NVMe , also known asNVM Express, is the general standard for accessing non-volatilestorage over PCIe .People commonly talk about NVMe SSDs while I sometimes call them 'NVMe drives' (see my entry on theterminology and some of the technology ).By contrast you have SATA and SAS SSDs, which are a subset of SATAand SAS drives in general, because people (us included) still douse spinning rust.

SMART is a standard,originally for ATA hard drives, for reporting various informationabout the

An opinionated list of best practices for textual websites byRohan Kumar is what it says in the subject. I'm not sure Iagree with everything in it (and I certainly don't do everythingthere), but I think it has useful information and it's certainlygiven me things to think about.

(Since this entire blog is a textual website, I havea decided interest in this area and some opinions of my own.)

I tweeted :

Grumpy thesis: monitoring TLS certificate expiry is too hard(evidence: good people keep having certs expire on them). Why don'tweb servers ship with routine cron jobs that email you when anyactively used TLS certificate is N days or less from expiring, forexample?

Having a TLS certificate for a public web server unexpectedly expireon you is practically a rite of passage for a system administrationteam. And I'm not here to throw stones, because while we have areasonably good system

About two weeks ago I reached a tipping point of unhappiness withVMWare Workstation and wound up decidingto try switching over to the current obvious alternative, libvirt , mostly through virt-manager , virt-viewer , and virsh . The summary from two weeks ofusage is that libvirt has worked out okay for me; it's more or lessa perfectly workable virtualization environment for Linux guestVMs, with an adequate GUI experience along side a command lineexperience that I'm coming to appreciate more for basic operationslike starting

Yesterday, I mentioned that our support site uses a little bitof Javascript to inject site-wide navigation on all the pages . In a comment, msi noted:

But then, that also means that people who block JavaScript don't getto see the navigation bar, which kind of defeats the point of theentire site, I guess.

On the one hand, I feel this. I block essentially all Javascriptmyself, so I had to add a specific exemption for our support site,and I'm

About a decade ago, we wound up caught in a wiki trap ,where our support site was stuckusing what had become an unsupported piece of wiki software withan unsupported wikitext dialect and no automated migration path.Our way out was not a different wiki software but instead to scrapethe HTML of the existing site and then redo the entire site as plainHTML. You might wonder how that has worked out for us over the timesince and if we regret our decision. The short answer is that itseems to have

Yesterday I wrote about how a 20-second program startup delayturned out to be because of a stray line in an /etc/pam.d file . Unfortunately, things in /etc/pam.dare especially prone to this problem on systems that have beenaround for a long time and have been upgraded from version to versionof their Linux. The short version of why is that there are toomany things modifying /etc/pam.d files .

The ideal situation for /etc/pam.

For some time I've had an odd problem on my work Fedora desktop , where after I logged in the first time I ranone of a number of GUI programs, it would take more than 20 secondsto start with no visible reason for why (the affected programsincluded Firefox and Liferea). After that 20 seconds, everythingwas fine and everything started or re-started as fast as it should.This didn't happen on my home Fedora desktop, which has an essentiallyidentical configuration.

If you install Ubuntu 22.04's server edition onto a server that hasone or more network ports that you aren't using, it's quite likelythat you'll get to see an unexpected two minute pause during systemboot. In some configurations this is a total stall, with neitherlocal nor remote logins possible. This behavior didn't happen in20.04, although some of the underlying issues were there, andunfortunately it's rather hard to automatically work