cks

cks, 1 year ago to random

So Fedora 38 has chosen to break fgrep and egrep, to the fun of everyone who has them in scripts, especially scripts in crontab entries.

$ fgrep fred /dev/null
fgrep: warning: fgrep is obsolescent; using grep -F

Adding output to standard error is an incompatible change. And this is happening only because the GNU Grep people are <redacted because I cannot think of quite the right phrase>.

cks, 8 months ago to random

Current status: poking at MH-E in GNU Emacs for Reasons. I wonder how much of a pain it will be to customize replies and forwarding the way I want them to work.

Also wow is the list of header fields to ignore not complete. (I customized it to take out all X-* headers because life is too short, but then there's eg User-Agent.)

cks, 2 months ago to random

This is my face when Python's socket.gethostbyaddr() appears not to be able to return multiple names for a single IP address. Or at least it doesn't on Fedora and Ubuntu with their versions of Python 3.

(If you want to test it yourself, try 72.136.172.146, which right now returns 17 DNS PTR results for me. I would be interested if this works for you.)

cks, 11 months ago to random

I'm going to have to write a "Unix is not POSIX" techblog article, aren't I. And it's all because of GNU Grep (3.8+).

cks, 6 months ago to random

In re the below toot, anyone who thinks that universities moving to using Microsoft, Google, and so on services is entirely due to the administration making silly decisions has not been exposed to the behavior of actual people at universities. People at universities were informally forwarding their email to GMail long before the administration was outsourcing services to corporate behemoths.

https://aoir.social/@rwg/111308895829845440

cks, 11 months ago to random

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

cks, 2 months ago to random

Welcome to the cursed knowledge show, X Window System edition, featuring "backing store" and "save-under".

cks, 7 months ago to random

As a system administrator, I sometimes pessimistically wonder how many of the current open source tools and systems that we depend on will still be around and viable in a few years (or more), as the money tide keeps going out. For example, is the true state of monitoring and metrics something more like the 2003-Nagios era where high-capability dashboards and agents were enterprise-cost objects?

(It feels like we've floated on a lot of free open source work for more than a decade.)

cks, 1 year ago to random

This is my expression when local (and exclusive) flock() locks on a Linux NFS server don't conflict with POSIX locks obtained over NFS through lockd/NLM/etc. Because these NFS locks may be from flock() on clients.

Augh. This is robot logic and it means 'don't run anything on your NFS servers'.

cks, 1 year ago to random

Recent Firefox Nightlies periodically have the tab die when rendering Grafana dashboards, especially when the dashboard updates. If this isn't just me, I can only hope it gets fixed before it propagates into a Firefox release.

(I have no clue how to go about tracking this down and submitting any bug reports to Mozilla, since it's not reproducible and happens in my rather busy main browser.)

cks, 1 year ago to random

On the positive side, drgn[1] is easy to install in a venv and it will indeed let me grub through live kernel structures, specifically NLM locking structures. On the negative side, the NLM locking structures themselves don't have the contents that I expected, so I am no closer to being able to tell which NFS clients (theoretically) hold what locks.

1: https://github.com/osandov/drgn

cks, 6 months ago to random

Current status: reading about IPv6 address allocation plans and wondering if there are reasons to give any of our existing IPv4 subnets something larger than a /64.

(Our subnet firewalls don't run routing protocols so it's hard to see how multiple interior IPv6 networks on a subnet would work, even if people wanted to give, eg, their VM cluster an entire /64 for itself. Maybe it'd all work out?)

cks, 10 months ago to random

Hot take: packaging open source software is actual work (and is sometimes what we demurely call 'non-trivial' in this field). I say this as a sysadmin who has sometimes had to deal with the results of not packaging software and then not keeping up with the state of the software we didn't package but installed anyway.

(Sure, sometimes you get lucky and the packaging instructions are easy to write (Debian rules, RPM specfiles, whatever Arch uses, etc). And sometimes they aren't.)

cks, 4 months ago to random

Finally sat down and upgraded the work desktop to Fedora 39. I really need to do something to free up more disk space on its root filesystem; it's getting troublesome during upgrades. I think /var/cache/dnf is about to get voted off to another location.

(The real cure is bigger NVMe drives, but there's a lot of yak shaving and manager persuasion in there.)

cks, 10 months ago to random

At work, the large-scale network likely has multiple compromised machines at any given time, anyone can walk through our buildings, and multiple attackers have legitimate network access. This isn't dysfunctional; it's called 'a university'. We have what you could call a rather different network environment than typical organizations.

I will let you guess if people still seriously suggest (or imply) that we should operate like typical corporate networks.

cks, 8 months ago to random

Current status: thanks, GNU Emacs and MH-E, for offering spelling correction for the URL in a message I'm reading that I'm trying to click on like GNU Emacs claimed I could. I can't even edit the buffer you're showing me the message in to do spelling changes on it, can't you engage something there?

cks, 7 months ago to random

I know ZFS is very nifty and all, but I rather wish that all 'ZFS on root' guides for Linux (for regular distributions like Debian) came with a big disclaimer of 'this is for experts, things can go wrong and you will be in a world of pain, consider ext4 for root and ZFS for everything else'.

(I say this as someone who's had his $HOME on ZFS on Linux for what turns out to be almost a decade now.)

cks, 4 months ago to random

I just wrote a blog entry arguing that TLS certificate expiry times are a hack[1], because apparently sometimes I like setting things on fire. I can always blame it on the fever.

(Also I look forward to people explaining to me other good reasons for TLS certificates to expire that aren't hacks to get around key compromise and the lack of revocation.)

1: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/TLSCertificateExpiryHack

cks, 6 months ago to random

I used to be a minimal vi user. Over the years I've drifted to being a not so minimal vim user, and I think the vim features that I'm now addicted to are:

• infinite undo and redo (and a tree view of undo)
• unlimited backspacing in insert mode (true vi only lets you backspace so far)
• vim windows, which let me have multiple files on screen at once (this used to be vi's big limit versus emacs)
• recently, visual mode, both line and character.

(I use other vim things but these matter to me.)

cks, 1 year ago to random

Today's provocative argument: a substantial amount of Unix programming has always been done in languages with automatic memory management (in contrast to C's manual management). It's just that we called this programming 'shell scripts', 'awk', 'make', or etc.

(Then later we got Perl.)

cks, 18 days ago to random

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.

cks, 3 months ago to random

It has been '0' days since I've been irritated by the Bourne shell syntax quirk that you can't write 'command &; othercmd'. You have to write eg 'pkill dhcpd; dhcpd & tail -f /var/log/daemon'.

cks, 17 days ago to random

Half formed hot take: the Linux kernel CVE situation is the tip of an emerging iceberg as OSS people push back and refuse to do supply chain/security work for free just because third parties want it.

(AFAIK, the ultimate trigger was third party maintainers of old kernels wanting the mainstream kernel to note all changes that turned out to be security fixes so the 3rd parties could backport them and only them. Identifying what is actually a security fix is non-trivial extra work (& fallible).)

cks, 2 months ago to random

TIL that Lustmord is on Bandcamp, https://lustmord.bandcamp.com/music
Now I have some catching up to do (and a Bandcamp Friday coming up, conveniently).

cks, 19 days ago to random

I've now created my first cloud (virtual) machine. It is of course a special snowflake, because I had no desire to try to simultaneously learn this cloud vendor's web UI, terminology, etc and also some cloud machine automation setup. At least it's an extremely simple special snowflake and I kept notes (and off-machine copies of everything important).

I suspect that it is terribly set up and there are much better ways to do what I want, but meh. It's simple.