2011-11-21: |
A cheap caching trick with a preforking server in Python
Mouse scroll wheels versus buttons that you actually want to use
The likely cause of my IPSec dropped packet mystery
|
| 2011-11-20: |
Google Groups fails both anti-spam and basic mailing list management
|
| 2011-11-19: |
My Liferea crashes are not Liferea's fault
|
| 2011-11-17: |
The drawback of modern X font handling
A classic and standard C quoting bug
|
| 2011-11-16: |
Solaris is not an enterprise operating system
|
| 2011-11-15: |
A scroll wheel experiment
|
| 2011-11-13: |
Thinking about how to test our UPSes
A confession about our ZFS configuration
|
| 2011-11-12: |
(Not) parsing wikitext
|
| 2011-11-11: |
My view of the right way to copy lists in Python
|
| 2011-11-10: |
Praise for systemd
|
| 2011-11-09: |
The disappearance of separate filesystems for /usr and /var
|
| 2011-11-08: |
Files and fundamental filesystem activities (on Unix)
|
| 2011-11-07: |
An IPSec mystery with dropped packets
|
| 2011-11-06: |
Ubuntu does system disk mirroring right
|
| 2011-11-05: |
Understanding Apache's Allow, Deny, and Order directives
|
| 2011-11-04: |
More on my Firefox 7 extensions
|
| 2011-11-03: |
My Firefox 7 extensions
|
| 2011-11-02: |
Attention marketers: blog comments are not email
|
| 2011-10-31: |
Why 'quiet' options to programs aren't as useful as you think
Deduplication is always going to be expensive
|
| 2011-10-30: |
Why we have a VPN
|
| 2011-10-29: |
Why ZFS dedup is not something we can use
|
| 2011-10-28: |
ZFS features that could entice us to upgrade Solaris versions
|
| 2011-10-27: |
A Wikitext formatting mistake that I made here
|
| 2011-10-26: |
How to fail at useful cryptography: bad error messages
|
| 2011-10-25: |
A reason not to automate: policy flexibility
|
| 2011-10-24: |
Salting passwords compared to slow password hashing
|
| 2011-10-23: |
Boiling frogs and PC performance
|
| 2011-10-22: |
Fedora 15 versus me
|
| 2011-10-21: |
How I'm capturing only the last portion of standard error
|
| 2011-10-20: |
The kind of computer usage I think Gnome 3 is targeting
|
| 2011-10-19: |
Defending Berkeley's forced choice in network device naming
|
| 2011-10-18: |
The Ethernet device naming mistake (or one part of it)
|
| 2011-10-17: |
What I want out of stable device names
|
| 2011-10-15: |
Why I say Fedora 15 could get my machine's Ethernet's name right
The problem with Fedora 15's consistent network device naming
|
| 2011-10-14: |
Power consumption numbers for my 2011 home machine
|
| 2011-10-13: |
The problem with event loops
|
| 2011-10-12: |
The true cost of sysadmin time (actually, of anyone's time)
|
| 2011-10-11: |
Why people are attracted to minimal language cores
|
| 2011-10-10: |
Arranging scopes for for loops
|
| 2011-10-09: |
My view of the state of graphics cards for Linux (in fall 2011)
|
| 2011-10-08: |
My new Linux machine for fall 2011 (planned)
|
| 2011-10-07: |
Python's philosophy of what closures close over
|
| 2011-10-06: |
Thinking about event loops versus threads
|
| 2011-10-05: |
Understanding the motivations of mail service vendors
|
| 2011-10-03: |
On CPython, cell objects, and closures
My idea of how a modern mailing service should work
|
| 2011-10-02: |
Another comment spam precaution that no longer works out
|
| 2011-10-01: |
Understanding a tricky bit of Python generators
|
| 2011-09-30: |
Some thoughts from a close view of catastrophe
Unit testing by analogy to scientific hypotheses
|
| 2011-09-28: |
A multilevel view of DevOps (with more balance)
Oracle shows its appreciation for long-term Sun customers again
|
| 2011-09-26: |
DevOps and the blame problem: an outsider's view
|
| 2011-09-25: |
How we handle iSCSI device names in Solaris
Danger signs for mail senders in SMTP conversations
|
| 2011-09-24: |
Some recent Google spam problems
|
| 2011-09-23: |
Python's attribute lookup order
|
| 2011-09-22: |
An operational explanation of Python types
|
| 2011-09-21: |
I've surrendered on utm_* query parameters in URLs
|
| 2011-09-20: |
Why I still comment out code even with a VCS
|
| 2011-09-19: |
An operational explanation of Python metaclasses (part 4)
|
| 2011-09-18: |
An operational explanation of Python metaclasses (part 3)
|
| 2011-09-17: |
An operational explanation of Python metaclasses (part 2)
|
| 2011-09-16: |
Setting the character encoding for HTML form input
|
| 2011-09-15: |
How your Linux installer should help you set up filesystems
|
| 2011-09-14: |
Graphs are not enough (for your monitoring system)
|
| 2011-09-13: |
'Web of trust' is a security failure
|
| 2011-09-12: |
An operational explanation of Python metaclasses (part 1)
|
| 2011-09-11: |
The weakness of the certificate authority model, illustrated
|
| 2011-09-09: |
You really want to put your switches in server racks
Things that could happen to your archives
|
| 2011-09-08: |
Archival storage in the modern world
|
| 2011-09-06: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 21)
|
| 2011-09-05: |
The real reason why true asynchronous file IO is hard
|
| 2011-09-04: |
Why true asynchronous file IO is hard, at least for reads
How some Unixes did shared libraries in the old days
|
| 2011-09-03: |
The core of modern Unix shared libraries
|
| 2011-09-01: |
Things I will do differently in the next building power shutdown
|
| 2011-08-31: |
An interesting debugging experience (another tale from long ago)
Who is the audience for a trouble ticket update?
|
| 2011-08-29: |
Devirtualization
Designing services for disengagement
|
| 2011-08-28: |
The problem with busy sysadmins
|
| 2011-08-26: |
Why we don't use a trouble ticketing system
The problem for WSGI middleware
|
| 2011-08-25: |
Trouble ticketing systems and the future
|
| 2011-08-24: |
Why we have a problem with Oracle's Solaris support pricing
|
| 2011-08-23: |
Reading the tea leaves about Oracle, Solaris, and universities
|
| 2011-08-22: |
V8's neat encoding trick for type tracking
|
| 2011-08-21: |
The conflict between caching and tracking on the web
|
| 2011-08-20: |
Why browsers can't really change or validate Last-Modified
|
| 2011-08-19: |
Visibility: an advantage of automation
|
| 2011-08-18: |
You should always use super()
|
| 2011-08-17: |
MH is an iceberg
|
| 2011-08-16: |
An interesting way to shoot yourself in the foot and a limitation of super()
|
| 2011-08-15: |
A bit about what life was like on Unix before shared libraries
|
| 2011-08-14: |
The tragedy of MH
|
| 2011-08-12: |
A Gnome 3 shell extensions failure
One reason we install machines from checklists instead of via automation
|
| 2011-08-11: |
Friendly 'noreply' email addresses
|
| 2011-08-10: |
The 'key plus authenticator' pattern in web apps
|
| 2011-08-08: |
You need to hash web app session IDs
An incomplete list of the ways around MAC address blocking
|
| 2011-08-07: |
What I want out a Symbol type in Python
|
| 2011-08-06: |
Gnome 3: I'm out
|
| 2011-08-05: |
Why sysadmins don't just notify users about compromised machines
|
| 2011-08-04: |
On banning MAC addresses
|
| 2011-08-03: |
How I encode and decode the milter protocol (or, how to write a codec for a sane binary protocol)
|
| 2011-08-02: |
How to make yourself look bad: broken bounce addresses
|
| 2011-07-31: |
Reference counting and multiple inheritance in (C)Python
One of my testing little dirty secrets
|
| 2011-07-29: |
Deciding the meaning of 'disabling' an account (and the value of procedures)
|
| 2011-07-28: |
A directory service doesn't make it easy to disable user accounts
Another reason why version control systems should support history rewriting
|
| 2011-07-27: |
Why not YP, er, NIS
|
| 2011-07-26: |
Disabling an account can be kind of complex
|
| 2011-07-25: |
The risks of using CentOS are split
A little thing that irritates me about common WSGI implementations
|
| 2011-07-24: |
On documenting (or not documenting) binary protocols
|
| 2011-07-23: |
What good secure string expansion on Unix should look like
|
| 2011-07-22: |
String expansion and securely running programs on Unix
|
| 2011-07-20: |
Why I would like my mailer to have a real programming language (part 2)
Our ZFS spares handling system (part 3)
|
| 2011-07-18: |
Thinking about when SQL normalization can improve performance
My view on ORMs
|
| 2011-07-17: |
Another reason to reject spam at SMTP time: as a signal
|
| 2011-07-15: |
Ubuntu, illustrating how to utterly fail at kernel security updates
Something to remember: HTML forms are anonymous
|
| 2011-07-14: |
Ramblings on handling optional arguments in Python
|
| 2011-07-12: |
Why I'm going to be skipping Fedora 15
Some thoughts on creating simple and sane binary protocols
|
| 2011-07-11: |
mxiostat: second generation better Linux disk IO statistics
Some things to think about when doing polymorphic WSGI
|
| 2011-07-10: |
Exploiting polymorphic WSGI again to create cat
|
| 2011-07-08: |
My view on iSCSI performance troubleshooting
|
| 2011-07-07: |
An interesting gotcha with Exim and .forward processing
How Exim makes traditional .forward semantics work
|
| 2011-07-06: |
Our solution to the spam forwarding problem
|
| 2011-07-05: |
Another reason to allow mail origin address forgery
|
| 2011-07-04: |
Our ZFS spares handling system (part 2)
|
| 2011-07-03: |
Why Ubuntu's PAM versioning failure matters
|
| 2011-07-02: |
Dear Googlebot: SMTP is not HTTP
|
| 2011-06-30: |
Some ways to test if a program securely runs other programs
Please have symmetric option negotiations in your protocols
|
| 2011-06-29: |
Our ZFS spares handling system (part 1)
|
| 2011-06-28: |
How to securely run programs from inside your program on Unix
|
| 2011-06-27: |
Formatting information output to make it easy to manage
|
| 2011-06-26: |
Design systems to be managed
|
| 2011-06-25: |
A small wish about parked and squatted domains
|
| 2011-06-23: |
Milter tools for Python and an experiment with coding in public
The ZFS opacity problem and its effect on manageability
|
| 2011-06-22: |
A basic Namespace metaclass for Python
Abusing Python classes as namespaces
|
| 2011-06-20: |
It's long since time for languages to provide sensible network IO
What I need for stream decoding and encoding binary protocols
|
| 2011-06-19: |
The Unix shell initialization problem and how shells should work
|
| 2011-06-18: |
My xdm heresy
|
| 2011-06-17: |
cgroups: so close and yet so far away from per-user fair scheduling
|
| 2011-06-16: |
My three sorts of (Linux) desktops
|
| 2011-06-15: |
The persistence of spammers, illustrated
|
| 2011-06-14: |
A package dependency failure in Fedora 15
|
| 2011-06-13: |
An example of the evolution of a real network
|
| 2011-06-12: |
Noting some wandering thoughts on the occasion of an anniversary
Why [], {}, and () are cheap in Python
|
| 2011-06-11: |
Some notes on __slots__ and class hierarchies
|
| 2011-06-10: |
What __slots__ are good for (or, how to use slots to save memory)
|
| 2011-06-09: |
My issues with Chrome's handling of extensions
More impressions of Google Chrome
|
| 2011-06-08: |
OpenBSD pf rule numbers and tcpdump filtering
|
| 2011-06-07: |
Databases as a compromise damage limiter in web applications
|
| 2011-06-06: |
How much space a Python dictionary entry uses
|
| 2011-06-05: |
A subtle difference between tuples and lists in CPython
|
| 2011-06-04: |
Sometimes having a system programmer around is the right answer
|
| 2011-06-03: |
Ints, __slots__, and Python 3
|
| 2011-06-02: |
My understanding of SQL normalization
|
| 2011-05-31: |
The programmer's problem with WikiText systems
How to fail at versioning
|
| 2011-05-30: |
My recent experience with Firefox's speed
|
| 2011-05-29: |
Getting the stages of the class namespace straight
|
| 2011-05-28: |
The stickyness of Fedora 8 (despite my better intentions)
|
| 2011-05-26: |
You can get 'stale filehandle' errors for local files on extN filesystems
|
| 2011-05-25: |
More not supporting random query parameters in URLs
How Django's form field ordering works
|
| 2011-05-24: |
Proper SQL database design versus the real world
|
| 2011-05-23: |
An aside on RAID-5/RAID-6 and disk failures
|
| 2011-05-22: |
Why losing part of a striped RAID is fatal even on smart filesystems
|
| 2011-05-21: |
One of my irritations: outgoing email that was scored as spam
|
| 2011-05-20: |
Why the kernel does mmap() (beyond efficiency)
|
| 2011-05-19: |
One limitation of simple bisection searches in version control systems
|
| 2011-05-18: |
Why open source projects should use 'git rebase' or the equivalent
|
| 2011-05-17: |
What we could use 10G Ethernet for in the near future
|
| 2011-05-16: |
How our network is implemented (as of May 2011)
|
| 2011-05-15: |
The most interesting reason for an unrouted sandbox network
|
| 2011-05-14: |
Our environment illustrated: what network cable colours mean what
|
| 2011-05-13: |
Our network layout (as of May 2011)
|
| 2011-05-11: |
How ZFS lets you recover from damaged metadata, and what the limitations are
|
| 2011-05-10: |
An important way to get ZFS metadata corruption
A brief summary of how ZFS updates (top-level) metadata
The different ways that you can lose a ZFS pool
|
| 2011-05-09: |
X and the misleading claim of 'mechanisms not policy'
|
| 2011-05-08: |
Fvwm as a window manager construction kit
|
| 2011-05-07: |
Email has two faces today
|
| 2011-05-06: |
A realization about cache entry lifetime and validation
|
| 2011-05-05: |
Thinking about when not disabling iSCSI's InitialR2T matters
|
| 2011-05-04: |
Why xterm's cut and paste model is non-standard and limited
|
| 2011-05-03: |
The importance of xterm for X Windows
|
| 2011-05-02: |
The apparent origins of some odd limitations in the iSCSI protocol
|
| 2011-04-30: |
Our likely iSCSI parameter tuning
|
| 2011-04-29: |
Understanding the iSCSI protocol for performance tuning
|
| 2011-04-28: |
How CPython implements __slots__ (part 2): access
|
| 2011-04-27: |
Mail rejection stats for our external mail gateway
Some notes on what __dictoffset__ on types means in CPython
|
| 2011-04-26: |
A quick look at some spam filtering stats from our system
|
| 2011-04-25: |
An important note about multi-line log message formats
|
| 2011-04-24: |
Notes to myself on the priorities of Linux routing policy rules
|
| 2011-04-23: |
The Upstart dependency problem
|
| 2011-04-21: |
Nailing down new-style classes and types in Python
How CPython implements __slots__ (part 1): storage
|
| 2011-04-19: |
Another reason to avoid using __slots__ in your Python classes
A difference between Python 'structs' and C structs
|
| 2011-04-18: |
What made X Windows so special
|
| 2011-04-17: |
The ultimate (for now) answer for our ZFS ARC size problem
|
| 2011-04-16: |
Cache validators versus cache invalidation
|
| 2011-04-15: |
Why a dynamic website with caching is simpler than a baked site
|
| 2011-04-14: |
More on baking websites to static files and speed
|
| 2011-04-13: |
Some common caching techniques for dynamic websites
|
| 2011-04-11: |
You don't need to bake your site to static files to be fast
The importance of test suites for standards
|
| 2011-04-10: |
The evolution of the git tree format
|
| 2011-04-08: |
An example of modifying a Firefox extension
|
| 2011-04-07: |
Why I don't like Solaris boot archives, illustrated
|
| 2011-04-06: |
Monkey subclassing for fun and profit
|
| 2011-04-05: |
The story of leaving N% of your filesystem unused for performance
|
| 2011-04-04: |
Why logging to syslog is different than logging to standard error
Logs are not just streams
|
| 2011-04-03: |
Please don't alert based on percentages
|
| 2011-04-02: |
How to use gdb to call getpeername()
|
| 2011-03-31: |
A slightly unobvious trap with 'from module import *'
A really annoying gap in system observability
|
| 2011-03-30: |
A realization about code complexity and clarity
|
| 2011-03-28: |
Why you should avoid 'from module import whatever'
The problem with contributing documentation to projects
|
| 2011-03-27: |
Some thinking on proliferating web standards
|
| 2011-03-26: |
How not to issue Linux kernel security update notices
|
| 2011-03-25: |
Sending email via a SMTP connection considered harmful
|
| 2011-03-24: |
XHTML and web authoring folklore
|
| 2011-03-22: |
How to add and use additional fields on Django model formsets
Some notes on doing things with Django model formsets
|
| 2011-03-21: |
Why XHTML was doomed from the beginning
|
| 2011-03-20: |
The devil's advocate argument against paying attention to web standards
|
| 2011-03-19: |
The two sides of (PPPoE) DSL service
|
| 2011-03-18: |
How to configure a (PPPoE) DSL connection on a normal Fedora 14 Gnome desktop
|
| 2011-03-17: |
The timing of production Linux deployments
|
| 2011-03-16: |
Thinking about our alternatives to Solaris
|
| 2011-03-15: |
Our uncertain future with Solaris 11
|
| 2011-03-14: |
Why growing IPv6 usage is going to be fun, especially for sysadmins
|
| 2011-03-13: |
Why programs traditionally used sparse files on Unix
|
| 2011-03-12: |
Trust betrayed: a story of modern email
|
| 2011-03-11: |
What tools I use to deal with email
|
| 2011-03-10: |
What we did to get iSCSI multipathing working on Solaris 10 update 8
|
| 2011-03-09: |
Why feed readers have been a geek flash in the pan
|
| 2011-03-08: |
My personal hard drive capacity curve inflection point
|
| 2011-03-07: |
What terminal emulators I use when
|
| 2011-03-06: |
A fun Linux kernel pty problem, or maybe it's not a problem
|
| 2011-03-05: |
FastCGI's encoding mistakes and how not to design a wire protocol
|
| 2011-03-04: |
Why I call FastCGI complex and SCGI much simpler
|
| 2011-03-02: |
The POSIX shell and the three sorts of Unixes
Filtering, email, and differences from Usenet
|
| 2011-02-28: |
The evolution of filtering (a story from the Usenet era)
The slowdown of Solaris here
|
| 2011-02-27: |
Django's forms are security-smart the way you want them to be
|
| 2011-02-26: |
A belated realization about web spiders and your page cache
|
| 2011-02-25: |
Why I am not enthused about ZFS for my root filesystem
|
| 2011-02-23: |
Handling variations of a page (or, the revenge of REST)
A quick tour of my desktop
|
| 2011-02-22: |
Why I want read-only form fields in Django
|
| 2011-02-21: |
How to get automatic volume management on Fedora 14 without Gnome
|
| 2011-02-20: |
What windows I use window titlebars on
|
| 2011-02-19: |
My view on window titlebars and when they are good and bad
|
| 2011-02-18: |
Another building block of my environment: xrun
|
| 2011-02-17: |
My latest crazy plan to upgrade my home Linux machine
|
| 2011-02-16: |
The myth of isolated, independent sysadmins
|
| 2011-02-15: |
More on an advantage of the blog approach to web writing
|
| 2011-02-14: |
Thinking about misunderstandings (in systems)
|
| 2011-02-13: |
A humbling experience with '#' characters in filenames
|
| 2011-02-12: |
An advantage of the blog approach to web writing versus the wiki approach
|
| 2011-02-11: |
The letdown
|
| 2011-02-10: |
Using Django forms with HTTP GETs
|
| 2011-02-09: |
On flow (a digression)
|
| 2011-02-08: |
Thinking realistically about SQL database field sizes
|
| 2011-02-07: |
My brute force email archive
|
| 2011-02-06: |
Dear Unix mailers: please allow more forgery
|
| 2011-02-05: |
A side note on Google Chrome and the future of HTML
|
| 2011-02-04: |
Why people put NFS mounts in subdirectories
|
| 2011-02-03: |
The real lesson of XHTML
|
| 2011-02-02: |
Django and primary keys versus surrogate keys
My issues with primary keys are not Django specific
|
| 2011-01-31: |
There are two sorts of standards in the world
A little advantage of Django's automatic primary keys
|
| 2011-01-30: |
An obvious realization about SQL foreign keys
|
| 2011-01-29: |
Two things I have discovered about Django schema design
The amusement of minimalist spam
|
| 2011-01-28: |
On programming (and me)
|
| 2011-01-27: |
Not very much about Solaris NFS filehandles
|
| 2011-01-26: |
The various ways of writing a modern Python web app
|
| 2011-01-25: |
The modern Python web application stack (as I understand it)
|
| 2011-01-24: |
Poison pills, a tale of interrupts versus highly structured systems
|
| 2011-01-23: |
The question of how long our greylisting interval should be
|
| 2011-01-22: |
The clash between wikis and blogging
|
| 2011-01-21: |
A bit more on listing file locks on Solaris 10
|
| 2011-01-20: |
Something I've worked out about Django's admin interface
|
| 2011-01-18: |
What I am trying to do with Django
|
| 2011-01-17: |
Wrestling with how to design a schema for a Django app
|
| 2011-01-16: |
More on Linux FHS and /var
Why I don't use either a thin client or a fat client
|
| 2011-01-15: |
Linux's FHS is not the right answer for where to put data directories
|
| 2011-01-14: |
Wikis are not a simple solution for blogging
|
| 2011-01-13: |
One of SELinux's problems is that it's a backup mechanism
|
| 2011-01-11: |
My problem with SELinux
The optimistic view of SELinux's real purpose
|
| 2011-01-10: |
Why really high computer security is not interesting to most people
|
| 2011-01-09: |
What would be nice for SSL is out-of-band certificate binding
|
| 2011-01-08: |
Finding out if you've been hit by careful, clever spammers
|
| 2011-01-07: |
More modest suggestions for bug trackers
|
| 2011-01-06: |
An appreciation for the Posix $( ) command substitution syntax
|
| 2011-01-05: |
An actual use for the CSS overflow property
|
| 2011-01-04: |
A new building block of my environment: dmenu
|
| 2011-01-03: |
On improved but less functional versions of things
|
| 2011-01-02: |
Why there is a gulf between shells and scripting languages
|
| 2010-12-31: |
The only way to really be secure with SSL
One group that can sensibly use non-GPL'd Linux kernel modules
|
| 2010-12-30: |
Why you need select() even with communication channels
|
| 2010-12-29: |
Spam as a tax on public participation in open source projects
|
| 2010-12-28: |
A modest proposal for fixing your bug tracker
|
| 2010-12-27: |
Users don't care about security
|
| 2010-12-26: |
A lesson for myself: write tests. Really.
|
| 2010-12-25: |
Garbage-collected languages and memory allocation failures
|
| 2010-12-24: |
The jurisdiction problem with making SSL CAs liable for things
|
| 2010-12-23: |
More on the Unix interpreter startup problem
|
| 2010-12-22: |
The Unix interpreter problem(s)
|
| 2010-12-21: |
Why I want tests to be easy to write
|
| 2010-12-20: |
I don't understand how to test complex data structures
|
| 2010-12-19: |
A tale of memory allocation failure
|
| 2010-12-17: |
A Python (non-)idiom that I should really avoid
Sometimes bugs have very small edit distances
|
| 2010-12-16: |
The elements of a non-event
|
| 2010-12-15: |
Always remember that people make mistakes
|
| 2010-12-13: |
Fumbling towards understanding how to use DRBD
A program that I want to write: a 'sink' SMTP server
|
| 2010-12-12: |
One problem with the files-in-directory approach to configuration
|
| 2010-12-11: |
The danger of having system programmers around, illustrated
|
| 2010-12-10: |
How to get sysadmins to never use your software again
|
| 2010-12-09: |
A small request for C programmers: no static locals
|
| 2010-12-08: |
Exploring a limitation of the DTrace fbt provider (on x86)
|
| 2010-12-07: |
More on https as a necessary mistake
|
| 2010-12-06: |
What performance anomalies mean
|
| 2010-12-05: |
A log message format mistake that I've made
|
| 2010-12-03: |
Asking users questions never increases security
Why https was a mistake, but an inevitable one
|
| 2010-12-02: |
My view of OpenSolaris and Illumos
|
| 2010-11-30: |
A modest idea on how to get people to use Fedora Rawhide
|
| 2010-11-29: |
Why low quality encryption is not better than no encryption
Why 10G Ethernet is not a near-term issue for us
|
| 2010-11-28: |
Why I am harsh on Solaris Live Upgrade and similar tools
|
| 2010-11-27: |
Why I'm not really interested in Solaris's Live Upgrade stuff
|
| 2010-11-26: |
My view on Wayland replacing X in Linux
|
| 2010-11-25: |
An example of the progress of the modern web
|
| 2010-11-24: |
My oddly inconsistent caution (or paranoia) with email addresses
|
| 2010-11-22: |
Where to find the Illumos source repository
|
| 2010-11-21: |
Why I think some coding tricks are especially damaging
|
| 2010-11-20: |
Why I avoid DSA when I have a choice
More on those Python import oddities
|
| 2010-11-18: |
My current Apache SSL cipher settings
Thinking about how long our infrastructure will last
|
| 2010-11-16: |
When good ideas go bad: how not to do a file chooser dialog
|
| 2010-11-15: |
The language dilemma for production software
|
| 2010-11-14: |
Four reasons to have a firewall
The ordering of SSL chain certificates
|
| 2010-11-13: |
How os.path exposes some Python import weirdness
|
| 2010-11-11: |
The changing assumptions about viruses in email
Some yum tricks with distro-sync and --releasever
|
| 2010-11-09: |
Directory link counts and a find trick
|
| 2010-11-08: |
A find optimization and a piece of history, all in one
When Linux's rp_filter might make sense
|
| 2010-11-07: |
When you should care about security
|
| 2010-11-06: |
Modern versions of Apache and Redirect
|
| 2010-11-05: |
GNU sort and -k: a gotcha
|
| 2010-11-04: |
What we (currently) use virtualization for
|
| 2010-11-03: |
One reason that I call us a midsized environment
|
| 2010-11-01: |
Redirecting from HTTP to HTTPS is a bad security idea
|
| 2010-10-31: |
How I run two Firefoxes at once and still have remote control
How I set up my isolated testing Firefox environment
|
| 2010-10-30: |
A very convenient trick: having a testing browser
|
| 2010-10-29: |
What problems the Maildir mail storage format solves
|
| 2010-10-27: |
An extra problem with not documenting things in open source modules
A modern VCS mistake enabled by working on live trees
|
| 2010-10-26: |
Why Python's struct module isn't great for handling binary protocols
|
| 2010-10-24: |
Why we built our own ZFS spares handling system
Why I'm interested in Go
|
| 2010-10-23: |
My issues with Go's net package
|
| 2010-10-22: |
My theory on Unix's one chance to have a standard GUI
|
| 2010-10-21: |
The problems with testing for round-trip capable codecs
|
| 2010-10-20: |
Round-trip capable character encodings in Python
|
| 2010-10-18: |
A module that I want in the standard library: Parsing
The cache eviction death spiral
|
| 2010-10-17: |
Read IO is generally synchronous (unlike write IO)
|
| 2010-10-16: |
The attraction of the milter protocol
|
| 2010-10-15: |
How big our fileserver environment is (part 2)
|
| 2010-10-13: |
How big our fileserver environment is (part 1)
Why visited links being visible is important for blog usability
|
| 2010-10-12: |
Why non-linear directories have not been popular in filesystems
|
| 2010-10-11: |
The Unix directory problem and the history of directories
|
| 2010-10-10: |
Fixing Upstart's coupling of startup script presence and activation
|
| 2010-10-09: |
An illustration of how careful and clever spammers are today
|
| 2010-10-08: |
Why I am unhappy with Upstart right now
|
| 2010-10-07: |
In universities, you often buy hardware when you can
|
| 2010-10-06: |
What is going on with Samba's POSIX locking on NFS on Linux
|
| 2010-10-05: |
Why people combine NFS with Samba servers
|
| 2010-10-04: |
Linux, Samba, NFS, and POSIX locking
|
| 2010-10-03: |
An API mistake Unix has made several times
|
| 2010-10-02: |
ZFS resilvers are a whole-pool activity
|
| 2010-09-30: |
Stopping kernel updates on Ubuntu
A lot of my bugs are conceptual oversights
|
| 2010-09-29: |
A surprise about random IO versus unnecessary IO
|
| 2010-09-27: |
Why there is no POSIX standard for a Unix GUI
Why Grub2 doesn't solve my Ubuntu kernel problem
|
| 2010-09-26: |
The problems with OpenSolaris
|
| 2010-09-25: |
How Usenet used to be a filesystem stress test
|
| 2010-09-24: |
Frames were never necessary for menus and tables of contents
|
| 2010-09-23: |
Why things should be in Python's standard library
|
| 2010-09-22: |
The mysteries of video cards for Linux
|
| 2010-09-20: |
Dear Solaris boot sequence: SHUT UP
|
| 2010-09-19: |
Your on the fly control system should not use toggles
Some notes on (dynamic) Bind 9 logging
|
| 2010-09-18: |
Another reason why I don't like Ubuntu kernel packaging
|
| 2010-09-17: |
More on the module selection problem
|
| 2010-09-15: |
Why I like modules to be in the Python standard library
An overview of the Debian and RPM source package formats
|
| 2010-09-14: |
A confession: I find third party modules awkward in Python
|
| 2010-09-13: |
Why you want a recursive-forwarding caching nameserver
|
| 2010-09-12: |
Keyword expansion: why RCS rewrites files when you commit them
One aspect of getting used to modern version control
|
| 2010-09-11: |
A simple thing that every package management system should have
|
| 2010-09-10: |
Go's network package and IPv6 (and my ideal version thereof)
|
| 2010-09-09: |
Go, IPv6, and single binding machines
|
| 2010-09-07: |
My new view of DomainKeys
|
| 2010-09-06: |
Sorting out DomainKeys and understanding its limits
|
| 2010-09-05: |
An observation from changing my password
A plan to deal with my feed reader problem
|
| 2010-09-04: |
The laziness of a programmer, illustrated
|
| 2010-09-03: |
Finally understanding the attraction of AJAX
|
| 2010-09-02: |
Why Python's global is necessary
|
| 2010-08-31: |
I don't understand how net.ipv4.conf.*.rp_filter can work
|
| 2010-08-30: |
My avoidance of Python global variables
|
| 2010-08-29: |
A Bourne shell irritation: no wildcard matching operator
How many uberblock copies ZFS writes on transaction group commits
|
| 2010-08-28: |
The different between an SMTP proxy and a SMTP relay
|
| 2010-08-27: |
My impressions of Google Chrome so far
|
| 2010-08-25: |
A Windows moment on my laptop
The limitation of templates for web design changes
|
| 2010-08-24: |
A design mistake in my comments form
|
| 2010-08-23: |
Why I hate the Solaris 10 version of /bin/sh
My (probably wrong) assumption about Flash on Fedora
|
| 2010-08-22: |
Another reason to hate $LANG and locales on Unix
|
| 2010-08-21: |
A sudden realization about Unix access time updates and disk mirrors
|
| 2010-08-20: |
A clever blog anti-usability trick
|
| 2010-08-19: |
Getting Flash to work on my upgraded 64-bit Fedora 13 machine
|
| 2010-08-18: |
Please, no automatic scrolling to the next item
|
| 2010-08-17: |
The two sorts of Referer spam that I see
|
| 2010-08-16: |
What OpenSolaris's death probably means for us
|
| 2010-08-15: |
Why I change font sizes
|
| 2010-08-14: |
What I want in a caching nameserver
|
| 2010-08-13: |
PPP over ssh: solving problems with indirection
|
| 2010-08-12: |
Many programs should provide an easy way to change font size
|
| 2010-08-11: |
You should have a way to purge history
|
| 2010-08-10: |
Upgrading to Fedora 13 with my first yum upgrade
|
| 2010-08-08: |
The joy of debugging other people's programs
A personal view of the Fedora versus Ubuntu issue
|
| 2010-08-07: |
Why buying a Linux machine is not such a simple thing
|
| 2010-08-06: |
A thing I miss in the modern X world: command line arguments
|
| 2010-08-05: |
Doing unsigned 32-bit integer math in Python
|
| 2010-08-04: |
Good Solaris news from Oracle for once
|
| 2010-08-02: |
How OpenBSD's pf source-hash maps internal IPs to NAT pool IPs
|
| 2010-08-01: |
The consequence of Oracle's Solaris decisions
|
| 2010-07-31: |
The other peculiar effects of grant funding at universities
It's the indirect failure modes that will get you
|
| 2010-07-30: |
A little modern Unix twitch
|
| 2010-07-29: |
Some brief notes on OpenSSH's known_hosts hashing
|
| 2010-07-28: |
My Fedora 8 problem: upgrading
|
| 2010-07-27: |
What I would now do differently in a file based blog engine
|
| 2010-07-25: |
Why sysadmins almost never replace distribution packages
iSCSI versus NFS
|
| 2010-07-24: |
Thinking about the implications of your program being successful
|
| 2010-07-23: |
A realization about why my inbox keeps being my to-do tracker
|
| 2010-07-22: |
Why keeping /etc under version control doesn't entirely help
|
| 2010-07-21: |
The easy way to do fast OS upgrades
|
| 2010-07-20: |
The sysadmin view of messages from programs
|
| 2010-07-19: |
Why blog calendar widgets are bad
|
| 2010-07-18: |
How I solve the configure memory problem
|
| 2010-07-17: |
More building blocks of my environment: tkrxterm, tkssh, and pyhosts
|
| 2010-07-16: |
Realistic blog usability
|
| 2010-07-14: |
Making the Linux kernel shut up about segfaulting user programs
The challenges of shared spares in RAID arrays
|
| 2010-07-13: |
Sun Support's habit of publicizing private bug reports
Single-level list flattening in Python
|
| 2010-07-12: |
On (not) logging calculated statistics
|
| 2010-07-11: |
When is using SQL the right answer?
|
| 2010-07-10: |
People forget exceptions
|
| 2010-07-08: |
Unix programs should avoid exiting non-zero for clever reasons
|
| 2010-07-07: |
A gotcha with the Bourne shell's set -e and &&
|
| 2010-07-06: |
How zpool status reports on ZFS scrubs and resilvers
ZFS scrubs and resilvers are not sequential IO
|
| 2010-07-05: |
A thesis: noisy email addresses are dead
|
| 2010-07-03: |
/u, one of our long-standing Unix customizations
Returning to the era of 'duplicated' Ethernet addresses
|
| 2010-07-02: |
A gotcha with Python's socket.htonl() and ntohl()
A corollary to the limits of anti-spam precautions
|
| 2010-06-30: |
An update on comment spammer behavior here on WanderingThoughts
|
| 2010-06-29: |
Converting between IPv4 addresses and 32-bit integers in Python
There is such a thing as too much SQL (a reminder to myself)
|
| 2010-06-28: |
The great irritation of hidden access controls
|
| 2010-06-27: |
How we propagate password information in our fileserver infrastructure
|
| 2010-06-26: |
The Unix system UID and login name problem
|
| 2010-06-25: |
Python class definitions can be nested
|
| 2010-06-24: |
The elements of fileserver infrastructure
|
| 2010-06-23: |
The advantages of separate machines for separate things
|
| 2010-06-22: |
Why feed readers are not good for skimming things
|
| 2010-06-21: |
Applying low distraction design to alerting systems
|
| 2010-06-20: |
How my mail notifier avoids interrupting me
|
| 2010-06-19: |
Don't make your 'I am processing' animation too complex
|
| 2010-06-18: |
ZFS and multi-pool shared spares
|
| 2010-06-17: |
One reason why I prefer browser windows to browser tabs
|
| 2010-06-16: |
The problem of testing firewall rules changes
|
| 2010-06-14: |
The practicalities of non-GPL'd Linux kernel modules
A thought on feed readers versus the social web
|
| 2010-06-13: |
A (surprising) missing Unix tool program
|
| 2010-06-12: |
iSCSI Enterprise Target 1.4.20.1 and disk write caches (and ZFS)
|
| 2010-06-11: |
What I know about ZFS and disk write caches
|
| 2010-06-10: |
What an iSCSI Enterprise Target kernel message really means
|
| 2010-06-09: |
The challenge of analyzing NFS packet traces
|
| 2010-06-08: |
Focusing on what you actually need in a program
|
| 2010-06-07: |
One problem with testing system changes
|
| 2010-06-06: |
The quiet death of postmaster@anywhere
|
| 2010-06-04: |
How to set up your module exceptions to be useful
How disk write caches can corrupt filesystem metadata
|
| 2010-06-02: |
A ZFS feature wish: rewriting read errors
|
| 2010-06-01: |
My sad little irritation with Twitter
|
| 2010-05-31: |
Another building block of my environment: sshterm
|
| 2010-05-30: |
The end of university-provided email is probably nigh
|
| 2010-05-29: |
UPSes: defense against problems, or sources of them?
Some comments on spam scoring and anti-spam tools in general
|
| 2010-05-28: |
Why I am really unhappy with ZFS right now: a ZFS import failure
|
| 2010-05-27: |
One benefit of relying on third-party (anti-)spam filtering
|
| 2010-05-25: |
Watch out for quietly degrading SATA disks
|
| 2010-05-24: |
Give your personal scripts good error messages
|
| 2010-05-23: |
Replacing modules for testing (and fun)
|
| 2010-05-22: |
How I fixed Google's search results redesign
Why I'm wrong about what sort of APIs C's stdargs allows
|
| 2010-05-21: |
An example of an API that you can't do with C stdargs
|
| 2010-05-20: |
The limitations of C's varargs support
|
| 2010-05-19: |
Why RPM's .rpmnew files don't work in practice
|
| 2010-05-18: |
An illustrated example of how not to do package updates
|
| 2010-05-16: |
You should also document why you didn't do attractive things
A theory about our jumbo frame switch firmware bug
|
| 2010-05-15: |
Why we don't use jumbo frames for iSCSI: a cautionary tale on testing
|
| 2010-05-14: |
A sysadmin mistake: shooting your virtual foot off
|
| 2010-05-13: |
Python exceptions for C programmers
|
| 2010-05-12: |
'Borrowing' IPv4 netblocks to get around address space exhaustion
|
| 2010-05-11: |
Retrospectives are uncommon
|
| 2010-05-10: |
A little vi twitch
|
| 2010-05-09: |
Why diskless Unix machines lost out
|
| 2010-05-08: |
SSL certificate vendors are selling a commodity
|
| 2010-05-06: |
Oracle's future for Sun's hardware and OS business is now clear
The right way and the wrong way to disable init.d services
|
| 2010-05-05: |
The right way to fix ZFS disk glitches (at least for us)
|
| 2010-05-04: |
Dear software packagers, startup scripts edition
|
| 2010-05-03: |
Keeping track of filesystem consistency
|
| 2010-05-02: |
A brief history of fsck
|
| 2010-04-30: |
A rule of thumb: Automate where you can make mistakes
Never kill the screen locker
|
| 2010-04-29: |
How you access an object can be important in Python
|
| 2010-04-28: |
Altering a Python function's local variables with a trace function
|
| 2010-04-27: |
Evolving our mail system step 1: adding an external mail gateway
|
| 2010-04-26: |
How we moved from a black-box mailer configuration to a white-box one
|
| 2010-04-25: |
An observation about Twitter (and Google)
|
| 2010-04-24: |
Evolving our mail system: the overview and our goals
|
| 2010-04-23: |
What per-partition disk IO stats you get from the Linux kernel
|
| 2010-04-22: |
The latest Solaris licensing and support rumbles
|
| 2010-04-21: |
The advantage of garbage collection for APIs
|
| 2010-04-20: |
Standard format Unix errors in Python programs
|
| 2010-04-19: |
Why you don't want to host your MTA machine in the cloud
|
| 2010-04-18: |
I think it's time to turn off automatic periodic ext3 fscks
|
| 2010-04-17: |
The 30 second elevator pitch on HTML 4.01 (vs XHTML)
|
| 2010-04-16: |
How to write to stderr so people will like you
|
| 2010-04-15: |
The standard format Unix error messages
|
| 2010-04-14: |
The myth of a completely shared knowledge base across sysadmins
|
| 2010-04-13: |
The impact of single-disk slow writes on mirrors (and other RAID arrays)
|
| 2010-04-12: |
The importance of figuring out low-level symptoms of problems
|
| 2010-04-11: |
The comedy potential inherent in people reusing your address space
|
| 2010-04-10: |
Why commands can never afford to get it wrong in a version
|
| 2010-04-09: |
The processing flow of a network copying program
|
| 2010-04-08: |
A little script: sshup
|
| 2010-04-07: |
Our current mail system's configuration
|
| 2010-04-06: |
How not to set up IP aliases on Ubuntu (and probably Debian)
|
| 2010-04-05: |
An important thing about how ZFS handles spares
|
| 2010-04-04: |
The problem with header and footer overlays on web pages
|
| 2010-04-03: |
A DVCS advantage for open source development
|
| 2010-04-02: |
Notes on the compatibility of crypted passwords on various Unixes
|
| 2010-03-31: |
Looking back at a year of our disk-based backup system
Remote applications and Gnome settings: an irritation
|
| 2010-03-30: |
One possible future for Solaris
|
| 2010-03-29: |
More signs of Oracle's view of Solaris
My theory on why our worklogs work for us
|
| 2010-03-28: |
The evolution of checklists in my work
|
| 2010-03-27: |
Testing in the face of popen()
|
| 2010-03-26: |
Tkinter sometimes has a busy-wait main loop (more or less)
|
| 2010-03-25: |
The problem with overly verbose package installation
|
| 2010-03-24: |
One reason why 'zpool status' can hang
|
| 2010-03-23: |
No DSL is 'human-readable' as such
|
| 2010-03-22: |
Why I exploit Python to shim modules for testing purposes
|
| 2010-03-21: |
The power of 'I like this' in social applications
|
| 2010-03-20: |
Web analytics versus GET parameter security
|
| 2010-03-19: |
The problem with general purpose languages as configuration languages
|
| 2010-03-17: |
How Solaris 10's mountd works
Another building block of my environment: rxterm
|
| 2010-03-16: |
The Solaris 10 NFS server's caching of filesystem access permissions
|
| 2010-03-15: |
How to create pointless error reports (and how not to)
|
| 2010-03-14: |
Space and content
|
| 2010-03-13: |
A surprising lack: milter clients
|
| 2010-03-12: |
End results versus what's inside the black box
|
| 2010-03-11: |
Why the pam_mail PAM module is not my friend
|
| 2010-03-10: |
Mythology about Unix workstations
|
| 2010-03-09: |
How not to design an API (in C): the enum ordering mistake
|
| 2010-03-08: |
Exceptions versus error return values
|
| 2010-03-07: |
Why I don't expect third-party support for OpenSolaris
|
| 2010-03-06: |
Pushing code changes upstream is hard work
|
| 2010-03-05: |
PCs are (or can be) Unix workstations
|
| 2010-03-04: |
You want to do spam forwarding on a separate machine
|
| 2010-03-03: |
All syndication formats use XML
|
| 2010-03-02: |
A building block of my environment: rxexec
|
| 2010-02-28: |
Why XML is terrible for configuration files
The dividing line between supporting code and forking it
|
| 2010-02-27: |
An 'email marketing' wish
|
| 2010-02-26: |
The remaining Unixes (and their manpages)
|
| 2010-02-25: |
Reading the Oracle tea leaves for Solaris
|
| 2010-02-24: |
How to listen on a socket in the modern IPv6-enabled world
|
| 2010-02-23: |
What Linux's getaddrinfo() is doing with IPv6 (on some versions)
|
| 2010-02-22: |
Unix portability and scripting language versions
|
| 2010-02-21: |
It's sinking in that Sun is gone
|
| 2010-02-20: |
Viral marketing versus word of mouth marketing
|
| 2010-02-19: |
Using socket.getaddrinfo to look up IP addresses
|
| 2010-02-18: |
Some notes on using socket.getaddrinfo()
|
| 2010-02-17: |
The purpose of configuration files
|
| 2010-02-16: |
A Linux gotcha about daemons and bindv6only
|
| 2010-02-15: |
IPv6 with Lighttpd on Linux
|
| 2010-02-14: |
Brief notes on IPv6 support in some Linux programs
|
| 2010-02-13: |
Some stuff on dual-bound IPv6 sockets on Linux
|
| 2010-02-12: |
The many IPv6 addresses of an IPv4 machine
|
| 2010-02-11: |
Forcing your webpage content to scroll is generally a bad idea
|
| 2010-02-10: |
Beware of using Linux's hostname -s switch
Some thoughts about 6to4
|
| 2010-02-09: |
Why your program should have an actual configuration file
|
| 2010-02-08: |
A thought on deliberately slow disaster recovery
|
| 2010-02-07: |
The problem with blog footnotes
|
| 2010-02-06: |
Why a laptop is not likely to be my primary machine any time soon
|
| 2010-02-05: |
Emergency procedures checklists need check steps
|
| 2010-02-03: |
Outdated documentation is especially risky for sysadmins
Link: Pollution in 1.0.0.0/8
How to destroy people's interest in updating documentation
|
| 2010-02-02: |
What charging credit cards doesn't prove
|
| 2010-01-31: |
More vim options it turns out that I want
Thinking about syndication feeds and spoilers
|
| 2010-01-30: |
I'm puzzled about DNS glue records in the modern world
|
| 2010-01-29: |
A theory about Apple's new iPad
|
| 2010-01-28: |
Always sign exactly what you are authenticating
|
| 2010-01-27: |
AT&T's mad unbundling and the damage it did to Unix
|
| 2010-01-26: |
Why the modern age is great
|
| 2010-01-25: |
You can only really expire cookies on the server
|
| 2010-01-24: |
How I should have done password crypto for DWiki
|
| 2010-01-23: |
A Python safety tip: Do notice that things can throw exceptions
|
| 2010-01-22: |
Three ways to get tracebacks in your CGI Python application
|
| 2010-01-20: |
The argument for not managing systems via packages
One of the things that killed network computers (aka thin clients)
|
| 2010-01-19: |
OpenSolaris versus Solaris
|
| 2010-01-18: |
More on mismatched sectors on Linux software RAID mirrors
|
| 2010-01-17: |
I do not like Unix's fossilization
|
| 2010-01-16: |
Different visions of what packaging systems are for
|
| 2010-01-15: |
Packaging systems should support overlays
|
| 2010-01-14: |
Packaging systems should be comprehensive
|
| 2010-01-13: |
One reason why you should not let people register other people
|
| 2010-01-12: |
How systems get created in the real world
|
| 2010-01-11: |
In praise of crash (and kernel source)
|
| 2010-01-10: |
Why the Solaris packaging system is bad
|
| 2010-01-09: |
Patch management is part of package management
|
| 2010-01-08: |
A brief and jaundiced history of Unix packaging systems
Interesting things can happen when you scale things up
|
| 2010-01-06: |
A theory on why most browsers control their own list of CA roots
The department's model for providing computing support
|
| 2010-01-04: |
Some thoughts on battery backup for RAID controller cards
Turning synchronous channels asynchronous
|
| 2010-01-03: |
Go interfaces are not my sort of interfaces
|
| 2010-01-02: |
Proper disclosure, or how not to be a comment spammer
|
| 2010-01-01: |
Brief bits from the evolving ipsCA failure
|
| 2009-12-31: |
Why free things are so attractive in universities
Look at your pull-based system for things that push
|
| 2009-12-30: |
Real world support periods are shorter than they look
|
| 2009-12-29: |
Solaris is not open source
|
| 2009-12-28: |
The annoying timing of future SSL certificate renewals
|
| 2009-12-27: |
Some OpenSSL and SSL certificate basics
|
| 2009-12-26: |
Things that limit the performance of hardware acceleration
|
| 2009-12-25: |
Linux's non-strict overcommit is the right default
|
| 2009-12-24: |
The advantages of open source software RAID
|
| 2009-12-23: |
Another demonstration of SSL Certification Authority (in)competence
|
| 2009-12-22: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 20)
Do you have a network layout diagram?
Using OpenID for local web application authentication
|
| 2009-12-20: |
Some things about getting useful output from time
Some thoughts on intercepting https traffic
|
| 2009-12-19: |
Local CAs and an interesting consequence of the SSL security model
|
| 2009-12-18: |
Secure or useful: pick one
|
| 2009-12-17: |
The good and bad of SQL
|
| 2009-12-16: |
How Linux software RAID is making me grumpy right now
|
| 2009-12-15: |
The high costs of true security paranoia in the face of compromises
|
| 2009-12-13: |
Sysadmin versus developer uses of version control systems
Mercurial versus git for sysadmins, or why we picked Mercurial
|
| 2009-12-12: |
You should always be able to get a program's version and basic usage
|
| 2009-12-11: |
A wish for KVM virtualization: simple bridged networking
|
| 2009-12-10: |
How not to copy a file to standard output in Python
|
| 2009-12-09: |
My views on inheritance versus interface
|
| 2009-12-08: |
Why I am not enthused about etckeeper and similar systems
|
| 2009-12-07: |
Why whitelists (and blacklists) are long-term poison for online systems
|
| 2009-12-05: |
Overcoming the drawbacks of preforking accept() servers
What version of Python is included in various current OSes
|
| 2009-12-04: |
Learning from Unicorn: the accept() thundering herd non-problem
|
| 2009-12-02: |
The problem with the OpenSolaris source repository
The mixed directory/unrelated files VCS problem
|
| 2009-11-30: |
Using content hashing to avoid the double post problem
Poking around the OpenSolaris codebase (for sysadmins)
|
| 2009-11-29: |
In security, you need to stop the root mistake
|
| 2009-11-28: |
'Conditional restart' in init.d scripts can be dangerous
|
| 2009-11-27: |
Modern version control systems change your directory layouts
|
| 2009-11-26: |
Some notes for myself on git bisect
|
| 2009-11-25: |
Why I love Unix, number N (for some N)
|
| 2009-11-24: |
An important lesson for me on Fedora upgrades
|
| 2009-11-23: |
Converting a directory from RCS to Mercurial
My current unhappy thoughts on Fedora 12
|
| 2009-11-22: |
RCS versus modern version control systems
|
| 2009-11-21: |
An update on faulted ZFS spares
|
| 2009-11-20: |
Spam and the attraction of reach
|
| 2009-11-19: |
The corollary for effective anti-spam heuristics
|
| 2009-11-18: |
Universities are open environments
|
| 2009-11-17: |
Finally understanding the appeal of 'Interfaces'
|
| 2009-11-16: |
'Is-a' versus 'is-a-descendant-of'
|
| 2009-11-15: |
A limitation of Python types from C extension modules
|
| 2009-11-14: |
How to defer things in Exim
|
| 2009-11-13: |
(Ab)using Exim routers for their full power
|
| 2009-11-12: |
What makes Exim work as a mailer construction kit
|
| 2009-11-11: |
For universities, the Internet world has fundamentally changed
|
| 2009-11-10: |
HTML5 may end up giving us real, working XHTML
|
| 2009-11-08: |
My problem with the obvious solution to my unexposed types problem
|
| 2009-11-07: |
Solving unexposed types and the limits of duck typing
A gotcha with Bash on Ubuntu 8.04
|
| 2009-11-06: |
A shell script thing that I have learned the hard way
|
| 2009-11-05: |
Why the NFS client is at fault in the multi-filesystem NFS problem
|
| 2009-11-04: |
The cause of the multi-filesystem NFS export problem
|
| 2009-11-02: |
Are security bugs always code bugs?
XHTML vs HTML5
|
| 2009-10-31: |
My thoughts on why invented standards succeed or fail
The risk continuum for standardization success
|
| 2009-10-30: |
Understanding hash length extension attacks
|
| 2009-10-29: |
Why per-process (or per-user) memory resource limits are hard
|
| 2009-10-28: |
Python modules should make visible their (fundamental) types
|
| 2009-10-27: |
A personal experience of web browsers making bad text editors
|
| 2009-10-26: |
What I think I understand about how standards get created
|
| 2009-10-25: |
Some thoughts on a 'modern' university email system
|
| 2009-10-24: |
Something I have realized about university services
|
| 2009-10-22: |
The limits of some anti-spam precautions
How to waste lots of CPU time checking for module updates
|
| 2009-10-21: |
Why you should be able to get a list of your local email addresses
|
| 2009-10-20: |
Simple mailing lists: an illustration of Exim's flexibility
|
| 2009-10-19: |
The case against backup MXes
|
| 2009-10-18: |
Backup MXes versus redundant MXes
|
| 2009-10-17: |
Automated web software should never fill in the Referer header
|
| 2009-10-16: |
A tale of network horror, or at least excitement
|
| 2009-10-15: |
One complexity of buffered IO on Unix
|
| 2009-10-14: |
Why 'invite-your-friends' features are spam from you, not your users
|
| 2009-10-13: |
There are two different uses of conditional GETs
|
| 2009-10-12: |
ZFS GUIDs vs device names
|
| 2009-10-11: |
Why security bugs aren't bugs
|
| 2009-10-10: |
You should delete obsolete data files
|
| 2009-10-09: |
A fun bug I once ran across
|
| 2009-10-08: |
What is going on with faulted ZFS spares
|
| 2009-10-07: |
A brief introduction to ZFS (disk) GUIDs
|
| 2009-10-06: |
The danger of software suspend on servers
|
| 2009-10-05: |
The problem with security bugs is that they aren't bugs
|
| 2009-10-04: |
Why Unix filesystems precreate lost+found directories
|
| 2009-10-03: |
One thing that top-posting is good for
|
| 2009-10-01: |
The rules for combining things with Bourne shell 'here documents'
|
| 2009-09-30: |
A little habit: cat >/dev/null
On (not) putting IP addresses in registration email
|
| 2009-09-28: |
Two ends of hardware acceleration
What I think about why graphics cards keep being successful
|
| 2009-09-27: |
Some suggestions for registration confirmation emails
Why you can no longer have an 'invite-your-friends' feature
|
| 2009-09-26: |
How our 'plug in and go' laptop network DHCP portal works
|
| 2009-09-25: |
How our DHCP registration portal redirections work
|
| 2009-09-24: |
SSL certificates require proper domain names
|
| 2009-09-23: |
A brief overview of the Solaris 10 nvpair library
|
| 2009-09-22: |
Some trivia about Python frame objects
|
| 2009-09-21: |
Exploring the frame object f_builtins member
|
| 2009-09-20: |
Why kernel packaging is so bad in Debian and Ubuntu
|
| 2009-09-19: |
Why I am not a fan of hardware acceleration
|
| 2009-09-18: |
Are you sure it's a C string?
|
| 2009-09-17: |
A trick to testing https setups on test machines
|
| 2009-09-16: |
Some kernel lockd NFS error messages explained
|
| 2009-09-14: |
Listing file locks on Solaris 10
Forwarding emails without false positives
|
| 2009-09-13: |
How modern CPUs are like (modern) disks
|
| 2009-09-12: |
My opinions on when you should let ZFS handle RAID stuff
|
| 2009-09-11: |
Why you should let ZFS handle the RAID stuff
|
| 2009-09-10: |
What I know about how ZFS actually handles spare disks
|
| 2009-09-09: |
Postfix versus Exim
|
| 2009-09-08: |
Some ways to avoid needing a public ticketing system
|
| 2009-09-07: |
A use for ticketing systems as your primary support method
|
| 2009-09-06: |
What typing ^D really does on Unix
|
| 2009-09-05: |
Why the Unix EINTR semantics (probably) exist
|
| 2009-09-03: |
An interesting issue with doing NFS over TCP (apparently)
Programming blindness and security
|
| 2009-09-02: |
Environment variables make bad switches
|
| 2009-08-31: |
How to deprecate bits of your program
The IO scheduler improvements I saw
|
| 2009-08-30: |
Some more thinking about requirements in specifications
|
| 2009-08-29: |
MUST versus SHOULD in your specifications
|
| 2009-08-28: |
ZFS changes filesystem device numbers on reboot
|
| 2009-08-26: |
What packages SystemTap requires on Ubuntu 8.04 (and others)
A frame object's f_locals isn't always the locals
|
| 2009-08-24: |
The problem with the CFQ IO scheduler and our iSCSI targets
Anti-spam content scanning systems need to scan more
|
| 2009-08-23: |
You should not use HTTP request parameters as filenames
|
| 2009-08-22: |
A gotcha with Python's new signal.siginterrupt()
|
| 2009-08-21: |
The danger of powerful generality, illustrated
|
| 2009-08-20: |
Python modules should not reinvent OSError
|
| 2009-08-19: |
Link: Using colour well in data visualization
Python, signal handlers, and EINTR
|
| 2009-08-18: |
Why user programs mapping page zero is so bad news on x86 hardware
|
| 2009-08-17: |
More accidental BitTorrent on our network
|
| 2009-08-16: |
Testing versus extensibility
|
| 2009-08-15: |
SSDs and the RAID resync problem
|
| 2009-08-14: |
Sorting out what 'passive ftp' is
|
| 2009-08-12: |
Undo is sometimes not good enough
One thing your mail-sending system should do
|
| 2009-08-11: |
The somewhat apocryphal history of comments in the Bourne shell
|
| 2009-08-10: |
The difference in the Bourne shell between : and #
|
| 2009-08-09: |
Building true ssh opportunistic connection sharing
|
| 2009-08-08: |
How I use ssh's connection sharing feature
|
| 2009-08-07: |
The basics of ssh's connection sharing feature
|
| 2009-08-06: |
A rule for Internet software
|
| 2009-08-05: |
A feature that I wish Linux package managers had
|
| 2009-08-04: |
A downside to syndication feed readers respecting permanent HTTP redirects
|
| 2009-08-02: |
Limitations on custom NFS mount authorization on Solaris
What you can't do before you drop setuid permissions
|
| 2009-07-31: |
Using SystemTap to trace the system calls of setuid programs on Linux
How fast various ssh ciphers are
|
| 2009-07-30: |
How we do custom NFS mount authorization on Solaris 10
|
| 2009-07-29: |
The shift-selection trick in X terminal programs
|
| 2009-07-28: |
Spammers are quite dedicated in their address scraping
|
| 2009-07-27: |
Why you should do code reviews for sysadmin scripts
|
| 2009-07-26: |
The anatomy of a hack to get around try:/finally: and generators
|
| 2009-07-25: |
When code in generators runs
|
| 2009-07-24: |
The usefulness of a syndication feed of your blog's comments
|
| 2009-07-22: |
Thinking like a security paranoid: an example
A peculiar change in Linux flock() and fcntl() behavior
|
| 2009-07-21: |
Packages should not contain both tools and policies
|
| 2009-07-20: |
Minimalistic spam, another annoyance to worry about
|
| 2009-07-19: |
The importance of making an issue visible
|
| 2009-07-18: |
Why NFS filehandles fail as access capabilities
|
| 2009-07-17: |
The hard problem of live major release upgrades
|
| 2009-07-16: |
Another reason to safely update files that are looked at over NFS
|
| 2009-07-15: |
A Bourne shell gotcha with ( ... ) command grouping
|
| 2009-07-13: |
Some stuff on NFS access restrictions
Shell scripts should not use absolute paths for programs
|
| 2009-07-12: |
A brief history of NFS server access restrictions
|
| 2009-07-11: |
What can go wrong in making NFS mounts
|
| 2009-07-10: |
An unpleasant surprise about ZFS scrubbing in Solaris 10 U6
|
| 2009-07-09: |
The high-level version of how mounting NFS filesystems works
|
| 2009-07-08: |
Fedora and workstations (on Linux distributions for desktops)
|
| 2009-07-07: |
Why and why not Fedora
|
| 2009-07-06: |
How you could do a shared root directory with NFS
|
| 2009-07-05: |
The coming Internet identity problem
|
| 2009-07-04: |
A side note on the cost of operations
|
| 2009-07-03: |
How software makes reverse proxying hard
|
| 2009-07-02: |
Finding out when a command in a pipeline fails
|
| 2009-06-30: |
A Unix irritation: pipeline status
More on why users keep mailing specific people
|
| 2009-06-29: |
A theory on why users keep mailing specific people
|
| 2009-06-28: |
How we solve the multiuser PHP problem
|
| 2009-06-27: |
Possible limits on our port multiplied ESATA performance
|
| 2009-06-26: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 19)
An advantage for hardware RAID over software RAID
|
| 2009-06-25: |
Patching systems versus patching appliances
|
| 2009-06-24: |
Another source of stickyness for social web sites
|
| 2009-06-22: |
Solaris 10 NFS server parameters that we change and why
Why GNU tools are sometimes not my favorite programs
|
| 2009-06-21: |
Email is intrusive, and why
|
| 2009-06-20: |
Using GRUB to figure out the mapping of BIOS drive numbers
|
| 2009-06-19: |
Fedora desperately needs a better upgrade system
|
| 2009-06-18: |
A kernel NFS error message explained
|
| 2009-06-17: |
The NFS 'reserved ports' option and why you care
|
| 2009-06-16: |
Maybe understanding blogrolls
|
| 2009-06-15: |
try:/finally: and generators
|
| 2009-06-14: |
How to set up your vacation messages to get thrown off mailing lists
|
| 2009-06-13: |
One of the reasons good alerting is tough
|
| 2009-06-12: |
What I know about Solaris 10 NFS server file lock limits
|
| 2009-06-11: |
There are two different purposes of monitoring systems
|
| 2009-06-10: |
Users are lazy
|
| 2009-06-08: |
Another way that generators are not lists: modifying them
Monitoring systems should be always be usefully informative
|
| 2009-06-07: |
It's important to get the real costs right
|
| 2009-06-06: |
User perceptions (and expectations) of backups
|
| 2009-06-05: |
How we're planning our backup storage capacity needs
|
| 2009-06-04: |
Another irritation with Gnome's gconf settings system
|
| 2009-06-03: |
The costs of development versus the costs of operation
|
| 2009-06-02: |
Sometimes brute force is the answer (on Unix)
|
| 2009-05-31: |
A thought on giving custom redundant storage systems some history
The better way to install Sun's Java
|
| 2009-05-30: |
The program energy efficiency optimist's view
|
| 2009-05-29: |
The cost of program energy efficiency
|
| 2009-05-28: |
Encapsulation may be in the eye of the beholder
|
| 2009-05-27: |
Hosted servers, cloud computing, and backups
|
| 2009-05-25: |
Backups versus redundancy
|
| 2009-05-24: |
An interesting bit of ssh and sshd behavior
What modern email is good for
|
| 2009-05-23: |
The drawback of using a language with a good interface to the OS
|
| 2009-05-22: |
How CPython handles (and delays) Unix signals
|
| 2009-05-21: |
Solving the Python SIGCHLD problem
|
| 2009-05-20: |
Why directory URLs have to have trailing slashes
|
| 2009-05-19: |
Some notes on rewrites in Apache .htaccess files
|
| 2009-05-17: |
One reason for Unix's permission checking timing
The crucial difference between online and offline backups
|
| 2009-05-16: |
Autoresponders in the modern email world
|
| 2009-05-15: |
Why df on an NFS-mounted ZFS filesystem can give odd results
|
| 2009-05-14: |
Fixing your system after hitting the RAID growth gotcha
|
| 2009-05-13: |
Booting a Linux system without a root mirror
|
| 2009-05-12: |
A serious gotcha with growing software RAID devices
|
| 2009-05-10: |
What affects how fast you can restore backups
Another advantage of disk-based backup systems
|
| 2009-05-09: |
Our disk-based backup system
|
| 2009-05-08: |
The problem with tapes (for backup)
|
| 2009-05-07: |
How to set up your xorg.conf for RandR-based dual-headed systems
|
| 2009-05-06: |
An irritation with Linux's 'mount -t nfs' output
|
| 2009-05-05: |
How we periodically scrub our ZFS pools
|
| 2009-05-03: |
An inexplicable omission in bash's sourcing of .bashrc
|
| 2009-05-02: |
Why version control systems should support 'rewriting history'
Convenient ssh in Gnome, or 'my sshmenu wish comes true'
|
| 2009-04-30: |
My standard Gnome customizations
Why I would still like MC/S in Linux
|
| 2009-04-29: |
Pragmatic issues with hash verifiers for email messages
|
| 2009-04-27: |
One of my TDD weaknesses: mock objects for complex objects
The problems of over-documenting things
|
| 2009-04-26: |
A Bourne shell irritation: piping just stderr
Lighttpd, CGIs, and standard error
|
| 2009-04-25: |
On digital signatures and client security issues
|
| 2009-04-24: |
The difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0
|
| 2009-04-23: |
A Gnome irritation
|
| 2009-04-21: |
Why your ticketing system should not be accessible to users
|
| 2009-04-20: |
Some ways to add versioning to pickled objects
Why pickle is not a good way to save your data
|
| 2009-04-19: |
Sometimes you don't want behavior with your data
|
| 2009-04-18: |
What users see as benefits from sysadmins
|
| 2009-04-17: |
Git and 'rewriting history'
|
| 2009-04-16: |
What causes the ZFS file deletion problem with snapshots
|
| 2009-04-15: |
The problem with Solaris 10 update 6's ZFS failmode setting
|
| 2009-04-13: |
How I went wrong in thinking about /boot mirroring
Your ticketing system should be optional
|
| 2009-04-12: |
A hairshirt too far: on always avoiding CSS
|
| 2009-04-11: |
The advantage of having an (XML) sitemap
|
| 2009-04-10: |
Why 'sender stores message' is easier for spammers than real mail servers
|
| 2009-04-09: |
Why ssh needs to verify host keys
|
| 2009-04-07: |
Handling ssh to generic hostnames
The technical problems with 'sender stores messages' schemes
|
| 2009-04-06: |
An interesting hardware mystery
|
| 2009-04-05: |
Why I don't expect ARM-based netbooks to be a success
|
| 2009-04-03: |
The (or a) problem with Unix manpages
How to use Vixie cron to schedule at regular odd times
|
| 2009-04-02: |
System status announcements and where your users are
|
| 2009-03-31: |
The SSD boom and the theoretical multicore revolution
A sysadmin use for Twitter
|
| 2009-03-30: |
There are three entry states for feed readers
|
| 2009-03-29: |
Why I wrote my own bulk IO performance measurement tool
|
| 2009-03-28: |
Make your web application's interface elements obvious
|
| 2009-03-27: |
The theoretical advantage of a separate /boot filesystem
|
| 2009-03-26: |
An important difference
The git version control system as a creation of the modern age
|
| 2009-03-24: |
Using fully mirrored system disks on Linux
How not to improve your CD player application
Frustration for a sysadmin (well, for me)
|
| 2009-03-23: |
How libraries should handle internal warning messages
|
| 2009-03-22: |
An outline of a possibly easier IPv4 to IPv6 transition
|
| 2009-03-21: |
Why the ideal IPv4 to IPv6 transition is impossible
|
| 2009-03-19: |
Why 'sender stores message' schemes won't cure phish spams
|
| 2009-03-18: |
An obvious thing about dealing with web spider misbehavior
Principles of email in the modern age
|
| 2009-03-16: |
An important gotcha with iSCSI multipathing in Solaris 10
Complex data structures and the two sorts of languages
|
| 2009-03-15: |
A realization: planet aggregators have a natural size limit
|
| 2009-03-14: |
Why I don't trust seteuid() and friends
|
| 2009-03-12: |
The problem with /var today
The not so secret history of /var
|
| 2009-03-11: |
Checklists versus procedures
|
| 2009-03-10: |
Why checklists work
|
| 2009-03-09: |
What list methods don't make sense for heterogeneous lists
|
| 2009-03-08: |
Python's theoretically missing core data type
|
| 2009-03-07: |
What past problems of mine the collections module solves
|
| 2009-03-06: |
What can keep a ZFS pool busy and prevent it from exporting
|
| 2009-03-05: |
What seems to use power on a Dell Mini 12
|
| 2009-03-04: |
The ASUS Eee PC versus the Dell Mini 12
|
| 2009-03-03: |
Rollbacks versus downgrades
|
| 2009-03-02: |
Some gotchas with ZFS in Solaris 10 update 6
|
| 2009-02-28: |
What it would take for me to use Fedora Rawhide
The potential problems with distribution downgrades
|
| 2009-02-27: |
The peculiar case of the conference spammers
|
| 2009-02-26: |
What I learned from Google Mail's recent outage
|
| 2009-02-25: |
Don't log usernames for bad logins
|
| 2009-02-24: |
A core principle of error and warning messages
|
| 2009-02-23: |
A problem with microtransactions
|
| 2009-02-22: |
Internet scale security: the impact of cheapness
|
| 2009-02-21: |
How to turn off gnome-terminal's cursor blinking
|
| 2009-02-20: |
An attraction of planet-style blog aggregators as your feed reader
|
| 2009-02-19: |
Appearances are deceptive in the (anti-)spam world
|
| 2009-02-18: |
My theory on why people wind up using common passwords
|
| 2009-02-17: |
Design versus construction
|
| 2009-02-16: |
My approach to website passwords (and why it is the right one)
|
| 2009-02-15: |
How CPython optimizes allocations for some built-in types
|
| 2009-02-14: |
Some of my assumptions about Python object allocation
|
| 2009-02-13: |
The accumulator mini-pattern and .setdefault()
|
| 2009-02-12: |
Recognizing non-interactive shells and 'shell levels'
|
| 2009-02-11: |
True point in time restores may be hard
|
| 2009-02-09: |
Backups and archives
I hate flaky systems, Fedora 10 and/or hardware edition
|
| 2009-02-08: |
When bash sources your .bashrc
|
| 2009-02-07: |
An illustration of one reason that documentation is hard
|
| 2009-02-06: |
Our SunFire X2100 nVidia Ethernet experiences
|
| 2009-02-04: |
An alarming ZFS status message and what is usually going on with it
Why btrfs was inevitable: a corollary to (not) getting ZFS in Linux
|
| 2009-02-02: |
A grumpy remark about Solaris's scalability
|
| 2009-02-01: |
Understanding ZFS cachefiles in Solaris 10 update 6
|
| 2009-01-31: |
Why social mudding works
When can you assume UTF-8 filenames?
|
| 2009-01-30: |
A surprising lack on Linux: browsers for camera RAW photos
|
| 2009-01-29: |
An RPM packaging utter FAIL
|
| 2009-01-28: |
The (or an) attraction of Twitter
|
| 2009-01-27: |
My wishes for Sun's online documentation
|
| 2009-01-26: |
My reaction to Solaris 10 update 6's ZFS changes
How LiveJournal is sticky
|
| 2009-01-25: |
Thinking about what you do with undo
|
| 2009-01-24: |
Towards a better undo
|
| 2009-01-23: |
The HTML tax (in Python, and in general)
|
| 2009-01-22: |
The NFS re-export problem
|
| 2009-01-20: |
Why high availability NFS requires shared storage
The inner life of NFS filehandles
|
| 2009-01-19: |
Using iptables to get around the policy based routing limitation
|
| 2009-01-18: |
The basic implementation of relatively high-availability NFS
|
| 2009-01-17: |
Practical issues with getting ZFS on Linux
|
| 2009-01-16: |
A lament about modern NFS development
|
| 2009-01-15: |
Why templating systems are the wrong answer for simple HTML generation
|
| 2009-01-14: |
Documenting the kernel.sem sysctl
|
| 2009-01-12: |
A surprising lack in Python's standard library
What I want out of NFS security, at least at the moment
|
| 2009-01-11: |
The problems I see with multi-signed SSL in practice
|
| 2009-01-10: |
You cannot ask users to manage their own security
|
| 2009-01-09: |
A Unix shell glob trick
|
| 2009-01-08: |
The ufsdump block size doesn't seem to matter much
|
| 2009-01-07: |
Two suggestions for improving Fedora's PreUpgrade experience
|
| 2009-01-06: |
The problem of forcing users to make choices (in security)
|
| 2009-01-05: |
Why 'email marketing' winds up as spam
|
| 2009-01-04: |
'Email marketing' versus outright email spam
|
| 2009-01-03: |
How to help programmers (parts 2 and 3): os.environ and sys.argv
|
| 2009-01-02: |
Why SSL needs certificate authorities, or at least trust roots
|
| 2009-01-01: |
Flaws in the 'web of trust' approach to trust issues
|
| 2008-12-31: |
Certificate authorities seem to be a real weakness in SSL
One of Python 3's fundamental problems on Unix
|
| 2008-12-30: |
ZFS and crazy dates
|
| 2008-12-28: |
Discovering things while researching Unix history
An advantage of doing test driven development
|
| 2008-12-27: |
Email marketing is pretty much spam
|
| 2008-12-26: |
The consequences of the Debian OpenSSL compromise
|
| 2008-12-25: |
My view of Sun and their history
|
| 2008-12-24: |
A thesis: Sun should be prepared to give up on SPARC
|
| 2008-12-23: |
You need major advantages to really move issues
|
| 2008-12-21: |
Part of why managing firewalls is hard
The role of superstition and folklore in system administration
|
| 2008-12-20: |
The source of spurious .rpmnew files
|
| 2008-12-19: |
Comments and dialogues
|
| 2008-12-18: |
Why LVM snapshots should really have hooks into filesystems
|
| 2008-12-17: |
Some reasons why I like vi
|
| 2008-12-16: |
Why XHTML is doomed, at least in its strict validation form
|
| 2008-12-14: |
Feed aggregators should fail gracefully
|
| 2008-12-13: |
The pragmatic problem with strict XHTML validation
|
| 2008-12-12: |
Two-step updates: the best solution to the valid XHTML problem
|
| 2008-12-11: |
Why syndication feed readers (and web browsers) should fail gracefully
Why you should always allow version 1 to be specified
|
| 2008-12-09: |
What sort of user interfaces the web is good for
How Amanda uses what restore program to use, a correction
|
| 2008-12-08: |
How I split up my workstation's disk space
|
| 2008-12-07: |
How to help programmers (part 1): the os.listdir() problem
One of Python's problems with packages
|
| 2008-12-06: |
On line endings and honesty
|
| 2008-12-05: |
A little gotcha when implementing shell read
|
| 2008-12-04: |
The rewriting problem on ZFS and other 'log structured' filesystems
|
| 2008-12-03: |
Mapping IP addresses to ASNs
|
| 2008-12-02: |
A thesis: Sun should fork Solaris
|
| 2008-11-30: |
My view on vi and vim (and nvi et al)
Server problems caused by 'transparent' self-signed SSL certificates
|
| 2008-11-29: |
Good editors aren't better or worse, just different
|
| 2008-11-28: |
Why rootkits targeted at Red Hat Enterprise would make me especially nervous
|
| 2008-11-27: |
The practical insecurity of self-signed SSL certificates on the web
|
| 2008-11-26: |
One consequence of mathematical security thinking
|
| 2008-11-25: |
The problem with security alerts, and indeed all alerts
|
| 2008-11-23: |
My sign of a good graphical interface
|
| 2008-11-22: |
Why I hate 'security questions'
|
| 2008-11-21: |
Limiting how much load Exim puts on your system
|
| 2008-11-20: |
Combining dual identity routing and isolated interfaces revisited
|
| 2008-11-19: |
A growing realization about tcpdump and reading IP traffic
BitTorrent's file fragmentation problem
|
| 2008-11-18: |
Where vi runs into its limits
|
| 2008-11-16: |
Checking systems with RPM verification (part 2)
A hint for email providers
|
| 2008-11-15: |
Getting Python's encoding and decoding straight
|
| 2008-11-14: |
How to force a crash dump on Solaris 10 x86
|
| 2008-11-13: |
What the members of a Unicode conversion error object are
|
| 2008-11-12: |
Why not doing Unicode is easier than doing Unicode in Python
|
| 2008-11-11: |
Another attempt to split SSL into encryption and trust
|
| 2008-11-10: |
Exploiting the Bourne shell to parse configuration files
|
| 2008-11-09: |
The history of Unix *dump programs
|
| 2008-11-08: |
Thinking about how your security domains relate to each other
|
| 2008-11-07: |
What the timestamps in Ubuntu kernel messages mean
|
| 2008-11-05: |
How many root passwords should you have?
An issue with quotas on ZFS pools
|
| 2008-11-04: |
Mistakes editors can make that disqualify them as sysadmin editors
|
| 2008-11-03: |
Why vi has become my sysadmin's editor
|
| 2008-11-02: |
Why university webmail systems are attractive to spammers
|
| 2008-10-31: |
Why realistic UDP bandwidth testing is hard
Banging rocks together in Python
|
| 2008-10-30: |
How Linux initrds used to be a hack
|
| 2008-10-29: |
Problems I have seen with switch port mirroring
|
| 2008-10-28: |
One reason why people buy Ethernet taps
|
| 2008-10-27: |
What we keep track of for ZFS pools
|
| 2008-10-26: |
Why RAID-1 is the right choice for our new fileservers
|
| 2008-10-25: |
How we worked out the partition sizes for our SAN
|
| 2008-10-24: |
A little neat detail of the BitTorrent protocol
|
| 2008-10-23: |
Another update to the ZFS excessive prefetching situation
|
| 2008-10-22: |
How Amanda knows what restore program to use
|
| 2008-10-21: |
Seeing how remarkable V7 Unix was
|
| 2008-10-19: |
The advantages of iSCSI's MC/S for multipathing
Thesis: reputation based antispam systems are dead
|
| 2008-10-18: |
More on Firefox 3's handling of self-signed SSL certificates
|
| 2008-10-17: |
How self-signed certificates are a problem for browsers
|
| 2008-10-16: |
Why Firefox 3's handling of self-signed SSL certificates is wrong
|
| 2008-10-15: |
The corporate identity problem
|
| 2008-10-14: |
Improving initial ramdisks
|
| 2008-10-13: |
The complexity of not lying to Makefiles
|
| 2008-10-12: |
An irritating awk limitation: getting a range of fields
|
| 2008-10-11: |
Forcing sort ordering in Unix shell scripts
|
| 2008-10-10: |
Some notes about iSCSI multipathing in Solaris
|
| 2008-10-09: |
We've lost the password battle
|
| 2008-10-08: |
How we set up our Solaris ZFS-based NFS fileservers
|
| 2008-10-07: |
How we set up our iSCSI target servers
|
| 2008-10-06: |
A problem with Python's help()
|
| 2008-10-05: |
SSL certificate revocation doesn't work (for web browsers)
|
| 2008-10-04: |
Consider having obvious interfaces too
|
| 2008-10-03: |
Arranging your SSL websites for very cautious people
|
| 2008-10-01: |
Another consequence of the Debian OpenSSL security bug
|
| 2008-09-30: |
The consequences of your SSL certificate getting compromised
Using Python to find out what cipher a SSL server is using
|
| 2008-09-29: |
SSL/TLS and forward secrecy
|
| 2008-09-28: |
Why I hate Solaris 10's service facility right now
|
| 2008-09-27: |
The problem with initial ramdisks
|
| 2008-09-26: |
The aesthetics of syntactic sugar
|
| 2008-09-25: |
Why qmail is no longer a suitable Internet MTA
|
| 2008-09-24: |
How we lie to our Makefiles
|
| 2008-09-23: |
Some thoughts on improving current thread-based programming
|
| 2008-09-21: |
Why I wind up writing real parsers for my sysadmin tools
|
| 2008-09-20: |
A side note to the attraction of file-based blog engines
The attractions of 'file as blog entry' blog engines
|
| 2008-09-19: |
Gotchas with IET that I have encountered
|
| 2008-09-18: |
My experiences so far with Linux iSCSI target software
|
| 2008-09-17: |
How to securely manipulate user files
|
| 2008-09-16: |
A Unix without a test program
|
| 2008-09-15: |
Why ZFS's raidz design decision is sensible (or at least rational)
|
| 2008-09-14: |
A read performance surprise with ZFS's raidz and raidz2
|
| 2008-09-13: |
999 days is not forever
|
| 2008-09-12: |
ZFS's helpful attention to detail
Why you want sysadmins, not users, to be providing the computing
|
| 2008-09-11: |
Why I have the same shell dotfiles everywhere
|
| 2008-09-10: |
A Unix shell trick
|
| 2008-09-09: |
The problem with unit testing programs
|
| 2008-09-08: |
How to get as much of your program byte-compiled as possible
|
| 2008-09-07: |
Why your main program should be importable
|
| 2008-09-06: |
Why negative DNS caching is necessary
|
| 2008-09-05: |
Something to remember when using DTrace on userland programs
|
| 2008-09-03: |
Why SMTP needs a way of communicating partial success for message delivery
How to reject at SMTP time without enabling dictionary scanning
|
| 2008-09-01: |
Accept-then-bounce is no longer acceptable in mail systems
|
| 2008-08-31: |
There is a balance between optimism and paranoia for compromised machines
A realization about the recent Red Hat Enterprise security issue
|
| 2008-08-29: |
Open source projects and programs versus products
We don't really control user desktop machines
|
| 2008-08-28: |
Thinking about the importance of cross-implementation portability
|
| 2008-08-27: |
How I think about how important security updates are
|
| 2008-08-25: |
Fixing low command error distances
The concept of error distance in sysadmin commands
|
| 2008-08-24: |
An update to the ZFS excessive prefetching situation
|
| 2008-08-23: |
Another problem with SSL identities
|
| 2008-08-22: |
Why noting security fixes in Linux kernel changelogs doesn't really help
|
| 2008-08-21: |
What you select for when you make something harder
|
| 2008-08-20: |
An illustration of why syntactic sugar matters
|
| 2008-08-18: |
The problem with using tuples and lists to hold structures
|
| 2008-08-17: |
Thinking about the best way to handle command registration
Why your blog comments have less of an audience than new blog entries
Another reason to avoid having comments
|
| 2008-08-16: |
Why it matters what users like
|
| 2008-08-15: |
Using a non-standard shell as your login shell
|
| 2008-08-14: |
A bash irritation: the incompatible exec
|
| 2008-08-12: |
The first principle of analyzing compromised machines
|
| 2008-08-11: |
How RPM verification deals with prelinking
|
| 2008-08-10: |
Anti-spam work is pure overhead
How to tell when your bug reporting system is at its limits
|
| 2008-08-08: |
How to exploit unsigned repository metadata
A workaround for the Python module search path issue on Unix
|
| 2008-08-07: |
The pragmatics of language changes
|
| 2008-08-06: |
More on the funding capture problem
|
| 2008-08-04: |
SSL does not create trust
Our answer to the ZFS SAN failover problem
|
| 2008-08-03: |
A performance gotcha with syslogd
First impressions of using DTrace on user-level programs
|
| 2008-08-02: |
One reason that it is so hard to challenge Google
|
| 2008-07-31: |
A crude system verification method
SSL's identity problem
|
| 2008-07-30: |
What is guaranteed in languages in practice
|
| 2008-07-28: |
What you can (probably) count on for concurrency in Python
Another advantage of Python builtins
|
| 2008-07-27: |
The yum versionlock problem
|
| 2008-07-26: |
dict.setdefault() as a concurrency primitive
|
| 2008-07-24: |
How packaging systems should handle kernel updates
One thing that I dislike about typical debuggers
|
| 2008-07-23: |
Retracting blog entries in the face of syndication feeds
|
| 2008-07-22: |
Two different usage patterns
|
| 2008-07-20: |
Thinking about uses for (system) activity tracers
Why I'm mostly out of the email (anti-)spam game
|
| 2008-07-18: |
One consequence of Linux's dynamic network device naming
The advantage of blog comments
|
| 2008-07-17: |
The not so secret origins of /usr/bin and /usr/sbin (and /sbin)
|
| 2008-07-16: |
The problem with Usenet
|
| 2008-07-14: |
What some fdisk options actually do
|
| 2008-07-13: |
How ZFS helps out with the big RAID-5 problem
The problem with big RAID-5 arrays
|
| 2008-07-12: |
When overlapping windows do (and don't) make sense
|
| 2008-07-11: |
The case of the mysteriously failing connections
|
| 2008-07-10: |
Internet software decays and must be actively maintained
|
| 2008-07-09: |
Detailed usage charges versus simpler charging models
|
| 2008-07-08: |
How to force Solaris to renumber network devices
|
| 2008-07-06: |
A (D)VCS feature that I'd really like
A small drawback to Wietse Venema's TCP Wrappers
|
| 2008-07-05: |
How OOXML is a complete failure, even for Microsoft
|
| 2008-07-04: |
Phish spammers who make it easy
|
| 2008-07-03: |
Why system administrators like interpreted languages
|
| 2008-07-02: |
Why reverse proxies are good for big web applications
|
| 2008-06-30: |
The many problems with bad security patches
|
| 2008-06-29: |
Why user exposure matters for Linux distributions, especially on desktops
Why Ubuntu's LTS releases are inferior to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
|
| 2008-06-28: |
The other reason that shells should be programmable
|
| 2008-06-27: |
Fault hierarchies and problem reports
|
| 2008-06-26: |
Virtual desktops versus multiple monitors
|
| 2008-06-25: |
More on standard interfaces
|
| 2008-06-23: |
Why I am not really fond of docstrings in Python
More thinking about Python's inheritance model
|
| 2008-06-22: |
The implicit versus the explicit
|
| 2008-06-21: |
A bug reporting paradox: don't put in too much detail
|
| 2008-06-20: |
Accidental bittorrent on our networks
|
| 2008-06-19: |
A thought about filesystem snapshots
|
| 2008-06-17: |
A simple request for vendor websites
Sun flubs another SSH patch
|
| 2008-06-16: |
Why people persist in sending files by email
|
| 2008-06-15: |
Why DNS blocklists return information as IP addresses
|
| 2008-06-13: |
The cost of virtualization
|
| 2008-06-12: |
The problem with ZFS, SANs, and failover
|
| 2008-06-11: |
Designing a usable DNS Blocklist result format
Tabs versus windows, or why I usually want windows
|
| 2008-06-09: |
Mirrored system disks should be trivial to set up
|
| 2008-06-08: |
Thinking about Python's inheritance model
Recovering my Eee PC from a post-update problem
|
| 2008-06-07: |
Why 'file as blog entry' blog engines have problems
|
| 2008-06-06: |
Why shells should have small programming languages
|
| 2008-06-04: |
Some corollaries to the charging problem
|
| 2008-06-03: |
My problem with ZFS
|
| 2008-06-02: |
Improving RPM as a packaging system
Why package systems are important
|
| 2008-05-31: |
What contracts aren't
|
| 2008-05-30: |
The fun of awk
Users are rational
|
| 2008-05-29: |
Why web spiders should not crawl syndication feeds
|
| 2008-05-28: |
What promiscuous mode does on modern networks
|
| 2008-05-26: |
Shimming modules for testing (and fun)
|
| 2008-05-25: |
Making a good Unix glue language
The risks of forcing frequent password changes
|
| 2008-05-24: |
Dear applications: WEP keys are not passwords
|
| 2008-05-23: |
Frequent password changes as security mythology
|
| 2008-05-21: |
Combining dual identity routing and isolated interfaces
|
| 2008-05-20: |
Getting live network bandwidth numbers on Solaris
|
| 2008-05-19: |
Segregating your outgoing email to get blocked as little as possible
|
| 2008-05-18: |
The threat model for website logins
Counterproductive password security
|
| 2008-05-17: |
Why we're interested in many ZFS pools
|
| 2008-05-15: |
Why it is hard to decommission a DNS blocklist
What protects the strength of a ssh connection's encryption
|
| 2008-05-13: |
Things I have learned about ZFS (and a Linux iSCSI target)
|
| 2008-05-12: |
Some thoughts on tradeoffs between storage models
|
| 2008-05-11: |
The history of readdir()
Another problem with doing your own sysadmin automation
|
| 2008-05-09: |
An advantage of interpreted languages
|
| 2008-05-08: |
Getting live network bandwidth numbers on Linux
|
| 2008-05-07: |
Today's Solaris 10 irritation: the fault manager daemon
|
| 2008-05-06: |
The Bourne shell is not a programming language
|
| 2008-05-05: |
The costs of doing your own system administration automation
|
| 2008-05-04: |
On standard interfaces
|
| 2008-05-03: |
Why people don't automate sysadmin stuff
|
| 2008-05-02: |
Automation changes as systems grow
|
| 2008-05-01: |
What the co_names attribute on Python code objects is
|
| 2008-04-30: |
Why apt is always going to be faster than yum
Why you can't stop 'abuse' of file sharing services
|
| 2008-04-28: |
Abusing Python frame and code objects
|
| 2008-04-27: |
Attribute tracing as a mixin class
|
| 2008-04-26: |
A thought on trackbacks
|
| 2008-04-25: |
BitTorrent trackers are not innocent bystanders
|
| 2008-04-24: |
What Linux's RPC queue dump means, sort of
A brief mention of some tools for debugging Linux NFS client issues
|
| 2008-04-22: |
The irritation of single-context applications
|
| 2008-04-21: |
Dear ZFS: please stop having your commands stall
|
| 2008-04-20: |
Finding the name of your caller in Python
What FAQs are
|
| 2008-04-18: |
The two (at least) forms of documentation
|
| 2008-04-17: |
The limits of isolated interfaces
|
| 2008-04-16: |
My secret mouse fear
The appeal of GNU tools
|
| 2008-04-15: |
Management interfaces as isolated interfaces
|
| 2008-04-14: |
A sysadmin's review of the ASUS Eee PC
|
| 2008-04-13: |
How I use Firefox's remote control
|
| 2008-04-12: |
Different reasons for having comments
|
| 2008-04-11: |
The appeal of XML
When I do and don't read a blog's comments
|
| 2008-04-09: |
Why there's a bunch of spam from university webmail systems right now
|
| 2008-04-08: |
An alternate take on availability numbers
|
| 2008-04-07: |
Get statistics
|
| 2008-04-06: |
The problem with PID files
|
| 2008-04-05: |
What I needed to make my custom Fedora 8 environment work
Why people are accepting bad uptimes from Internet applications
|
| 2008-04-03: |
Google Mail has a spam problem
|
| 2008-04-02: |
ZFS: Reservations versus quotas
|
| 2008-04-01: |
A simple Python class to trace access to object attributes
|
| 2008-03-31: |
Keeping secrets as a system administrator
The quote of the time interval, on XML
|
| 2008-03-30: |
Docstrings versus comments in my code
|
| 2008-03-29: |
Tradeoffs in where you store volume management metadata
|
| 2008-03-28: |
The stages of Bittorrent encryption
|
| 2008-03-27: |
An idea for a browser anti-phish feature
|
| 2008-03-26: |
Why authenticated email won't stop phish spam
|
| 2008-03-25: |
The easy way to keep a week's worth of something
|
| 2008-03-24: |
The two sorts of (programmer) certification
|
| 2008-03-23: |
Why software engineering certification may not work out the way people want
|
| 2008-03-22: |
Why NFS writes to ZFS are sometimes (or often) slow
|
| 2008-03-21: |
Journaling filesystems and the fsync() problem
|
| 2008-03-20: |
Why you should ratelimit messages that outside things can cause
|
| 2008-03-19: |
The problem of charging for things (well, one of them)
|
| 2008-03-18: |
Some things I dislike about the ASUS Eee
|
| 2008-03-17: |
Why I expect more from Solaris
|
| 2008-03-16: |
My problem with Lisp
|
| 2008-03-15: |
Why accurately counting committed address space is hard
|
| 2008-03-14: |
Why I like definite answers to support issues
|
| 2008-03-13: |
Another problem with iSCSI on Solaris 10
|
| 2008-03-12: |
A bash irritation: mutable history
|
| 2008-03-11: |
The 'Add Comments' problem
|
| 2008-03-10: |
Why I organize comments on WanderingThoughts the way I do
|
| 2008-03-09: |
The difference between a SAN and a cluster filesystem
|
| 2008-03-08: |
What controls Red Hat Enterprise's ethN device names
My problem with Ethernet naming on Red Hat Enterprise 5
|
| 2008-03-06: |
Software RAID, udev, and failed disks
The difference between operations and system administration
|
| 2008-03-05: |
How we make Exim discard bounces of spam
|
| 2008-03-04: |
How we deal with the spam forwarding problem
|
| 2008-03-03: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 18)
|
| 2008-03-02: |
How ZFS's version of RAID-5 can be better than normal RAID-5
|
| 2008-03-01: |
Speed surprises in reimplementing the .find() string method
|
| 2008-02-29: |
An illustration of the speed advantage of Python builtins
|
| 2008-02-28: |
My likely Firefox 3 extensions
|
| 2008-02-27: |
Two sorts of languages
|
| 2008-02-26: |
Something that I do not understand
|
| 2008-02-25: |
The best way to shroud IP addresses
|
| 2008-02-24: |
An idea: only use URL fragments as an implementation detail
|
| 2008-02-23: |
Where the risk is with virtualization (and iSCSI)
|
| 2008-02-22: |
Why I am not fond of Ubuntu's management of kernel updates
|
| 2008-02-21: |
Wireless, machine rooms, and the Asus Eee PC
The irritation of single-instance applications
|
| 2008-02-20: |
How our automounter replacement works
|
| 2008-02-18: |
Coding paralysis
ZFS versus SANs: where do you put the RAID?
|
| 2008-02-16: |
The only way you can stop spam with money
|
| 2008-02-15: |
A weird routing mystery
|
| 2008-02-14: |
Why does anyone buy iSCSI TOE network cards?
|
| 2008-02-13: |
A consequence of Python's 'computer science' nature
|
| 2008-02-12: |
A small annoyance with HTML
|
| 2008-02-11: |
Why commercial support needs to solve your customers' problems
|
| 2008-02-10: |
A basic introduction to prelinking on Linux
|
| 2008-02-09: |
The other reason certified email won't solve the spam problem
How your fileservers can wind up spreading over your SAN
|
| 2008-02-08: |
Why /usr/local is now useless (and where it came from)
|
| 2008-02-06: |
Why ZFS needs a zfsdump
|
| 2008-02-05: |
Prewiring experimental racks
|
| 2008-02-04: |
The origins of /usr/share
|
| 2008-02-03: |
A note to would-be photo editing applications
|
| 2008-02-02: |
Why certified/authenticated email cannot solve spam
|
| 2008-02-01: |
Isolating network interfaces on Linux
|
| 2008-01-31: |
The sysadmin's life (again)
|
| 2008-01-30: |
Linux's IP forwarding settings summarized
|
| 2008-01-29: |
An annoyance in Python's attribute access rules
|
| 2008-01-28: |
One reason I like Python
|
| 2008-01-27: |
Classic crontab syntax mistakes
|
| 2008-01-26: |
The funding capture problem
|
| 2008-01-25: |
A modest suggestion about test accounts
|
| 2008-01-24: |
Running a 32-bit Firefox on a 64-bit Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise
|
| 2008-01-23: |
The weird effects of Firefox's remote control on Unix
Linux's umount -f forces IO errors
|
| 2008-01-21: |
Why I believe that you want Solaris if you want ZFS
|
| 2008-01-20: |
Layering buffering on top of other buffering is usually a bad idea
|
| 2008-01-19: |
Why the x86 Linux kernel is part of every process's address space
|
| 2008-01-18: |
What seems to use power on an Asus Eee PC
|
| 2008-01-17: |
Lab notebooks are not changelogs
|
| 2008-01-16: |
Why sysadmins should keep a lab notebook
|
| 2008-01-15: |
What applications are actually crucial at a university
|
| 2008-01-14: |
A Python pattern: Mutating Proxies
|
| 2008-01-13: |
The robot logic of ZFS snapshots and quotas
|
| 2008-01-12: |
A thought about Amazon's S3 and EC2
|
| 2008-01-11: |
The importance of killing processes with the right signal
|
| 2008-01-10: |
What you don't know about other peers in BitTorrent
|
| 2008-01-09: |
There are two different situations for content-types
|
| 2008-01-08: |
Why I feel that a missing Debian package is a bad sign
|
| 2008-01-07: |
Some thoughts on Solaris 10 x86 versus Linux
|
| 2008-01-06: |
Why the server is the right place to determine web content types
|
| 2008-01-05: |
Why file extensions in URLs are a hack
|
| 2008-01-04: |
One problem with the current anti-spam environment
|
| 2008-01-03: |
Scrolling versus panning
|
| 2008-01-02: |
The various sorts of backgrounding in Unix
|
| 2008-01-01: |
An unpleasant thing about system administration
|
| 2007-12-31: |
There are really two GPL v2 licenses
|
| 2007-12-30: |
The importance of killing processes in the right order
|
| 2007-12-29: |
SNI doesn't work in practice
|
| 2007-12-28: |
Please don't make me pick an account name
|
| 2007-12-27: |
Why I am not entirely fond of Solaris 10 x86's boot archive
|
| 2007-12-26: |
Two problems with Python's file iterators
|
| 2007-12-25: |
Process memory layout for 32-bit Linux programs
|
| 2007-12-24: |
The difference between shells that do job control and shells that don't
|
| 2007-12-23: |
Multihomed hosts and /etc/hosts
Shortening hostnames for fun and profit
|
| 2007-12-22: |
Getting a useful persistent VNC session
|
| 2007-12-21: |
A thought about Solaris 10 x86's boot process
|
| 2007-12-20: |
Virtualization does not eliminate security concerns
|
| 2007-12-19: |
Why setuid scripts are fundamentally a bad idea
How x86 Linux executes ELF programs
|
| 2007-12-17: |
What is a script language on Unix
|
| 2007-12-16: |
A thought on reading multiline records
|
| 2007-12-15: |
There are reasons for stupid anti-spam policies
|
| 2007-12-14: |
Check then use is a dangerous security pattern
|
| 2007-12-13: |
Doing one-shot booting with GRUB
|
| 2007-12-12: |
A more abstract view of the generalized open() issue
Implicit generalized open()'s are dangerous
|
| 2007-12-10: |
A surprise about Linux serial consoles
|
| 2007-12-09: |
I don't like smooth scrolling
|
| 2007-12-08: |
A depressing thing about phish spam
|
| 2007-12-07: |
Using Linux's magic SysRq feature
|
| 2007-12-06: |
Why large ISPs like SPF (the cynical view)
|
| 2007-12-05: |
Safely updating files that are read over NFS
|
| 2007-12-04: |
Dumb switches are now too smart for my good
|
| 2007-12-03: |
A comment spam precaution that didn't work out
|
| 2007-12-02: |
How my CGI to CGI/SCGI frontend works
|
| 2007-12-01: |
My expectations for responsible spider behavior
BitTorrent's protocol is not designed to hide
|
| 2007-11-29: |
Hashes are not complete protectors of privacy
|
| 2007-11-28: |
The problem the automounter was trying to solve
Another aphorism of system administration
|
| 2007-11-27: |
Taking advantage of polymorphic WSGI
|
| 2007-11-26: |
The two things I can mean by 'web spider'
|
| 2007-11-25: |
Why we may not be able to use ZFS
|
| 2007-11-24: |
Gotchas with dual-headed X with RandR on ATI cards
|
| 2007-11-23: |
My web spider technical requirements
|
| 2007-11-22: |
The different types of hash collisions
|
| 2007-11-21: |
Linux virtual terminals and the X server
|
| 2007-11-20: |
A lesson learned: Always upgrade Fedora with a respin CD
|
| 2007-11-19: |
What IPsec being mandatory in IPv6 really means
|
| 2007-11-18: |
I love Linux's serial console support
|
| 2007-11-17: |
Fighting spam always costs
|
| 2007-11-16: |
Improving your life with checklists
|
| 2007-11-15: |
Platform risk and platform (in)security
|
| 2007-11-14: |
What NAT is useful for
|
| 2007-11-13: |
Why vfork() got created (part 2)
|
| 2007-11-12: |
Matching words against a list in the Bourne Shell
|
| 2007-11-11: |
Why vfork() got created (part 1)
|
| 2007-11-10: |
The risks of spam filtering (part 2)
|
| 2007-11-09: |
An object oriented design mistake illustrated
|
| 2007-11-08: |
How Linux handles virtual memory overcommit
|
| 2007-11-07: |
Understanding the virtual memory overcommit issue
|
| 2007-11-06: |
A thought about competition between Red Hat Enterprise and CentOS
|
| 2007-11-05: |
Some notes on Solaris 10 U4 x86 as an iSCSI target
|
| 2007-11-04: |
Thinking through salts for passwords
|
| 2007-11-03: |
A thought about the speed of IPv6 deployment
|
| 2007-11-02: |
Note to self: check for gigabit Ethernet
|
| 2007-11-01: |
Dynamic rendering versus static rendering for websites
|
| 2007-10-31: |
What may be causing my random NumLock issues
Jumbo frames on gigabit Ethernet on Solaris 10 x86
|
| 2007-10-30: |
The problem with big systems
|
| 2007-10-29: |
My problem with learning new programming languages
|
| 2007-10-28: |
The inconvenience of some DWiki design choices
|
| 2007-10-27: |
Why I am not really interested in hearing blacklist appeals
|
| 2007-10-26: |
The Slashdot effect is not like regular load
|
| 2007-10-25: |
Long term storage management in the field
|
| 2007-10-24: |
The format of PTR records in Bind irritates me
|
| 2007-10-23: |
How we sized the overcommit ratio
|
| 2007-10-22: |
The dangerous appeal of the obvious
Vim options it turns out I want
|
| 2007-10-21: |
How I got a corrupted metadb replica that paniced Solaris 10 x86
|
| 2007-10-20: |
Why mail systems should not defer rejections to RCPT TO time
|
| 2007-10-19: |
Some notes on booting single user in x86 Solaris 10
|
| 2007-10-18: |
The Python marshal module versus the cPickle module
|
| 2007-10-17: |
Our experience with Linux's strict overcommit mode
|
| 2007-10-16: |
Our old mail system's configuration
|
| 2007-10-15: |
The arrogance of trying to design for long term storage management
|
| 2007-10-14: |
Why I think identity blurs into authority
|
| 2007-10-13: |
Weekly spam summary on October 13th, 2007
|
| 2007-10-12: |
Getting your networks to your racks
|
| 2007-10-11: |
A gotcha with command order in pipes
|
| 2007-10-10: |
How to properly look up hostnames from IP addresses
|
| 2007-10-09: |
A silly trick with X
|
| 2007-10-08: |
I have new system enthusiasm
|
| 2007-10-07: |
An improvement in my comment spam precautions
|
| 2007-10-06: |
Weekly spam summary on October 6th, 2007
|
| 2007-10-05: |
Why we don't use cable management arms
|
| 2007-10-04: |
The corollary to who actually benefits from bug reports
|
| 2007-10-03: |
A basic principle of system design
|
| 2007-10-02: |
A gotcha with 'bidirectional' pipes to commands
|
| 2007-10-01: |
How Exim determines the retry time for local deliveries
|
| 2007-09-30: |
Understanding Exim's weird way of doing retries
Weekly spam summary on September 29th, 2007
|
| 2007-09-29: |
The first rule of free email-based services
|
| 2007-09-28: |
Phase objects: simple decent error reporting for Python programs
|
| 2007-09-27: |
Fixing Ubuntu's ethN device names when you swap hardware
|
| 2007-09-26: |
Thinking about why Apache waits for CGIs to close standard output
|
| 2007-09-25: |
How to clear Solaris Volume Manager metadb replicas on Solaris 10 x86
|
| 2007-09-24: |
Assume the existence of folklore among your users
|
| 2007-09-23: |
Names are not cheap
|
| 2007-09-22: |
Weekly spam summary on September 22nd, 2007
|
| 2007-09-21: |
An interesting bind(2) failure
|
| 2007-09-20: |
Websites should not accept random parameters in requests
|
| 2007-09-19: |
The benefit of chronological blog navigation
|
| 2007-09-18: |
Linux NFS client kernel tunable settings
|
| 2007-09-17: |
How mmap(2) requires a unified buffer cache
|
| 2007-09-16: |
In praise of Python's Global Interpreter Lock
|
| 2007-09-15: |
Weekly spam summary on September 15th, 2007
|
| 2007-09-14: |
A thought on untyped languages
|
| 2007-09-13: |
Limiting a process's memory usage on Linux
|
| 2007-09-12: |
Mass scanning via POP3
|
| 2007-09-11: |
Why I dislike ATX power supplies
|
| 2007-09-10: |
A small drawback of 64-bit machines
|
| 2007-09-09: |
Rethinking my views of Fibrechannel
|
| 2007-09-08: |
Weekly spam summary on September 8th, 2007
|
| 2007-09-07: |
My view of what 'strongly typed' means
|
| 2007-09-06: |
When you don't want RAID-5
|
| 2007-09-05: |
Where to find specifications on HTTP POST behavior
Features that I wish ZFS had
|
| 2007-09-03: |
Why syndication feed readers ignore an entry's 'last updated' time
|
| 2007-09-02: |
I wish mailers had a real programming language
|
| 2007-09-01: |
Weekly spam summary on September 1st, 2007
|
| 2007-08-31: |
Partial entry syndication feeds and updated entries
|
| 2007-08-30: |
Using reverse proxies to unify web sites
|
| 2007-08-29: |
One limitation of internal charges
|
| 2007-08-28: |
A gotcha with Solaris Volume Manager metasets
|
| 2007-08-27: |
On the naming of machines (part 2)
|
| 2007-08-26: |
A limitation in Linux's policy based routing
|
| 2007-08-25: |
Weekly spam summary on August 25th, 2007
|
| 2007-08-24: |
Linux and accidentally multipathed disks
|
| 2007-08-23: |
The excessive cleverness of some people's reverse DNS
|
| 2007-08-22: |
Redirecting traffic to another machine with Linux's iptables
|
| 2007-08-21: |
The dilemma of website facing
|
| 2007-08-20: |
Recognizing phish spam from exceedingly RFC compliant mailers
|
| 2007-08-19: |
A realization about breadcrumbs
|
| 2007-08-18: |
Weekly spam summary on August 18th, 2007
|
| 2007-08-17: |
A thesis about language niches
|
| 2007-08-16: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 17)
How to tell a DNS no data reply from a lame delegation
|
| 2007-08-15: |
The problem that built C++ (a thesis)
|
| 2007-08-14: |
The benefits of growing your toolbox
|
| 2007-08-13: |
One problem with distributed identity systems
|
| 2007-08-12: |
Adventures in network design, illustrated by our new backbone connection
Weekly spam summary on August 11th, 2007
|
| 2007-08-11: |
On the performance of Python longs being used as bitmaps
|
| 2007-08-10: |
Clever large integers
|
| 2007-08-09: |
A gotcha with the format of dump archives
|
| 2007-08-08: |
Explaining some university staff peculiarities
|
| 2007-08-07: |
A surprise with the Provides header in RPM
|
| 2007-08-06: |
Implementing a preforking network server in Python
|
| 2007-08-05: |
Thinking about more text formatting for DWiki
|
| 2007-08-04: |
Weekly spam summary on August 4th, 2007
|
| 2007-08-03: |
The scope of shell history
Using WSGI for performance tuning
|
| 2007-08-02: |
Link: XML on the web summarized
|
| 2007-08-01: |
A ZFS-based fileserver design
|
| 2007-07-31: |
Consequences of allowing packages to quiz users at install time
|
| 2007-07-30: |
What we want out of our new fileserver design
|
| 2007-07-29: |
My standard for clear idioms in personal code
|
| 2007-07-28: |
Weekly spam summary on July 28th, 2007
|
| 2007-07-27: |
How big is the Slashdot effect?
|
| 2007-07-26: |
An unexpected performance stress test for DWiki
|
| 2007-07-25: |
Solaris Volume Manager and iSCSI: a problematic interaction
|
| 2007-07-24: |
Using iSCSI and AOE to create artificial disk errors
|
| 2007-07-23: |
An interesting issue when yum upgraded gaim
|
| 2007-07-22: |
Universities are not businesses: an implication
|
| 2007-07-21: |
Weekly spam summary on July 21st, 2007
|
| 2007-07-20: |
The downside of a unified buffer cache
|
| 2007-07-19: |
A safety tip: keep your different sorts of source trees separate
|
| 2007-07-18: |
Why I like Python's large integer support
|
| 2007-07-17: |
Random passwords are not necessarily good passwords
|
| 2007-07-16: |
Why SSL and name-based virtual hosts don't get along
|
| 2007-07-15: |
Problems I see with the ATA-over-Ethernet protocol
Weekly spam summary on July 14th, 2007
|
| 2007-07-14: |
Linux kernel asynchronous IO doesn't work on sockets
|
| 2007-07-13: |
You can't change a Python function's local variables from outside
|
| 2007-07-12: |
An interesting mistake with ZFS and iSCSI
|
| 2007-07-11: |
Why I wish Python had assignment in conditionals
|
| 2007-07-10: |
Thinking about the Python equivalents of C's !! double negation
|
| 2007-07-09: |
How many bits of information are in a password?
How not to set up your DNS (part 16)
|
| 2007-07-08: |
A suggestion for HMAC signature construction
|
| 2007-07-07: |
Weekly spam summary on July 7th, 2007
|
| 2007-07-06: |
What the flags on DNS query responses mean
How not to set up your DNS (part 15)
|
| 2007-07-05: |
What OpenID is good for
|
| 2007-07-04: |
What OpenID is (and is not)
Problems with EXA X acceleration on ATI cards in Fedora Core 6
|
| 2007-07-03: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 14)
|
| 2007-07-02: |
What the unified buffer cache is unifying
|
| 2007-07-01: |
The optimization rule for systems
|
| 2007-06-30: |
Weekly spam summary on June 30th, 2007
|
| 2007-06-29: |
The stupidity of being nickled and dimed by vendors
Why forwarding all email for users is dangerous
|
| 2007-06-28: |
Why I don't like inverted if conditionals
|
| 2007-06-27: |
Why you can't use object.__new__ on everything
|
| 2007-06-26: |
A small update on comment spammer behavior
|
| 2007-06-25: |
ZFS's issues with long term storage management
The advantage of a SAN
Painless long term storage management without disturbing users
|
| 2007-06-23: |
Weekly spam summary on June 23rd, 2007
|
| 2007-06-22: |
One reason why the Debian package format is not my favorite
A thought on web server capacity measurement
|
| 2007-06-20: |
More on slot wrapper objects
|
| 2007-06-19: |
Thinking about types of bugs (and static analysis)
|
| 2007-06-18: |
What are slot wrapper objects?
|
| 2007-06-17: |
A use for CSS adjacent selectors
|
| 2007-06-16: |
Weekly spam summary on June 16th, 2007
|
| 2007-06-15: |
Why I am in system administration instead of programming
|
| 2007-06-14: |
Getting source RPMs with yumdownloader (part 2)
|
| 2007-06-13: |
What NFS file-based locking problems can happen
|
| 2007-06-12: |
'Argument list too long' is a misleading message
|
| 2007-06-11: |
Getting source RPMs with yumdownloader
|
| 2007-06-10: |
How NFS is unreliable for file-based locking
|
| 2007-06-09: |
Weekly spam summary on June 9th, 2007
|
| 2007-06-08: |
Some thoughts on Slashdot's moderation system
|
| 2007-06-07: |
Why I hate firewalls, especially stateful firewalls
|
| 2007-06-06: |
Why you want a filesystem consistency checker
|
| 2007-06-05: |
RPM's multi-architecture file ownership problem
|
| 2007-06-04: |
RAID-5 versus RAID-6
Why we need our SAN RAID controllers to support logical drives
|
| 2007-06-02: |
Weekly spam summary on June 2nd, 2007
|
| 2007-06-01: |
Why our Solaris fileservers still use the automounter
|
| 2007-05-31: |
Please test your error paths
|
| 2007-05-30: |
A gotcha with the automounter and loopback mounts
|
| 2007-05-29: |
On storing source code in some non-text format
|
| 2007-05-28: |
Why ZFS's data integrity is less important than Solaris's usability
|
| 2007-05-27: |
Paying for security exploits
|
| 2007-05-26: |
Weekly spam summary on May 26th, 2007
|
| 2007-05-25: |
If you want work done, you need to pay for it
The risks of spam filtering (part 1)
|
| 2007-05-24: |
Firefox preferences settings that I use
|
| 2007-05-23: |
The danger of a web server writeable document area
|
| 2007-05-22: |
A case for breaking the web server ownership guidelines
|
| 2007-05-21: |
Linux is a Unix
|
| 2007-05-20: |
Properties relevant to finding what class supplies a method
|
| 2007-05-19: |
Weekly spam summary on May 19th, 2007
|
| 2007-05-18: |
The difficulty of throwing things away
|
| 2007-05-17: |
Determining what superclass supplies a method in Python
|
| 2007-05-16: |
My rules of thumb for picking conference talks
|
| 2007-05-15: |
Sizing your swap space (part 2)
|
| 2007-05-14: |
Sizing your swap space (part 1)
|
| 2007-05-13: |
Unix folklore: your swap should be twice your RAM
|
| 2007-05-12: |
Weekly spam summary on May 12th, 2007
|
| 2007-05-11: |
Building your own kernel with the Fedora kernel configuration
|
| 2007-05-10: |
The other problem with network booting
|
| 2007-05-09: |
CSS separates layout from content less than you'd like
|
| 2007-05-08: |
Supporting the real world
|
| 2007-05-07: |
What computer security is
|
| 2007-05-06: |
What Linux bind mounts are really doing
|
| 2007-05-05: |
Weekly spam summary on May 5th, 2007
|
| 2007-05-04: |
A little twitch I have in X Windows
|
| 2007-05-03: |
A stupid switch configuration trick
|
| 2007-05-02: |
My view of Ubuntu
|
| 2007-05-01: |
Some good practices for web servers
|
| 2007-04-30: |
Being specific about where your systems are
|
| 2007-04-29: |
What matters about object oriented operating systems
Weekly spam summary on April 28th, 2007
|
| 2007-04-28: |
Why I no longer bother to complain to ISPs about spam
|
| 2007-04-27: |
My view of Solaris 10 summarized
|
| 2007-04-26: |
A clever way of doing IP address assignment
|
| 2007-04-25: |
What do Unix errno values mean?
|
| 2007-04-24: |
RPC is surprisingly expensive
|
| 2007-04-23: |
Extra security systems for Unix should be explicit, not implicit
|
| 2007-04-22: |
Why Red Hat 7.3 is (still) so present on servers
|
| 2007-04-21: |
Weekly spam summary on April 21st, 2007
|
| 2007-04-20: |
Why organizations buy software from commercial companies
|
| 2007-04-19: |
A thought about attitudes towards support requests
|
| 2007-04-18: |
An advantage of CSS layouts for accessibility
|
| 2007-04-17: |
Why the University of Toronto can't just use Google Mail
A disappointment with ZFS
|
| 2007-04-16: |
Using CSS instead of tables is still using a hack
|
| 2007-04-15: |
chkconfig --add considered misleading
|
| 2007-04-14: |
Weekly spam summary on April 14th, 2007
|
| 2007-04-13: |
A little gotcha about binding services to interfaces
|
| 2007-04-12: |
Why Evolution is not my favorite mail reader
|
| 2007-04-11: |
Users don't really benefit from filing bug reports
|
| 2007-04-10: |
A limitation of Debian's /etc/network/interfaces control file
|
| 2007-04-09: |
Why indirect xdm probably doesn't work on your Linux machine
|
| 2007-04-08: |
A limitation of Python properties
Weekly spam summary on April 7th, 2007
|
| 2007-04-07: |
An interesting observation about web cracker behavior
|
| 2007-04-06: |
Why network booting is not a good answer
|
| 2007-04-05: |
Wanted: remote controllable DVD drives
An irritation about rails
|
| 2007-04-04: |
A brief sad note about root passwords
Social problems are the real problems
|
| 2007-04-03: |
Why charging for email won't do what people want
|
| 2007-04-02: |
Some lighttpd bits
|
| 2007-04-01: |
An advantage of virtualization for license servers
Please leave IOError and OSError alone
Weekly spam summary on March 31st, 2007
|
| 2007-03-31: |
Created functions and exception stack backtraces
Microsoft has another problem
Link: you are what you code
A simple debugger feature that I would really like
|
| 2007-03-30: |
What an Ethernet splitter looks like
|
| 2007-03-29: |
Usability issues with blog URLs
|
| 2007-03-28: |
A surprise to remember about starting modern machines
Dual identity routing with Linux's policy based routing
|
| 2007-03-27: |
The VPN routing problem
Some problems with iSCSI on Solaris 10 (on x86)
|
| 2007-03-26: |
Quality Solaris 10 software:
|
| 2007-03-25: |
Fitts' Law and edge-flipping in window managers
|
| 2007-03-24: |
Weekly spam summary on March 24th, 2007
How comment spammers behave
Randomly engaging NumLock considered irritating
|
| 2007-03-23: |
Counterintuitive RAID read performance
|
| 2007-03-22: |
An irony of conditional GET for dynamic websites
Making user home directories on a stock Solaris machine
|
| 2007-03-21: |
Users are almost always right
|
| 2007-03-20: |
On educating users
|
| 2007-03-19: |
The three strata of virtualization
|
| 2007-03-18: |
Why Unix setuid is incompatible with real network filesystems
|
| 2007-03-17: |
Weekly spam summary on March 17th, 2007
|
| 2007-03-16: |
GRE is a translucent tunnel
Things I have learned while doing GRE tunnels on Linux
|
| 2007-03-15: |
An annoying limitation of Linux IPSec
|
| 2007-03-14: |
The problem of machine startup order dependencies
|
| 2007-03-13: |
Machine room archaeology
What I currently do to stop comment spam on WanderingThoughts
|
| 2007-03-12: |
New warning messages might as well be fatal errors
|
| 2007-03-11: |
I consider __dict__ an implementation detail
Weekly spam summary on March 10th, 2007
|
| 2007-03-10: |
What a sysadmin's machine should be able to do
|
| 2007-03-09: |
Why hashcash schemes for email will never be adopted
|
| 2007-03-08: |
A bad popup dialog
A belated set of more power consumption numbers
|
| 2007-03-07: |
A gripe about sun.com
|
| 2007-03-06: |
Why I don't like USB keyboards
|
| 2007-03-05: |
Some useful new Linux software RAID features
|
| 2007-03-04: |
Handling lines with something-separated fields for Python
Weekly spam summary on March 3rd, 2007
|
| 2007-03-03: |
On useful front-panel LEDs
|
| 2007-03-02: |
A story of network weirdness
|
| 2007-03-01: |
An irritating limitation of listening sockets
|
| 2007-02-28: |
Using Unix domain sockets from Python
|
| 2007-02-27: |
Things I did not know about until recently: Ethernet splitters
|
| 2007-02-26: |
Things I have learned about effective sysadmin meetings
|
| 2007-02-25: |
Ordered lists with named fields for Python
How CSLab currently does email anti-spam stuff
Weekly spam summary on February 24th, 2007
|
| 2007-02-24: |
Thesis: any server push technology inevitably breeds spam
The problem with browser minimum font size settings
Most world-editable wikis are doomed
Some things to remember when implementing __getitem__
|
| 2007-02-23: |
The downside of distinctive hostnames
|
| 2007-02-22: |
A simplified summary of Python's method resolution order
My zeroth law of compromised machines
A note about the ordering of mixin classes
|
| 2007-02-21: |
Fixing Python's string .join()
The quick overview of DiskSuite failover
|
| 2007-02-20: |
Getting around LiveJournal's new minimum page width
|
| 2007-02-19: |
What I currently know about Fibrechannel versus iSCSI versus AoE
Another aphorism of system administration
|
| 2007-02-18: |
Why we do NFS fileserving with a SAN
Weekly spam summary on February 17th, 2007
|
| 2007-02-17: |
Programming fun
|
| 2007-02-16: |
I hate hardware (Dell 2950 edition)
QOTD: There are three types of authentication
|
| 2007-02-15: |
Something all full-service backup systems should have
|
| 2007-02-14: |
RPM tricks for dealing with multiarch machines
|
| 2007-02-13: |
On Python's grammar
|
| 2007-02-12: |
Why thin clients are doomed (part 2)
|
| 2007-02-11: |
How to do locking in shell scripts
|
| 2007-02-10: |
Weekly spam summary on February 10th, 2007
A temptation with challenge/response anti-spam systems
Link: Why the ease of installing Java matters
|
| 2007-02-09: |
What System V did to the poor ln command
|
| 2007-02-08: |
The danger of validating your XHTML
|
| 2007-02-07: |
Why I think thin clients are doomed
|
| 2007-02-06: |
What the Solaris 8 nfs3_max_threads parameter probably controls
|
| 2007-02-05: |
An irritation with yum localupdate
Another small user interface suggestion
|
| 2007-02-04: |
A sysadmin twitch about dump
|
| 2007-02-03: |
Weekly spam summary on February 3rd, 2007
|
| 2007-02-02: |
A modern environment's need for broadband
Why don't SQL servers do a lot of caching?
|
| 2007-02-01: |
Transparent versus non-transparent caching
|
| 2007-01-31: |
The inherent fragility of complex systems (in system administration)
Why I am not fond of DHCP in lab environments
|
| 2007-01-29: |
A gotcha with <textarea>
How to have your web spider irritate me intensely (part 2)
|
| 2007-01-28: |
Why DWiki doesn't use fully REST-ful URLs
Weekly spam summary on January 27th, 2007
|
| 2007-01-27: |
Why I think that DNS whitelists are going to fail
|
| 2007-01-26: |
First impressions of pyOpenSSL
|
| 2007-01-25: |
A clever trick to deal with students powering off workstations
|
| 2007-01-24: |
An irritation with current GUI interfaces
|
| 2007-01-23: |
How to stop DiskSuite resyncing a mirror on Solaris 8
|
| 2007-01-22: |
Why host authentication has to check who the certificate belongs to
|
| 2007-01-21: |
Sometimes system administration requires a hacksaw
|
| 2007-01-20: |
Weekly spam summary on January 20th, 2007
Browsers are the wrong place to report HTML validation errors
|
| 2007-01-19: |
Link: Peter Gutmann on PKI
|
| 2007-01-18: |
Why I want direct certificate checking instead of having to rely on CAs
|
| 2007-01-17: |
A grump about the socket module's SSL support
|
| 2007-01-16: |
Why I don't have a GPG key
|
| 2007-01-15: |
Configuring VLANs on Fedora Core
|
| 2007-01-14: |
Wrapping exceptions versus propagating them untouched
An alarming reflex in my use of find
|
| 2007-01-13: |
Weekly spam summary on January 13th, 2007
|
| 2007-01-12: |
The easy way to get me to not comment on a weblog
|
| 2007-01-11: |
Xen versus VMware for me
An interesting Bourne shell limitation
|
| 2007-01-10: |
A gotcha with inetd/xinetd and popular UDP services
|
| 2007-01-09: |
Solving an automounter timeout problem with brute force
|
| 2007-01-08: |
What I really want from an automounter
|
| 2007-01-07: |
Another issue with C's volatile
|
| 2007-01-06: |
Weekly spam summary on Janury 6th, 2007
Fixing up .rpmnew files
|
| 2007-01-05: |
Henry Spencer on C's volatile
|
| 2007-01-04: |
The scars of my NPTL experience
|
| 2007-01-03: |
The problem with C's volatile qualifier
|
| 2007-01-02: |
My current views on webmail providers
|
| 2007-01-01: |
Solaris's impressive ABI compatibility
Link: Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library
|
| 2006-12-31: |
A (Solaris 8) automounter irritation
|
| 2006-12-30: |
Weekly spam summary on December 30th, 2006
|
| 2006-12-29: |
What can go wrong if your compiler is not thread aware
|
| 2006-12-28: |
A thought on the advance of X auto-configuration
|
| 2006-12-27: |
Solaris 8 DiskSuite's lack of good monitoring
HTTP as it is seen in the wild
|
| 2006-12-26: |
Link: OpenBSD spamd
Link: varnish, a HTTP accelerator
|
| 2006-12-25: |
The problem with #ifdef
A thought of the day
Link: A lovely summary of the XHTML issue
|
| 2006-12-24: |
What Google Sitemaps isn't
|
| 2006-12-23: |
Weekly spam summary on December 23rd, 2006
|
| 2006-12-22: |
Another example of why Bourne shell quoting makes me grumpy
|
| 2006-12-21: |
Something to avoid in callback email address verification
|
| 2006-12-20: |
How many root DNS servers are reachable over Internet II?
|
| 2006-12-19: |
An Internet dependency
|
| 2006-12-18: |
A basic principle of website security
|
| 2006-12-17: |
How to get me to block your web ads in a flash
Weekly spam summary on December 16th, 2006
|
| 2006-12-15: |
An unsurprising discovery about spammer behavior
|
| 2006-12-14: |
Fedora Core's memory problem
|
| 2006-12-13: |
An example of Unix's slow fossilization
A SMTP implementor's conundrum
|
| 2006-12-12: |
A limitation of OpenBSD bridging NAT firewalls
|
| 2006-12-10: |
An irony of web serving
Weekly spam summary on December 9th, 2006
|
| 2006-12-09: |
How DWiki uses partial function evaluation
|
| 2006-12-08: |
What I want out of a Linux partitioning program
Why I don't expect result-oriented work hours to work out
|
| 2006-12-07: |
Another obnoxious discovery about Ubuntu's /var/run stuff
How not to set up your DNS (part 13)
|
| 2006-12-06: |
Setting up switches to avoid unwanted VLAN leakage
|
| 2006-12-05: |
A small annoyance with Unix wildcards
|
| 2006-12-04: |
How SSH achieves forward secrecy
|
| 2006-12-03: |
More fun with Python's indentation rules
|
| 2006-12-02: |
Weekly spam summary on December 2nd, 2006
|
| 2006-12-01: |
Ubuntu's attention to detail in init.d scripts
|
| 2006-11-30: |
How Python parses indentation
|
| 2006-11-29: |
Turning off HTTP basic authentication in urllib
|
| 2006-11-28: |
Progress towards an all 64-bit application world
|
| 2006-11-27: |
Some words of wisdom on email certification programs
Why I don't rip my CDs
|
| 2006-11-26: |
An irritating X Windows limitation with wheel mice
Link: Serif vs. Sans Serif Legibility
Weekly spam summary on November 25th, 2006
|
| 2006-11-25: |
The quest for a nice Linux CD player application
|
| 2006-11-24: |
A classical Unix tape gotcha
|
| 2006-11-23: |
Why I don't file bug reports very often
|
| 2006-11-22: |
Why ssh validates host keys using the exact name you supplied
|
| 2006-11-21: |
A small script: bsearch-nums
|
| 2006-11-20: |
A DiskSuite annoyance: metastat
|
| 2006-11-19: |
How https: should work
Weekly spam summary on November 18th, 2006
|
| 2006-11-18: |
Link: Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces
Should you care about whether you can upgrade hardware?
The good old days of Unix
|
| 2006-11-17: |
How to quiesce NFS traffic the brute force way
|
| 2006-11-16: |
An annoying omission in the Solaris 8 DiskSuite toolset
|
| 2006-11-15: |
A little regexp thing to remember about \b (and \w)
Why the Bourne shell is not my favorite language
|
| 2006-11-14: |
Some more power consumption numbers
|
| 2006-11-13: |
People aren't suspicious
|
| 2006-11-12: |
Some ways to break your syndication feed
Broken syndication feeds are worse than no feed
|
| 2006-11-11: |
Weekly spam summary on November 11th, 2006
A thought about disaster recovery planning
|
| 2006-11-10: |
Link: On Bots
|
| 2006-11-09: |
A fundamental problem with challenge/response anti-spam systems
The importance of printable objects
|
| 2006-11-08: |
Link: Pumas on Hoverbikes
The quest for the mythical C.UTF-8 locale
|
| 2006-11-07: |
Link: Unicode Spaces
|
| 2006-11-06: |
HTML character sets
|
| 2006-11-05: |
An interesting Python garbage collection bug
|
| 2006-11-04: |
Weekly spam summary on November 4th, 2006
|
| 2006-11-03: |
Installing Wine on Fedora Core 5 x86_64
|
| 2006-11-02: |
Knowing things versus being able to prove them
|
| 2006-11-01: |
The downsides of remailing
|
| 2006-10-31: |
A Solaris 8 make bug
An Internet rule of thumb
|
| 2006-10-30: |
A brief Exim observation
First irritations with Fedora Core 6
|
| 2006-10-29: |
Python's assert is a weak debugging tool
|
| 2006-10-28: |
Weekly spam summary on October 28th, 2006
|
| 2006-10-27: |
In (modest) praise of Solaris DiskSuite
|
| 2006-10-26: |
Languages need comments
|
| 2006-10-25: |
Another advantage of distributed version control systems
|
| 2006-10-24: |
Google and YouTube
|
| 2006-10-23: |
A dump performance hint: the block size really matters
|
| 2006-10-22: |
Why cursors blink
|
| 2006-10-21: |
Weekly spam summary on October 21st, 2006
An irritating iptables limitation
|
| 2006-10-20: |
Why releases are important
|
| 2006-10-19: |
A paradox of ignorance
An Ubuntu astonishment
|
| 2006-10-18: |
CSS is assembly language
Getting your spam crossed
|
| 2006-10-17: |
Link: HTML Doctype declarations inventoried
An Amanda gotcha with dumps to disk
|
| 2006-10-16: |
Why have an MX record to yourself?
|
| 2006-10-15: |
On the various meanings of <tag />
|
| 2006-10-14: |
Weekly spam summary on October 14, 2006
|
| 2006-10-13: |
Why quoting in the Bourne shell makes me grumpy
Link: Warning Signs for Tomorrow
|
| 2006-10-12: |
How stable my AMD 64-bit systems have been
|
| 2006-10-11: |
Getting nice looking TrueType fonts on Fedora Core
A spectacular web spammer failure
|
| 2006-10-10: |
Cross building i386 RPMs on an x86_64 Fedora Core 5 machine
A trivial script: wcat
|
| 2006-10-09: |
I ♥ Fedora Extras
|
| 2006-10-08: |
A reason to read blogs in reverse chronological order
|
| 2006-10-07: |
Weekly spam summary on October 7th, 2006
|
| 2006-10-06: |
A Python quoting irritation
|
| 2006-10-05: |
Thoughts on machine identity
|
| 2006-10-04: |
A pyramid of little scripts: nsdig
|
| 2006-10-03: |
Some numbers for modern disk performance
|
| 2006-10-02: |
The longevity of old hardware
|
| 2006-10-01: |
The advantage of vendor packages
|
| 2006-09-30: |
Weekly spam summary on September 30th, 2006
|
| 2006-09-29: |
Gnome daemons you'll want to run in a custom environment
|
| 2006-09-28: |
Why I hate $LANG and locales on Unix
|
| 2006-09-27: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 12)
|
| 2006-09-26: |
Why people still like TCL/TK
Web site security theatre
|
| 2006-09-25: |
Some reactions to a dual monitor X setup
|
| 2006-09-24: |
Two approaches to Unix environments
Weekly spam summary on September 23rd, 2006
|
| 2006-09-22: |
A NFS mount accident on Linux
|
| 2006-09-21: |
The danger of relying on Javascript for input validation
An amusingly truthful hostname
|
| 2006-09-20: |
A peculiarity of hardware at universities
|
| 2006-09-19: |
One of the reasons I dislike SELinux
|
| 2006-09-18: |
Why /var/log/btmp may be using up a lot of space in your /var
My current view of Linux system filesystem sizes
|
| 2006-09-17: |
How to convert a time string in GMT to seconds since the epoch
|
| 2006-09-16: |
Weekly spam summary on September 16th, 2006
|
| 2006-09-15: |
The temptation of LVM
|
| 2006-09-14: |
A bonus to writing documentation
The brute-force way to install missing Solaris 9 packages
|
| 2006-09-13: |
The really irritating thing about voicemail
|
| 2006-09-12: |
A quick note about how extended partitions work
|
| 2006-09-11: |
Python's extra-clever help() function
'In place' filesystem defragmentation with Disksuite
|
| 2006-09-10: |
A thought on iTunes and similar online services
Weekly spam summary on September 9th, 2006
|
| 2006-09-09: |
Something I really wish vendor product pages did
|
| 2006-09-08: |
A Solaris 8 Disksuite single user mode surprise
I hate hardware (AMD CPU edition)
Link: IRON File Systems
|
| 2006-09-07: |
Industrial strength Python
Some wise words from Henry Spencer on backups
|
| 2006-09-06: |
How fast an LCD refresh rate is going to be fast enough?
|
| 2006-09-05: |
Stupid web spammer tricks
|
| 2006-09-04: |
A thought about interactive development environments
|
| 2006-09-03: |
Why writing documentation is no fun
|
| 2006-09-02: |
Weekly spam summary on September 2nd, 2006
|
| 2006-09-01: |
Link: The Single Unix Specification et al
Why Postfix is not my favorite mailer
|
| 2006-08-31: |
SIGCHLD versus Python: a problem of semantics
How dd does blocking
|
| 2006-08-30: |
A problem with debugging threaded Python programs
How to lose readers of your syndication feed
|
| 2006-08-29: |
An interesting filesystem corruption problem
Documentation should be cheap
|
| 2006-08-27: |
Documentation is not free
|
| 2006-08-26: |
Weekly spam summary on August 26th, 2006
|
| 2006-08-25: |
Please don't use session cookies
Another stupid spider mistake
|
| 2006-08-24: |
More on the Solaris ssh stuff (part 3)
How not to get our business
|
| 2006-08-23: |
Why I am irritated with evince
An update on impending changes to access to Solaris patches
|
| 2006-08-22: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 11)
Link: Csh Programming Considered Harmful
fork(), wait(), and threads
|
| 2006-08-21: |
Most new products are upgrades
How not to set up your DNS (part 10)
|
| 2006-08-20: |
Finally, a good reason to periodically reboot servers
|
| 2006-08-19: |
Weekly spam summary on August 29th, 2006
Documentation needs testing
|
| 2006-08-18: |
Why apt-get is not my favorite application (part 2)
|
| 2006-08-17: |
Idealist versus Realist
The quick secret to bootable USB keys
|
| 2006-08-16: |
The fun of 32-bit bugs
|
| 2006-08-15: |
Hardware RAID versus software RAID
|
| 2006-08-14: |
The importance of numerical literacy
Distributions: keep your hands off vi
|
| 2006-08-13: |
The real Bourne shell problem
|
| 2006-08-12: |
Weekly spam summary on August 12th, 2006
|
| 2006-08-11: |
An unhappy spam milestone
|
| 2006-08-10: |
A Bourne shell gotcha: redirection order
|
| 2006-08-09: |
A Bourne shell irritation
|
| 2006-08-08: |
Slashdot's tacit admission of failure
|
| 2006-08-07: |
A problem in Python's implementation of closures
|
| 2006-08-06: |
A fun little regular expression bug
|
| 2006-08-05: |
Weekly spam summary on August 5th, 2006
|
| 2006-08-04: |
My current set of Firefox extensions
|
| 2006-08-03: |
Link: When the "best tool for the job"... isn't.
How to irritate your successor (on Solaris)
|
| 2006-08-02: |
In praise of installing from Live CDs
|
| 2006-08-01: |
One serial problem I should remember
|
| 2006-07-31: |
The limitations of Unix atime
|
| 2006-07-30: |
XHTML on the web is for masochists
Weekly spam summary on July 29th, 2006
|
| 2006-07-29: |
Link: Ten Risks of PKI
Another little sysadmin twitch or two
|
| 2006-07-28: |
A plug for blastwave.org
|
| 2006-07-27: |
Unix files do not have creation times
|
| 2006-07-26: |
xterm's ziconbeep feature
|
| 2006-07-25: |
An awk idiom: getting fields backwards from the end of the line
Reading Unix manpages
|
| 2006-07-24: |
Link: Linguistic blindness illustrated
A brief history of cut and paste in X
Walking away from Slashdot: a story of design
|
| 2006-07-23: |
Weekly spam summary on July 22nd, 2006
|
| 2006-07-22: |
Solaris's sparseness
|
| 2006-07-21: |
What Linux distributions we use (and sort of why)
|
| 2006-07-20: |
Why I like Python more than Perl
Link: non-errors in English
|
| 2006-07-19: |
A sysadmin habit: screen locking
Using Python to test system behavior
Link: 'Document Centric'
|
| 2006-07-18: |
Why you can't mix wildcard IP port binding with other bindings
|
| 2006-07-17: |
Thesis: SMP is a failure for most Internet servers
|
| 2006-07-16: |
Weekly spam summary on July 15th, 2006
|
| 2006-07-15: |
A robot wish
|
| 2006-07-14: |
SELinux bites man: a story
Pointers to some SELinux explanations
|
| 2006-07-13: |
A thought on Linux installation versus Solaris 9 installation
|
| 2006-07-12: |
Why I like 'lib64' better than 'lib32' for the x86_64 transition
|
| 2006-07-11: |
Why nofollow is useful and important
|
| 2006-07-10: |
A suggestion for people with 'Out of Office' autoreplies
|
| 2006-07-09: |
Weekly spam summary on July 8th, 2006
|
| 2006-07-08: |
The problem of IT winning arguments
|
| 2006-07-07: |
Sysadmins are an overhead
|
| 2006-07-06: |
More on tabs
|
| 2006-07-05: |
On tabs
|
| 2006-07-04: |
A surprise with using object() instances
|
| 2006-07-03: |
Why Solaris is not my favorite operating system
|
| 2006-07-02: |
Weekly spam summary on July 1st, 2006
|
| 2006-07-01: |
Link: The virtual furniture police
Another annoying RSS feed trick
|
| 2006-06-30: |
Some thoughts on the Fedora Core 5 Gnome desktop
|
| 2006-06-29: |
screen -x
|
| 2006-06-28: |
The problem with cool URLs
|
| 2006-06-27: |
More on the Solaris ssh stuff (part 2)
Microsoft has a problem
|
| 2006-06-26: |
How not to report spam (part 1)
WSGI versus asynchronous servers
|
| 2006-06-25: |
Weekly spam summary on June 24th, 2006
|
| 2006-06-24: |
A problem with signals in Python
|
| 2006-06-23: |
Respecting Unix signals
|
| 2006-06-22: |
An extreme example of C preprocessor (ab)use
|
| 2006-06-21: |
A year (and a bit) of WanderingThoughts
More on the Solaris ssh stuff
|
| 2006-06-20: |
How to improve programming productivity
|
| 2006-06-19: |
Impending changes to access to Solaris patches
An odd choice of hostname
WSGI: the good and the bad
|
| 2006-06-18: |
Weekly spam summary on June 17th, 2006
|
| 2006-06-17: |
Metrics considered dangerous
|
| 2006-06-16: |
/etc/inittab versus /etc/rc.d
|
| 2006-06-15: |
How to have your web spider irritate me intensely
Dispelling a nightmare (a sysadmin tale)
|
| 2006-06-14: |
How to supply an IP address in Red Hat's Kickstart
|
| 2006-06-13: |
A web validation aphorism
|
| 2006-06-12: |
Why charging for things is deadly at a university
|
| 2006-06-11: |
Link: The Unix Heritage Society
Weekly spam summary on June 10th, 2006
|
| 2006-06-10: |
Fixing the bad Solaris ssh patch
|
| 2006-06-09: |
Seeing Quicktime movie trailers on Fedora Core 5
|
| 2006-06-08: |
Some computer power consumption numbers
|
| 2006-06-07: |
Some Fedora Core 5 experimentation
|
| 2006-06-06: |
Internet Distance (In Memoriam)
|
| 2006-06-05: |
A Python coding mistake
People are ordinary
|
| 2006-06-04: |
Weekly spam summary on June 3rd, 2006
|
| 2006-06-03: |
The fundamental problem of spam
|
| 2006-06-02: |
An object identity gotcha in Python
|
| 2006-06-01: |
Link: a Unix sysadmin rosetta stone
The cynical take on nofollow
|
| 2006-05-31: |
A simple way to get a disk space usage summary
Fiddling with X selections from shell scripts
|
| 2006-05-30: |
An shell script idiom for choosing what file to operate on
|
| 2006-05-29: |
An obvious way to do bulk initialization of dictionaries
|
| 2006-05-28: |
Weekly spam summary on May 27th, 2006
|
| 2006-05-27: |
Today's dilemma: wiki page or blog entry?
|
| 2006-05-26: |
A message you do not want to see from your backup software
The problem with treating RAID arrays as single disks
|
| 2006-05-25: |
Link: Classic Mistakes Enumerated
A Linux su surprise
SCGI is a form of caching
|
| 2006-05-24: |
The not so secret history of vmlinuz
|
| 2006-05-23: |
Link: Why overtime is bad for everyone
A defense of Unix that always irritates me
|
| 2006-05-22: |
A little failsafe feature in 3-prong electrical plugs
|
| 2006-05-21: |
My mistake with the Host: HTTP header
Weekly spam summary on May 20th, 2006
|
| 2006-05-20: |
Things that irritate me about Python's socket module
|
| 2006-05-19: |
Some modest suggestions on vendor tradeshow giveaways
|
| 2006-05-18: |
The future of spam is advance fee fraud
|
| 2006-05-17: |
Where to find package inventories on Solaris 9
|
| 2006-05-16: |
A Python limit I never expected to run into
|
| 2006-05-15: |
PlanetLab hammers on robots.txt
|
| 2006-05-14: |
Absolute versus relative URLs in syndication feeds
Link: an engineering management hack
A small user interface suggestion
Weekly spam summary on May 13th, 2006
|
| 2006-05-13: |
Safely updating Unix files
|
| 2006-05-12: |
The problem with preforking Python network servers
|
| 2006-05-11: |
Building a boot floppy for BIOS flashing
|
| 2006-05-10: |
Another really stupid web spider
The practical cost of forking in Python
|
| 2006-05-09: |
Bad patch management at Sun
|
| 2006-05-08: |
Link: an excerpt from On Writing Well
A really stupid web spider
|
| 2006-05-07: |
Link: Search engine page size limits for indexing
SCGI versus FastCGI
Weekly spam summary on May 6th, 2006
|
| 2006-05-06: |
Using a stock kernel.org kernel on Fedora Core 5
|
| 2006-05-05: |
Link: Readable colour text combinations
Peeking under mount points with NFS
|
| 2006-05-04: |
A subtle advantage of simple wikis
|
| 2006-05-03: |
Fedora Core 5's missing 32-bit shared library symlinks
|
| 2006-05-02: |
CSS and syndication (another CSS limitation)
|
| 2006-05-01: |
Emergency repairs with GRUB
|
| 2006-04-30: |
Weekly spam summary on April 29th, 2006
|
| 2006-04-29: |
Another little script: field
|
| 2006-04-28: |
Some first impressions of Fedora Core 5
|
| 2006-04-27: |
A picture of what university IT is like
|
| 2006-04-26: |
Common web spider mistakes
|
| 2006-04-25: |
Linux's %iowait statistic
|
| 2006-04-24: |
People are social
|
| 2006-04-23: |
The sort of command line I can wind up typing
Some CBL stats for the week ending on April 22nd, 2006
Weekly spam summary on April 22nd, 2006
|
| 2006-04-22: |
Link: Scaling Apache at ftp.heanet.ie
|
| 2006-04-21: |
Working on RPMs with quilt: an illustrated guide
A CSS limitation: it's not supported by lynx
|
| 2006-04-20: |
The spread of syndication
|
| 2006-04-19: |
A gotcha with analyzing syslog logs
|
| 2006-04-18: |
How Solaris matches names in NFS exports
|
| 2006-04-17: |
What do variable names mean (in Python and elsewhere)?
|
| 2006-04-16: |
Weekly spam summary on April 15th, 2006
|
| 2006-04-15: |
The problem of the growth of syndication feeds
Public interfaces and Solaris 9 patchadd exit codes
|
| 2006-04-14: |
Why del has to be a Python builtin
|
| 2006-04-13: |
An obnoxious RSS feed trick
|
| 2006-04-12: |
Something to remember about networking restarts
|
| 2006-04-11: |
A little script: howmany
|
| 2006-04-10: |
xiostat: better Linux disk IO statistics
The fun and charm of quoting URLs properly
|
| 2006-04-09: |
Weekly spam summary on April 8th, 2006
|
| 2006-04-08: |
Apple joins the webmail hall of shame
A common socket programming mistake: not handling short IO
|
| 2006-04-07: |
A bash irritation
A pleasing Python regularity with __future__
Some quick SMTP connection statistics
|
| 2006-04-06: |
Some things about smpatch
|
| 2006-04-05: |
Keeping up with new Python features
The other dynamic linking tax
|
| 2006-04-04: |
Why I don't like resorting to caching
|
| 2006-04-03: |
An ugly spam attempt
Spiders should respect rel="nofollow"
|
| 2006-04-02: |
Weekly spam summary on April 1st, 2006
|
| 2006-04-01: |
The best April Fools joke I've seen here
A Firefox CSS irritation
|
| 2006-03-31: |
The perfection trap: a lesson drawn from Worse is Better
The difficulty of punishing people at universities
|
| 2006-03-30: |
What disk IO stats you get from the Linux kernel
|
| 2006-03-29: |
Easier Solaris patch management with pca
|
| 2006-03-28: |
Hotmail spam stats revised
Using threading to implement a 'busy' cursor (a tale from long ago)
|
| 2006-03-27: |
A helpful Apache safety tip
|
| 2006-03-26: |
Weekly spam summary on March 25th, 2006
|
| 2006-03-25: |
A little gotcha with os.path.join
|
| 2006-03-24: |
Setting up to build RPMs
|
| 2006-03-23: |
Side effects are bad: a personal illustration
We apologize for the disruption in syndication feeds
Atom versus RSS
Solaris patch exit codes and what they mean
|
| 2006-03-22: |
Google Desktop and conditional GET (part 2)
|
| 2006-03-21: |
The backend for our recent mirroring
|
| 2006-03-20: |
An optimization thought
|
| 2006-03-19: |
Weekly spam summary on March 18th, 2006
|
| 2006-03-18: |
Some little things Firefox gets right
|
| 2006-03-17: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 9)
The problem with LiveJournal
|
| 2006-03-16: |
A tricky memoization decorator
|
| 2006-03-15: |
The aftermath of our mirroring
|
| 2006-03-14: |
Some problems with iostat on Linux
|
| 2006-03-13: |
Preparing a high load web mirror setup
|
| 2006-03-12: |
A DNS realization
Weekly spam summary on March 11th, 2006
|
| 2006-03-11: |
Web design trends that I don't understand (part 1)
|
| 2006-03-10: |
Why dynamic linking
The dynamic linking tax on fork()
|
| 2006-03-09: |
Making things simple for busy webmasters
Closures versus classes for capturing state
|
| 2006-03-08: |
Thinking about project failures
|
| 2006-03-07: |
A modular approach to Apache configuration
|
| 2006-03-06: |
How not to set up your mail server (part 1)
A thought about Technorati
|
| 2006-03-05: |
Weekly spam summary on March 4th, 2006
|
| 2006-03-04: |
os.walk can be surprisingly slow
|
| 2006-03-03: |
Visualizing dynamic program flow
|
| 2006-03-02: |
A robots.txt surprise
The :; shell prompt trick
|
| 2006-03-01: |
Unicode is not simple
|
| 2006-02-28: |
Practical RAID-1 read balancing
A sad day for SGI: it's now a spammer
A web spider update: not actually Uptilt's web spider
A surprising effect of RAID-1 resynchronization
|
| 2006-02-27: |
Python's extra-clever function parameters
|
| 2006-02-26: |
Weekly spam summary on February 25th, 2006
The hassle of email (as compared to RSS)
|
| 2006-02-25: |
More clever (ab)use of and and or
A trick for handling mutable default arguments
|
| 2006-02-24: |
Wanted: RSS feeds for vendor software updates
|
| 2006-02-23: |
Checking systems with RPM verification (part 1)
|
| 2006-02-22: |
Peter Drucker on the Five Deadly Business Sins
|
| 2006-02-21: |
An annoyance with $PATH on Red Hat
|
| 2006-02-20: |
More on regular expression performance
|
| 2006-02-19: |
Irony in a Referer spammer
Weekly spam summary on February 18th, 2006
|
| 2006-02-18: |
Automation promotes action
Stupid web spider tricks
|
| 2006-02-17: |
Some regular expression performance surprises
|
| 2006-02-16: |
An interesting IDE to SATA migration problem
|
| 2006-02-15: |
Fun with control characters and the web
|
| 2006-02-14: |
An advantage of using a non-standard shell
|
| 2006-02-13: |
GNU bc for the birthday paradox
The problem with <pre>
|
| 2006-02-12: |
Weekly spam summary on February 11th, 2006
|
| 2006-02-11: |
The return of how to get your web spider banned
|
| 2006-02-10: |
The charm of Sun's Freeware collection
Session IDs and the Birthday Paradox
|
| 2006-02-09: |
Using the tempfile module to get temporary files
|
| 2006-02-08: |
The id attribute considered dangerous
|
| 2006-02-07: |
$PATH in Solaris
|
| 2006-02-06: |
The sysadmin's life
More on simple markup languages
|
| 2006-02-05: |
Weekly spam summary on February 4th, 2006
|
| 2006-02-04: |
Why simple markup languages make sense
|
| 2006-02-03: |
Van Jacobson illustrates the importance of cache effects
|
| 2006-02-02: |
The rise of wikiblogs
|
| 2006-02-01: |
A suggestion: read your own syndication feed
|
| 2006-01-31: |
Getting console messages in X
|
| 2006-01-30: |
An impending Debian derailment
|
| 2006-01-29: |
Weekly spam summary on January 28th, 2006
|
| 2006-01-28: |
A bad product name
|
| 2006-01-27: |
Pointer: The Unix-Haters Handbook
|
| 2006-01-26: |
A Unix annoyance
|
| 2006-01-25: |
Site navigation stuff goes on the right side
|
| 2006-01-24: |
A digression on spelling
|
| 2006-01-23: |
Why case independent filenames are a bad idea
|
| 2006-01-22: |
Weekly spam summary on January 21st, 2005
|
| 2006-01-21: |
Please have stable ids for your feed entries
|
| 2006-01-20: |
The limits of web spider tolerance
|
| 2006-01-19: |
A Python length gotcha
|
| 2006-01-18: |
A portability gotcha with accept()
|
| 2006-01-17: |
The economics of CPU performance
|
| 2006-01-16: |
Some words of wisdom for all ISPs
The danger of specific errno values
|
| 2006-01-15: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 8)
Weekly spam summary on January 14th, 2006
|
| 2006-01-14: |
Writing HTML considered harmful
|
| 2006-01-13: |
An unconventional reason for large RAID stripe sizes
|
| 2006-01-12: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 7)
On not logging things
|
| 2006-01-11: |
Recording attribute access and method calls
|
| 2006-01-10: |
The peculiar effects of grant funding at universities
|
| 2006-01-09: |
How Linux names network interfaces
|
| 2006-01-08: |
Weekly spam summary on January 7th, 2006
Towards assessing SORBS' false positive rate
|
| 2006-01-07: |
Some notes on Solaris 9's Sunscreen IP filtering package
|
| 2006-01-06: |
The old nameserver glue record hell
|
| 2006-01-05: |
Is concurrency 'hard'?
|
| 2006-01-04: |
Python synergies in list addressing
|
| 2006-01-03: |
In practice, there are multiple namespaces for URLs
|
| 2006-01-02: |
Universities are peculiar places
|
| 2006-01-01: |
Weekly spam summary on December 31st, 2005
|
| 2005-12-31: |
Notes on getting a Solaris hardware inventory
A logical consequence of def being an executable statement
|
| 2005-12-30: |
On Lisp's fundamental data structure
A Python surprise: the consequences of variable scope
|
| 2005-12-29: |
What I use asserts for
|
| 2005-12-28: |
Unix folklore: using multiple sync commands
|
| 2005-12-27: |
A thought about free software licenses
|
| 2005-12-26: |
Thinking about a closure confusion
|
| 2005-12-25: |
Weekly spam summary on December 24th, 2005
|
| 2005-12-24: |
When comment spammers attack
|
| 2005-12-23: |
Why the (Sun) JVM is irrelevant to me
|
| 2005-12-22: |
What I really want is error-shielding interfaces
|
| 2005-12-21: |
How to get your web spider banned from here
|
| 2005-12-20: |
Another problem of secrecy
A sociopolitical advantage of distributed version control
|
| 2005-12-19: |
Initializing Python struct objects with optional defaults
|
| 2005-12-18: |
Emulating C structs in Python
Weekly spam summary on December 17th, 2005
|
| 2005-12-17: |
The problem of secrecy
On the web, text colours are an all or nothing thing
|
| 2005-12-16: |
On the name of USB flash memory drives
|
| 2005-12-15: |
Another introspection trick
Reddit versus Digg: a little detail that matters
|
| 2005-12-14: |
A thing I don't like about Linux
|
| 2005-12-13: |
What Python threads are good for
|
| 2005-12-12: |
Waiting for both network IO and inter-thread notifications
|
| 2005-12-11: |
Weekly spam summary on December 10th, 2005
|
| 2005-12-10: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 6)
|
| 2005-12-09: |
A surprising hazard of running as root all the time
Security versus resilience
|
| 2005-12-08: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 5)
|
| 2005-12-07: |
Google Desktop and conditional GET
|
| 2005-12-06: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 4)
An explanation for the popularity of threads
|
| 2005-12-05: |
Dropping packets versus rejecting them in firewall rules
|
| 2005-12-04: |
Weekly spam summary on December 3rd, 2005
|
| 2005-12-03: |
CBL listings broken down by ISP
How to do TCP keepalives in Python
|
| 2005-12-02: |
Iptables modules that aren't in the iptables manpage
|
| 2005-12-01: |
Stopping brute-force ssh scans the easy way
|
| 2005-11-30: |
An advantage to introspection and an interactive interpreter
|
| 2005-11-29: |
A little gotcha in shell scripts
|
| 2005-11-28: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 3)
What Python's global interpreter lock does (and doesn't) protect
|
| 2005-11-27: |
Weekly spam summary on November 26th, 2005
|
| 2005-11-26: |
How not to set up your DNS (part 2)
How not to set up your DNS (part 1)
|
| 2005-11-25: |
Making self-signed SSL certificates with OpenSSL
A little sysadmin twitch
|
| 2005-11-24: |
Solaris 9's slow patch installs
Multiprocessors are a leaky abstraction
|
| 2005-11-23: |
A quick outline of Firefox extension structure
|
| 2005-11-22: |
How to fiddle with Firefox .jar files relatively easily
|
| 2005-11-21: |
Why I don't write 'if (NULL == foo)' in C code
|
| 2005-11-20: |
Weekly spam summary on November 19th, 2005
|
| 2005-11-19: |
Solaris 9 sendmail irritations
|
| 2005-11-18: |
SQL as metaprogramming
|
| 2005-11-17: |
Why Linux threads use up so much memory
|
| 2005-11-16: |
How not to do DNS for internal domains
|
| 2005-11-15: |
The scope of the peril of having a highly dynamic web site
|
| 2005-11-14: |
Banning MSNBot: an open letter to MSN Search
|
| 2005-11-13: |
Weekly spam summary on November 12th, 2005
|
| 2005-11-12: |
Why using local variables is fast in Python
|
| 2005-11-11: |
The importance of understanding Python's implementation
|
| 2005-11-10: |
How doing relative name DNS lookups can shoot you in the foot
|
| 2005-11-09: |
Using Python introspection for semi-evil
|
| 2005-11-08: |
Fun with DNS: a semi-obscure problem
|
| 2005-11-07: |
Examining Python's string concatenation optimization
|
| 2005-11-06: |
Weekly spam summary on November 5th, 2005
|
| 2005-11-05: |
Minimizing object churn to optimize Python code
|
| 2005-11-04: |
Modifying Linux kernel configuration options the easy way
|
| 2005-11-03: |
Fun with upgrading our backup server
|
| 2005-11-02: |
How well do some Atom feed fetchers do conditional GETs?
|
| 2005-11-01: |
Another tip: Label your hard drives
|
| 2005-10-31: |
A tip: Always include NAT in your Linux kernel configuration
|
| 2005-10-30: |
Weekly spam summary on October 29th, 2005
|
| 2005-10-29: |
Affiliate marketing is undead
The problem with If-Modified-Since as a timestamp
|
| 2005-10-28: |
Inside building RPMs with Python distutils
|
| 2005-10-27: |
Databases are APIs
|
| 2005-10-26: |
An example of why DBAs make money
|
| 2005-10-25: |
A smooth disk swap
|
| 2005-10-24: |
On banning web search engines
|
| 2005-10-23: |
One reason why I like Unix
Weekly spam summary on October 22nd, 2005
|
| 2005-10-22: |
A gotcha with Python and Unix signals
|
| 2005-10-21: |
How ETags and If-Modified-Since headers interact
MSNbot (still) has problems with binary files
|
| 2005-10-20: |
A Python surprise: exiting is an exception
Accidentally shooting yourself in the foot in Python
|
| 2005-10-19: |
Thoughts on Jakob Nielsen on weblog usability
|
| 2005-10-18: |
Another aphorism of system administration
|
| 2005-10-17: |
The Myth of Support (Part 3)
|
| 2005-10-16: |
Weekly spam summary on October 15th, 2005
|
| 2005-10-15: |
How Hotmail is doing on the spam front
Estimating search engine popularity
|
| 2005-10-14: |
On the naming of machines
|
| 2005-10-13: |
Try things out with new machines
|
| 2005-10-12: |
Really understanding availability numbers
|
| 2005-10-11: |
Improve your web experience by turning Javascript off
|
| 2005-10-10: |
A useful resource: gmane.org
|
| 2005-10-09: |
Troubleshooting versus support
Weekly spam summary on October 8th, 2005
|
| 2005-10-08: |
Exploring some spamblogs
Solaris 9 'Power management'
|
| 2005-10-07: |
Three levels of database usage
|
| 2005-10-06: |
First irritations with Solaris 9
|
| 2005-10-05: |
Thinking about redundant power supplies
|
| 2005-10-04: |
A left-field aphorism
Keeping changing systems stable
|
| 2005-10-03: |
Some important notes on getting all objects in Python
|
| 2005-10-02: |
Weekly spam summary on October 1st, 2005
|
| 2005-10-01: |
Some problems in common definitions of 'spam email'
The many consoles of Linux
|
| 2005-09-30: |
Pinging weblogs.com in Python
|
| 2005-09-29: |
Something C programmers should not write in Python code
|
| 2005-09-28: |
MSNbot goes crazy with RSS feeds
|
| 2005-09-27: |
Some hints on debugging memory leaks in Python programs
|
| 2005-09-26: |
A peril of having a highly dynamic web site
|
| 2005-09-25: |
Weekly spam summary on September 24th, 2005
|
| 2005-09-24: |
A spammer roundup
It's a multi-protocol world after all
|
| 2005-09-23: |
Be cautious with numbers in awk
The (probable) importance of accurate Content-Types
|
| 2005-09-22: |
Excluding buggy RPMs from a yum repository
|
| 2005-09-21: |
More Fedora Core 4 problems with X
What vendor updates are pending on your Linux system?
|
| 2005-09-20: |
Some words of wisdom for free webmail providers
Two Python import tricks
|
| 2005-09-19: |
Function definition order in Python
|
| 2005-09-18: |
Weekly spam summary on September 17th, 2005
|
| 2005-09-17: |
Demon Internet joins the webmail hall of shame
|
| 2005-09-16: |
Getting a list of all objects in Python
Web browsers make bad text editors
|
| 2005-09-15: |
Efficiently distributing huge files to lots of workstations
|
| 2005-09-14: |
Why I really dislike the Singleton design pattern
|
| 2005-09-13: |
Concurrency is tricky
The problem of being overcautious
|
| 2005-09-12: |
Things not do for your network daemon's debugging option
The annoyance of arbitrary limits
|
| 2005-09-11: |
Weekly spam summary on September 10th, 2005
Comment spam writ large
|
| 2005-09-10: |
Hotmail's Other Spam Problem
Hotmail has a spam problem
More Fedora Core 4 Anaconda fun
|
| 2005-09-09: |
When Python classes are pointless
|
| 2005-09-08: |
Another Fedora Core 4 Anaconda bug
|
| 2005-09-07: |
The MSN search spider has gone crazy
|
| 2005-09-06: |
Two sides of Internet identity
|
| 2005-09-05: |
Why print-based debugging is so popular
|
| 2005-09-04: |
Weekly spam summary on September 3rd, 2005
|
| 2005-09-03: |
Varying interpretations of improper CIDRs
|
| 2005-09-02: |
The 'Trade Press' and blogs
|
| 2005-09-01: |
On blocking access from large IP ranges
|
| 2005-08-31: |
LILO vs GRUB: why LILO still wins for servers
|
| 2005-08-30: |
The Version Control System dependency problem
|
| 2005-08-29: |
Python's dangerous automatic Unicode conversions
|
| 2005-08-28: |
Weekly spam summary on August 27th, 2005
|
| 2005-08-27: |
How not to package software in RPMs
|
| 2005-08-26: |
Two faces of RSS
|
| 2005-08-25: |
Explaining rubber duck debugging
|
| 2005-08-24: |
Another aphorism of system administration
Completely using an alternate yum configuration
|
| 2005-08-23: |
Diagnosing an install problem: a case study in indirect failures
|
| 2005-08-22: |
On being nibbled to death by moths
|
| 2005-08-21: |
Weekly spam summary on August 20th, 2005
Mutating Referer Spammers
|
| 2005-08-20: |
Disk setup in our Fedora Core 4 Kickstart environment
|
| 2005-08-19: |
The March of the Cheap
|
| 2005-08-18: |
The pains of modern disk storage
|
| 2005-08-17: |
Parallelizing DNS queries with split
Remember to think about the scale of things
Annoying RSS Feed Tricks
|
| 2005-08-16: |
Things that could happen to your backups
|
| 2005-08-15: |
Check your backups
|
| 2005-08-14: |
Weekly spam summary for August 13th, 2005
Those amusing Referer spammers
|
| 2005-08-13: |
The anatomy of a DWiki bug
|
| 2005-08-12: |
Chiming in on static versus dynamic typing
|
| 2005-08-11: |
Some interesting software tools (part 1)
An aphorism of system administration
|
| 2005-08-10: |
Why open source needs distributed version control
|
| 2005-08-09: |
My first comment spam
|
| 2005-08-08: |
Security is a pain
|
| 2005-08-07: |
XBL rejection stats, August 6th 2005
|
| 2005-08-06: |
The importance of 'transparency' in data structures
|
| 2005-08-05: |
Perimeter firewalls and universities
|
| 2005-08-04: |
Keep your hands off my font size
|
| 2005-08-03: |
Why Perl is not my favorite language
|
| 2005-08-01: |
Multilevel list comprehensions in Python
Spam breakdown by SBL listing, July 31st 2005
|
| 2005-07-31: |
Spam storm aftermath, July 30th 2005
|
| 2005-07-30: |
Briefly doing DNS queries in Perl
|
| 2005-07-29: |
How spammers seem to be coping with greylisting
|
| 2005-07-28: |
Doing DNS queries in Python
|
| 2005-07-27: |
Spam Storm, July 26th 2005
|
| 2005-07-26: |
What ASNs are most actively spamming us
|
| 2005-07-25: |
Reliably archiving things
|
| 2005-07-24: |
Spam summary for July 23rd 2005
The necessary evolution of mail servers
|
| 2005-07-23: |
The Myth of Support (Part 2)
|
| 2005-07-22: |
The Myth of Support (Part 1)
|
| 2005-07-20: |
Please produce useful error messages
|
| 2005-07-19: |
Exceptions as efficient programming
Exceptions and casual programming
|
| 2005-07-17: |
Skills I use when troubleshooting
How many places actually send us email?
|
| 2005-07-15: |
First Irritations with Fedora Core 4
How AMD killed the Itanium
|
| 2005-07-13: |
The legend of Debian Linux
|
| 2005-07-12: |
Chasing a problem in our Gnome customizations
|
| 2005-07-11: |
Adding submenus to Gnome
|
| 2005-07-10: |
Tools versus frontends in systems programs
|
| 2005-07-09: |
The minimum antispam features of a modern SMTP server
|
| 2005-07-08: |
Why apt-get is not my favorite application
|
| 2005-07-07: |
What RSS can learn from Usenet
|
| 2005-07-06: |
Mozilla versus SeaMonkey
|
| 2005-07-05: |
Fedora Core 4's buggy Anaconda
|
| 2005-07-04: |
The big trick of running lots of systems
There's two sorts of large systems
|
| 2005-07-03: |
Checking for dead DNSBls
|
| 2005-07-02: |
What shouldn't be a method function
|
| 2005-07-01: |
Why this site has almost no design
|
| 2005-06-29: |
Reconsidering network authentication delays
|
| 2005-06-28: |
Scripting and automation capture knowledge
|
| 2005-06-27: |
Some quick CBL stats
Dangerously over-broad error catching
|
| 2005-06-26: |
Some spam stats at June 25th, 2005
|
| 2005-06-24: |
An open letter to free webmail providers
An unchanging system should be stable
|
| 2005-06-23: |
A real use for staticmethod
|
| 2005-06-22: |
Future Sysadmin Jobs
|
| 2005-06-21: |
The problems with enforced UTF-8 only filenames
|
| 2005-06-20: |
Small details can matter (or: a little nifty Python bit)
|
| 2005-06-18: |
SMTP IP firewall stats at June 18th, 2005
|
| 2005-06-17: |
The problem with CPAN (and other similar systems)
|
| 2005-06-16: |
AJAX vs Dialups
Iterator & Generator Gotchas
|
| 2005-06-14: |
Putting a pleasant Python surprise to use
Pitfalls in generating Last-Modified:
|
| 2005-06-12: |
Making a Python mountain out of a molehill
Why a Blog?
|
| 2005-06-11: |
web/HTTPRedirects
web/CSSIrritation
|