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Full chronological index of WanderingThoughts

This is a full index of all entries in WanderingThoughts in chronological order, most recent to oldest; you can also get an alphabetical index.

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 `struct`s 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 `struct`s 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 `bool`s and `int`s
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 `POST`s 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 spares 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 `import`able
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

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