Recently I updated the kernel on my Fedora desktops and as I usuallydo , updated to the latest development version of ZFS on Linux . When I did this,I got an error message from DNF (which I think is really an RPM errormessage) that struck me as impossible:

file /usr/src/zfs-2.1.99/cmd/arc_summary from install of zfs-dkms-2.1.99-1199_g0c11a

I'm not a fan of NetworkManager on my desktops (although I thinkthere are machines where it's good ), butrecently I tweeted :

I wonder how well I could get NetworkManager to co-exist withsystemd-networkd, so that NM handles the few things networkd is bad at(eg OpenVPN, PPPoE) and networkd handles everything normal.

My home desktop has roughly three types ofnetworks. First, there are networks (the local ethernet, my Wireguardtunnel, and now my libvirt virtual networks

It's common to say that it's "easier" to set up a static websitethan a dynamic one, although people usually don't try too hard todefine what is easier about it. I've come to think that one reasonfor this perception is that historically, setting up a static websitehas effectively been a subset of setting up a dynamic website. Onereason for this is the same fundamental dynamic that has madeserving static files efficient , which isthat historically most dynamic websites had some

As we all sadly know, USB comes in a bewildering variety of connectors, standards, andespecially speeds that range fromvery nice to sadly pathetic. USB 1.0 and 1.1 are 12 Mbps, USB 2.0is 480 Mbps, USB 3.0 (aka 'USB 3.1 gen 1') is 5 Gbps, USB 3.1 (aka'USB 3.1 gen 2') is 10 Gbps, USB 3.2 is 20 Gbps,

Over on Twitter, I said something about Firefox in 22.04 :

So Ubuntu 22.04 (beta) makes Firefox into a Snap. I guess our userswon't be using it on our machines any more, since Snaps don't work atall in our environment. (Or they didn't in 20.04; they require non-NFShome directories in /home.)

After I made that Tweet I did some experimentation on 22.04

One of the ways that we propagate our central administrativefilesystem to machines is through rsync;rather than NFS-mounting the filesystems, some machines instead usersync to pull a subset of the filesystem to their local disk. Thisgives these machines resilience in case our NFS fileservers aren't available. This rsync isdone (in a script) from cron, and so we'll get emailed any problemsor odd output. This all works great until the rsync master machineis down, at which point we can count

I have a personal shell script that for reasons beyond the scopeof this entry uses the Unix date command to determine the currentday, month, and year. Recently I noticed that the shell script wassometimes not working right on our Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 servers,but was working right on 18.04, and tracked it down to the factthat doing ' ssh server date ' produced output in a different formaton 18.04 than on the other

We have a SLURM "cluster", by which we mean a pool of servers which people canuse to reserve some cores and RAM for themselves .Each compute server in the cluster (a node in SLURM terms) needsto be running the slurmd daemon in order for people to be ableto use its resources. This daemon can die under some circumstances,so we added an alert to check for slurmd not being active to ourPrometheus setup . However, we don'twant to alert on slurmd not being active

One of our little irritations with the modern Ubuntu serverinstaller is that after it hasinstalled your base system from the packages on the ISO image, italways installs at least security updates (unless it has no networkconnection to the outside world, which it probably does). A way ofturning this off has been a long standing request for the newinstaller, and when the issue is raised one reaction I've seen isto ask why wouldn't you want to install all the available (security)updates