The other day, I was working from home and wanted to bisect Firefoxversions with mozregression (in order to chase down my Firefox window to tab bug ). This normally works okay, butthis time around there were two intertwined problems with it. Thefirst was that mozregression's downloads were unusually slow,even for my home DSL link . The secondis that having Firefox start up at random, delayed times is kindof disruptive to what else I was doing. The second factor is alwaysthere, but unpredictably

One of the arguments I've heard against supporting partial distrustof Certificate Authorities in places like Linux root certificatestores ( which you currently can't really do ) is that a bad CA can simplybackdate TLS certificates to get around things like 'certificatesissued from December 1st 2022 onward won't be trusted'. On the onehand, this is technically true (although these days either such aTLS certificate wouldn't be usable in the majority of web browsersor it would soon be

Systemd-oomd is a somewhat controversial systemd component that, to quote itsmanpage, "uses cgroups-v2 and pressure stall information (PSI) tomonitor and take corrective action before an OOM occurs in thekernel space". A while back, Fedora enabled systemd-oomd by default and setit to be applied to user@.service, the template for user slices. WhenI upgraded to the relevant Fedora version, I sort of shrugged and wentalong with this to see what happened. Nothing did for

Recently, over on the Fediverse I said :

In Firefox 107 (and possibly earlier), if you convert a browserwindow into a tab in another window, quit Firefox, and restart, youlose the window-to-tab tab. It doesn't even make it into the sessionstore. This is a potential 'data' loss, in that you can lose URLs thatyou wanted to read/etc.

(This is filed as bug #1801952 .)

Last time around I covered using Dovecot 2.3's events to generatelog messages . This is actually the lessinteresting thing (to us) that you can do with them; the moreinteresting thing is that you can have Dovecot directly expose an OpenMetrics exporter for statistics , whichPrometheus can scrape directly (the OpenMetrics metrics format ismore or less the Prometheus one, and Prometheus can deal with itthese days). However, actually generating useful metrics andunderstanding what you get is a little bit complicated.

(

I mentioned recently that we were hopefully going to move awayfrom the Apache prefork MPM when weupgraded our primary web server from Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 22.04.We had tried to switch over to the event MPM back in 18.04,but had run into problems and had reverted to the prefork MPM as a quickfix. Specifically, we had run into Apache stopping serving requestsand reporting the following in the error log:

[mpm_event:error] [

Let's start with the background. Pretty much every Linux system(really, every Unix system) has a 'system CA root store', by whichwe mean 'the list of all CA root certificates that are trusted bydefault by most TLS-using software'. For various sensible reasons,many Linux distributions reuse Mozilla's CA root store for theirsystem root store, possibly with some tweaks.

The recent TLS news is that Mozilla (and Microsoft) are distrustingthe TrustCor CA certificates ( see this

Dovecot 2.1 and 2.2 had a relatively straightforward statisticssystem (which I believe may still be supported in 2.3 for now, althoughyou have to rename settings in your configuration). In v2.3, Dovecotintroduced a new, more flexible system based around the idea of events ,which can be used to generate either or both of statistics or logmessages. Today I'm going to talk about log messages, because they'resimpler.

As an illustrative example, suppose that

We're in the tail end of upgrading a lot of our servers to Ubuntu22.04 , where 'upgrade' means'build a new version on different hardware and swap it into place'(which has sped up our server turnover a bit ).Since we're building up new hardware, one of the questions has beenif we should put more memory in any of these servers or if thecurrent baseline of 8 GBytes is enough.

Even with a metrics system , thisisn't