@cks@mastodon.social avatar

cks

@cks@mastodon.social

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

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bitprophet, to random
@bitprophet@social.coop avatar

It might be time to do the thing I almost never do: burn down my entire shell config and start over.

It's like 15 years of cruft at this point, even with periodic machete sessions that's still a whole lotta nonsense.

cks,
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

@bitprophet case "$arch" in
[...]
ultrix-mips) [...];;
osf-alpha) [...];;
cray-el92) [...];;
ksr1) [...];;
[...]
esac

Universities. Fun times.

(The real version is in rc syntax. I have been using my rc configuration for ... a long time.)

cks,
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

@bitprophet @ehmatthes Being able to treat $PATH as an array you can manipulate in straightforward ways is a great feature (I say as a long-time rc user, which also has that). Sadly the list of $PATH entries seems to be growing again (for a while it was nicely short, then etc etc).

(My own dotfiles set a large potential $PATH and then trim it down to only directories that actually exist on this system. The potential $PATH used to be gigantic but then I ditched ancient directories.)

cks,
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

@bitprophet @ehmatthes I think they're pretty cheap on most modern systems due to directory entry caches. Partly this cleanup is historical from days when it could matter more, and largely it's because I didn't want to have a giant $PATH that was mostly inapplicable junk.

(The $PATH had everything from various local extra binary directories to a whole collection of system places for eg Solaris, which loved that sort of stuff.)

cks,
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

@pro @ehmatthes @bitprophet Bash remembers where it found commands, but I'm not sure if it remembers whether $PATH directories exist (visible through 'hash'). 4.2 BSD csh had a similar hash table and a 'rehash' builtin, and I think it's where the idea originated.

Binder, to random
@Binder@petrous.vislae.town avatar

Sure, you’re welcome to raise this to my boss.

But he /also/ “won’t know how” to make your rfc1918 addresses routable destinations from the internet & he’s not paid to be nice to you, so, good luck w/ that.

cks,
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

@Binder Now I'm wondering how many routers are set to reject RFC 1918 routes if they receive them from BGP/etc peers.

(Suggest to your correspondent that IPv6 is the answer, that should be fun.)

cks, to random
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

I wonder if libvirt can finally make snapshots of (shut down) UEFI based virtual machines, here in 2024 with everyone wanting to get rid of BIOS MBR booting. But I don't wonder enough to bother building a UEFI VM to find out.

(For years this was a big missing libvirt feature, but maybe it's not missing any more.)

cks, to random
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

Another day, another site devoted to listing and 'shaming' public web servers that don't have IPv6 yet. Sometimes I think that people who want IPv6 everywhere are their own worst enemy.

People have been yelling at other people to get IPv6 for decades. Maybe some year those people will stop to ask why people aren't using IPv6 already and what could help change that.

cks, to random
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

TIL that restarting Grafana Loki in our configuration can take the host's load average to over 1,000. Loki, what are you doing?

Binder, to random
@Binder@petrous.vislae.town avatar

Retasking the people who are Praying For Me w/ Listening to Bjork For Me as that’s an actual thing I won’t do which might benefit me.

cks,
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

@Binder If you hear the Icelandic fae, they hear you. Will the rhythm of your heart prove compelling? Better to not find out.

cks, to random
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

On the one hand, clouds in Toronto. On the other hand, it feels clearly darker than it should be given the apparent degree of cloud cover.

(I really should have prepared something in advance with a suitably tiny hole, but alas I did not. I have things with holes but they're probably too big holes.)

cks,
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

A neat thing about being on the edge of the eclipse totality with cloud cover is that during the totality passing just to the south of Toronto, the clouds and horizon to the south were much darker than the clouds to the west and north-west. Also it had the whole 'someone is turning the dimmer dial' experience, and then turning it back up and the cloud brightness equalizing again with the totality gone past.

People in the totality probably had a treat even with cloud cover (or so I hope).

danluu, to random
@danluu@mastodon.social avatar

Interesting comment about SGI leadership knowing about the problems they were facing and still being unable to come up with a way to handle them.

cks,
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

@danluu I feel that Sun is another clear example of a 'saw their doom coming and couldn't figure out how to get around it' case. They saw x86 systems coming reasonably early (given that they were offering various x86 products quite early) and tried to get on various wagons, but couldn't make it work in either SPARC hardware or x86 hardware.

cks, to random
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

My standard attitude on digital signatures for anything, Git commits included, is that you should not sign anything unless you understand what you're committing to when you do so. This usually includes "what people expect from you when you sign things". Signing things creates social and/or legal liability. Do not blindly assume that liability without thought, especially if people want you to.

In re: https://fosstodon.org/@vbatts/112185576755787518

cks, to random
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

I'm not sure why I have a JRE from 2012 sitting around, but I suspect it has something to do with old IPMI/BMC and KVM over IP with a Java applet. (Probably something to do with running unsigned old applets.)

I doubt the JRE still works and I don't think we have any actively used servers where I would care about this, but I'm still not going to rm it. Just in case.

cks, to random
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

Hot take: autoconf going away would be a significant net loss to OSS, perhaps as bad as the net loss of the Python 2 to Python 3 transition, and for much the same reason. There are a lot of projects out there that use autoconf/configure today and it works, and they would all have to do a bunch of work to wind up in exactly the same place ('a build system that works and has some switches and we can add our feature checks to').

(The build system can never supply all needed tests. Never.)

cks, to random
@cks@mastodon.social avatar

My hot take: if corporations are going to insist that OSS software they use have things like mandatory two-person code reviews, SLAs, written succession plans, and so on, then the end result is going to be that corporations don't use anywhere near as much as OSS code as they do today.

Since that would be unpalatably expensive to corporations (that's why they're using this OSS today), this is corporate hot air plus yet another attempt to lean on OSS for even more unpaid labour.

AlSweigart, to random
@AlSweigart@mastodon.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    cks,
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    @AlSweigart People making hobbyist games on the early 1980s micros like the Commodore PET often made them scroll-up games (maybe with your avatar at the top shooting down/etc) because there were plenty of readily available, highly optimized code for scrolling the screen up. You could practically write the game loop in Basic and count on the ROM scroll-up for (most of) the speed you needed.

    (You may already know this.)

    snowcrashmike, to random
    @snowcrashmike@hachyderm.io avatar

    A few weeks ago, tired of telling people that when we talk about "we need to make systemic change" that doesn't mean "everybody but YOU," I made a bookmark shortcut called "A TOADA SO" that linked to a news story about me, um, "springing into action" in response to an attempted ransomware attack.

    Today I decided that's just going to be my bookmark tag for other HEs getting rocked. "This was only not us because we got lucky now quit it!"

    cks,
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    @snowcrashmike I keep wondering when the first time will be that we use ZFS filesystem rollbacks.

    (The real answer is probably that our load metrics would all go red from the ransomware trying to encrypt <bignum> gigabytes of data over CIFS+NFS, and then we'd get to do selective restores.)

    cks,
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    @lanodan @snowcrashmike Fortunately for us, we have (copies of) all of that sort of configuration and settings information stored on our fileservers (and included in backups), along with machine configurations and so on. This is less virtuousness and more sheer survival; we have enough machines (and keep them long enough) that we have to keep track of all of that somehow or things will inevitably blow up in our faces.

    cks,
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    @lanodan @snowcrashmike If everything was completely wiped and had to be restored from utter scratch, we might find that we had missed some things, but we could probably put them back together again from general first principles about how our environment operates.

    (And the offsite backups. Those would be very important.)

    cks, to random
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    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,
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    Of course Bill Laswell has a lot of his stuff on Bandcamp, https://billlaswell.bandcamp.com/music

    This includes digital versions of a certain amount of his work with Pete Namlook and others on the sadly lamented FAX label. This is especially nice since the FAX originals were often somewhat limited CD releases.

    jschauma, to random
    @jschauma@mstdn.social avatar

    Today in stupid games: sorting by numeric IPv4 address

    Input: a file with '|' separated fields with IPv4 addresses in the third field

    awk -F'|' '{print $3 "%" $0 }' | # pull the address to the front \
    sort -t. -k1,1n -k2,2n -k3,3n -k4,4n | # numerically sort each octet in order \
    sed -e 's/^.*%//' # strip the leading field again

    cks,
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    @jschauma GNU sort will do this with -V 'version' number sorting, which can be used on any field AFAIK. I think FreeBSD sort also has a -V option that behaves enough like this to work for IPv4 addresses.

    cks, to random
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    Do we sort of (ab)use Prometheus for system inventory/asset tracking, by putting DMI information, SMART serial numbers, etc into metrics and then scraping them? Yes, we do. Am I considering extending this by turning PCIe information into more Prometheus metrics? Also yes.

    (I was hoping I could easily find a script for this that generated node_exporter textfile metrics but not so far in casual searches.)

    cks,
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    TIL that there are a lot of weird (system) PCIe devices on our servers. Would you like some dummy host bridges? We have a bushel. "Milan data fabric", "Sky Lake-E CHA Registers", MEI controllers, a whole bunch of Intel 'unknown device' system peripherals, it goes on.

    cks, to random
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    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,
    @cks@mastodon.social avatar

    I got curious and looked at the Glibc source, where it turned out to be pretty easy to trace the gethostbyaddr_r() code flow in the nss_dns code. This code winds up explicitly only ever returning one name: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=resolv/nss_dns/dns-host.c;h=95a7b3f0e5b6855afcbac38b25f40a80c5003f56;hb=HEAD#l600

    Thanks glibc, and it's possible glibc was doing this from the very first version of this code I can find in the repo, from 1996.

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