So I upgraded my home desktop from Fedora 42to Fedora 43 and sound stopped working. Having your audio stopworking is practically a rite of passage for Linux people, so I'vebeen through the drill, but things rapidly turned weird when tryingto restart sound daemons through 'systemctl --user restart ...'failed with systemd errors about not being able to contact the (systemd) user service manager.

Let me skip ahead and show you the culprit:

systemd-logind[252

Over on the Fediverse, I had a question :

To the sysadmin population of the Fediverse: do people have anynumbers on how long common mail senders will retry sending mail ifyour MX is unreachable? Once upon a time people retried for many days,but my impression is that quite a few places now stop trying andbounce the email after quite short intervals, like a day.

(Boosts and practical experiences welcome, like "my MX was down forthree days and I still got all that email sent from GMail

Suppose, not hypothetically, that you have an old Fedora systemwith a lot of packages installed and a 70 GByte root filesystem,which is now awkwardly small during system upgrades and so on.You would like to find out which of your roughly 7,500 packagesare contributing the most to your space usage.

(The real solution is to move to a bigger pair of NVMe drives,but that involves various yak shaving and you want to upgradeto Fedora 43 today .)

The simple version of

(Once again it's been a while since the last little script .)

Every so often I find myself in a situation where I have a bunchof lines with multiple columns and I want to either add up all ofthe numbers in one column (for example, to get total transfer volumefrom Apache log files) or add up all of the numbers in one columngrouped by the value of a second column. This leads to two scripts,which I call ' addup ' and ' sumup '.

Addup

These days, Wandering Thoughts has some hacked togetherHTTP request rate limits. They don't exist for strong technicalreasons; my blog engine setup here can generally stand up to evenfairly extreme traffic floods (through an extensive series of hacks).It's definitely possible to overwhelm Wandering Thoughts witha high enough request volume, and HTTP rate limits will certainlyhelp with that, but that's not really why they exist. My HTTP ratelimits exist for ultimately social reasons and because they let me stop worrying

Traditionally, the FreeBSD base system was managed through freebsd-update ( also ),which I would call primarily a patch-based system, while third partysoftware was (usually) managed through pkg , a package manager. Thiswas a quite traditional split, but it had some less than idealaspects, and as of FreeBSD 15 you can choose to manage FreeBSDthrough pkg using what is called freebsd-base (which isalso known as 'pkgbase'). If you're installing FreeBSD 15 from

For reasons well outside the scope of this entry, the other day Ilooked at the --help output from one of my old Python programs.This particular program has a lot of options, but when I'd writtenit, I had used argparse argument groups to break up the large list of options into logical groups, startingwith the most important and running down to the 'you should probablyignore these' ones. The result was far more readable than it wouldhave been without the grouping.

(I

Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you've made localchanges to an Ubuntu package using dgit and now Ubuntu has come out with an update to that package that youwant to switch to, with your local changes still on top. Back whenI wrote about moving local changes to a new Ubuntu release withdgit , I wrote an appendix with a theoryof how to do this, based on a conversation . Now that I'veactually done this, I've discovered that there is a minor variationand

I mentioned recently that at work, we 're retaining old systems that wewould have normally discarded. We're doing this for the obviousreason that new servers have become increasingly expensive, due toescalating prices of RAM (especially DDR5 RAM) and all forms ofSSDs, especially as new servers might really require us to buy onesthat support U.2 NVMe instead of SATA SSDs (because I'm not surehow available SATA SSDs are these days).

Our servers are generally fairly old anyways ,