Chris Siebenmann / is on Nostr

That cks. Overcommitted sysadmin, photographer, bicyclist, and other multitudes. I write a lot of words for a programmer. he/him

Last Notes

2024-10-28 23:50:22

Current status: it would be handy to have a website where I could plug in an IP or an ASN and it would tell me 'there is no route to this thing at the following network observation points around the world'. Or perhaps routing issues mostly don't manifest as completely missing routes.

2024-10-28 01:15:29

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@npub17qe…v7la The whole ZFS shutdown and boot process is arcane and not really documented (eg, that ZFS does not actually export pools on shutdown). The 'zfs.cache' file has a single name for each disk, and if the disk isn't there, you lose on boot as ZFS won't start the pool. There's no good way apart from abandoning zfs.cache, as suggested by others, and using zfs-import-scan.service.
(It was worse on Solaris, where the kernel itself magically loaded zfs.cache and did things with it.)

2024-10-27 03:18:33

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@npub1pfe…e2dm @npub102v…jtrj All of a sudden I'm wondering if WaPo paid people partly in profit-sharing or shares. Probably not, since Jeff Bezos seems to have it entirely privately held by him.
(I think entirely privately held by one person means 'not securities fraud', since there are no outside investors. But if it wasn't entirely private and this caused the share price to drop I bet someone absolutely would bring a securities fraud case.)

2024-09-24 16:18:00

Github demanding that I set up MFA because I publish my own code to it sure is making me want another read-only way to publish my own Git repos. But every time I look things are annoying here. Maybe I need to look again.
(A CGI would be ideal, I can easily run those on the department's general purpose web server.)

2024-09-19 02:21:59

Some days, I wonder how many more years open source will last as a useful thing. My perception is that maintainers are aging, burdens are increasing, and liability pressures are going to show up sooner or later to put the final knife in.
In ten years, will the Linux kernel, gcc, and so on be maintained almost entirely by people paid by their employer to do so? (Maybe this is already the case.)

2024-09-09 04:35:46

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@npub1ysu…2jyl I was thinking more things like how the BIOS setting for 'when power is restored, stay off/turn on/return to last state' is actually implemented. But apparently that is probably entwined with the S3/etc sleep logic, which I guess I shouldn't be surprised by.

2024-09-09 03:17:53

Today's interest: just how does a modern PC motherboard implement soft ATX power control? Presumably the main CPU isn't running all the time, although parts of the motherboard are powered. Is there a separate little always-on SOC that implements the logic? Something more clever?
The information is probably somewhere on the Internet but my search luck on this is 'lol no', probably since I don't know the right technical terms to look for.

2024-08-30 23:19:47

Today I've once again been reminded that different people have all sorts of different views of how they want their shell history to work. I am firmly in the camp of isolated, per-shell history; if I cursor up, I want to reliably get the previous commands I entered in that specific window, the ones I may be able to see right there.
(Am I a sysadmin who works across multiple contexts with interruptions and all sorts of terminal windows and shells on the go at once? Yes, yes I am.)

2024-08-24 02:35:11

In re JSON causing problems, I would rather deal with JSON than yet another bespoke 'simpler' format. I have plenty of tools that can deal with JSON in generally straightforward ways and approximately none that work on your specific new simpler format. Awk may let me build a tool, depending on what your format is, and Python definitely will, but I don't want to.
This is re: https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/113012173172896900

2024-07-13 19:02:10

My heretical opinion is that I would rather file a Github issue against your project than send you or your bug tracker email, because I do not trust you to safeguard my email against spammers, so I have to make up an entire new email address for you and carefully manage it. I don't trust Github either, but I have already done all of this email address handling for them.
(I also make up an email address for my Git commits. And yes, spammers have scraped it and spammed me.)

2024-05-27 22:47:50

In re comparing fire drills to phishing tests[1], if phishing tests were like fire drills, they would test the *response* to a successful phish. Was the person phished able to rapidly report and mitigate things? Do the organization's phish alarms work and reach people? Etc etc.
Current "phishing tests" are like testing people to see if they accidentally start fires if they're handed (dangerously) flammable materials. That's not a fire drill.
1: https://infosec.exchange/@sambowne/112513766095541271

2024-05-09 20:09:14

We used to operate one of the university's authoritative secondary DNS servers for all of the university's domains. Many years ago, we ceased doing this, reducing the server to just being authoritative for our own domains. Today I learned that there are a lot of people on the Internet still querying us for other people's domains that we haven't been NS records for for years. Where are they picking this up from? It is a mystery.

2024-05-07 17:27:38

Great moments in dry (Go) commit comments[1]:
runtime: remove note about goid reuse
Goids are designed to be big enough that they will never be reused: a uint64 is enough to generate a new goroutine every nanosecond for 500+ years before wrapping around, and after 500 years you should probably stop and pick up some security updates.
[...]
1: https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/8f71c7633fd70fffc5fa65e7865e763238fa6f46

2023-06-19 22:32:05

If RISC-V is going to be significant in datacenters in five to ten years, as someone claimed[1], there's a lot of prep work that's going to be needed. Where are the Linux distributions? Where are the reasonable computers for developers to use and for eg Debian package builders? I look at how far ARM64 isn't on all of that, and it's well ahead of RISC-V.
1: https://www.eetimes.com/jim-keller-on-ai-risc-v-tenstorrents-move-to-edge-ip/ via https://mastodon.social/@danluu/110539383653947021