Our ZFS fileservers divide uptheir data disks into standard sized partitions ,which are grouped into mirrored pairs in ZFS pools. Our customspares handling system can make useof any available unused partition to replace a partition on a faileddisk, so we don't need to keep a specific disk spare in case of adisk failure; we just need enough spare partitions. A few years agowe arranged to push a count of how many spare partitions eachfileserver had into our metrics system and then trigger an alert if it

In X, application windows can be in a variety of states. They canbe on the screen, they can not have been 'mapped' yet, they can bemapped but located off the currently visible area of the screen(many of my windows spend a lot of time in other pages of my virtualdesktop), and pretty much since the beginning they can be what wasoriginally called 'iconified' but which these days is often called'minimized' in documentation that ordinary people read.

(Things like the

Our Ubuntu systems have had a /usr/bin/python that was Python 2 formore or less as long as we've had Ubuntu systems, which by now ismore than fifteen years. Over that time, our users have written acertain amount of Python 2 programs that use '#!/usr/bin/python' toget Python 2, because that's been the standard way to do it for arelatively long time. However, Python 2 is going away on Ubuntusince it has

One of the Alertmanager configurationparameters you can set is the 'repeat interval' for an alert route ,which is described as:

How long to wait before sending a notification again if it has alreadybeen sent successfully for an alert. (Usually ~3h or more).

Translated, this is how often you get a reminder about an alert (or agroup of them) that is still active (and otherwise unchanged; if somethingchanges in the group of alerts, that's a different configuration setting )

The news of the time interval is that Debian's development versionhas removed even the 'minimal' version of Python 2.7 ( via ). Among other things,this includes the 'python2-minimal' and 'python2.7-minimal' packages,both of which are gone from Debian's 'testing' pseudo-distribution aswell as 'unstable' . Infuture Debian releases, people who want Python 2 will have to buildit themselves in some way (for example, copying

When I looked into how far back Unix's special way of markinglogin shells goes , I wound up looking atthe V2 source of login.s ,which is a .s file instead of a .c file because C (the language)was barely starting to be a thing in mid-1972. One of the thingsthat struck me when I looked at the V2 login.s was how much of whatwe consider standard Unix features were already there in some formin V

Suppose, not entirely hypothetically ,that you have a Firefox "Preferences" option and you'd like to knowfor sure what about:config setting corresponds to it. One way todo this is to look it up in the Firefox source code, which isprobably most readily done online through searchfox.org . This has to be done in two steps becausethere's a little bit of indirection in the Firefox code base (dueto localization).

First, search for the full text of the Preference option

If you allow Firefox to memorize your logins and passwords on websites, by default Firefox will automatically pre-populate loginforms with them. However, for years I've had this turned off,probably no later than when I read 2017's No boundaries for useridentities: Web trackers exploit browser login managers .I was going to say that there's no Preferences option to controlthis, but it turns out that there is these days, in "Privacy &Security"'s "

Today I found myself nerd-sniped by a bit in Golang is evil onshitty networks ( via ),and wanted to know where a particular behavior was added in Go'snetwork code. The article conveniently identified the code involved,so once I found the source file all I theoretically needed to dowas trace it back in history. Until recently, my normal tool forthis is Git's 'blame' view and mode, often on Github because Githubhas a convenient 'view git-blame just before