I've recently written about things like finding who owns NFS v3locks on a Linux server , breaking NFS lockson 22.04 , and experimenting with NFS v4 , where I mentioned in an aside that NFS v4seemed better regarded for file locking. All of this work has beenquietly motivated by it becoming obvious to us that we have somesort of NFS (v3) file locking problem on our Ubuntu 22.04 ZFSfileservers .

Specifically, what we're seeing

This should not be news, but I feel like saying it anyway in lightof some recent events in the Linux distribution ecology:

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

(Sure, sometimes you get lucky and

The thing we call Unix is both a technology (really a set of them)and an idea (really a set of them). Of course the two sides aren'tunrelated to each other; in Research Unix through V7 , clearly two mutually reinforced each other,with the technology being developed to support the ideas and also,I think, with the technology enabling some further ideas. However,even historically the two were not glued together. People took theUnix ideas and implemented them on other systems (

I've seen a view expressed that Contributor License Agreements areonly a small extra piece of formality over contributing bugfixesand other open source changes. I think this is wrong. Often, thedecisions that are made over whether or not to contribute changesto open source projects are significantly different than the decisionsthat must be made over CLAs, such that my university and similarinstitutions have little to lose from the former and a great dealto lose from the latter.

When I make a bugfix or some other small change to

Over on the Fediverse, I said something :

As a university employee, can I sign an individual CLA tocontribute a bugfix I made while at work, for something we use atwork? I don't know, but I'm also pretty certain that I can't getthe university's lawyers and senior management to come near yourorganizational CLA, and neither my management nor the university'slawyers probably want to even look into the individual CLA issue.

So basically a CLA means I'm

Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you have an old embeddeddevice that's accessible over SSH (as well as other methods) and youwant to SSH into its console to see if you can get more informationthan it exposes in its web interface. You've done this before, butnot for a while, and now when you try it on your Fedora 37 desktop:

; ssh root@dsl-modemUnable to negotiate with dsl-modem port 22: no matching host key type found

The short background is that I'm strongly attached to real three button mice (mice where the middle mouse button isnot just a scroll wheel), for good reason ,but what I really wanted was a three button mouse that also had ascroll wheel. For a long time people pointed me to the Contourmouse as the single mouse they knew of that featured this (see comments here and here ), butI kept balking at the price. Then in late 2015, I finally talkedmyself

We run what is now a relativelyodd and different environment ,where we provide a number of standard services (like IMAP email)along with a general multi-user Unix login experience on both general'login' servers and compute servers (along with a closely related SLURM cluster ). Historically, most of the Unixmachines involved in doing all of this have needed to have our fullset of logins and along with that have been set up with everyone'shome directories (and all of our other filesystems) NFS

I was recently nerd sniped into writing a Python version of asimple although real exercise . As partof that nerd snipe, I decided to write my Python using type hints( which I've been tempted by for some time ).This is my first time really trying to use type hints, and I didit without the benefit of reading any 'quick introduction to Pythontype hints' articles; I worked from vague memories of seeing thesyntax and reading the documentation for the standard library's typing module .