On Linux, plain disk names for most modern disk devices are inthe form /dev/sda for the whole disk and /dev/sda3 for thepartition (regardless of whether the disk is partitioned throughmodern GPT or old MBR). When I got NVMe SSDs for my office workstation , one of my many discoveries about them isthat Linux gives them different and more oddly formed names. Since Ihad many other NVMe related issues on my mind at the time, I didn't lookinto the odd

I'm generally not a fan of NetworkManager on the machines I dealwith , but I do wind up dealing with it atthe command line level every so often, most recently for settingup a WireGuard client on my work laptop .There was a time when it felt that NetworkManager was the inevitablefuture of networking on Linux even on servers, but fortunately systemd-networkd has mostly made that go away. Still, systemd-networkd has limitationsand isn't as comprehensive as NetworkManager, NetworkManager is theface of

One of the tiny irritations of operating ZFS for a long time isthat eventually, running ' zpool status ' on your pools would producea multi-line nag about upgrading them to the latest version of ZFS.I assume that this was added to ' zpool status ' output so that youwouldn't be unaware of it, but the size of the message was far toolarge for its actual importance. Back in the old days of Solaris10, ' zpool status -x ' even included pools that could

A while ago, I wrote Addressable values in Go (and unaddressableones too) as an attempt to get straight thistricky concept in Go, which I hadn't fully understood. To refresh, the Go specification's core descriptionof this is covered in Address operators :

For an operand x of type T , the address operation &x generates a pointer of type *T to x . The operand must be addressable , that is, either a variable, pointer indirection, orslice indexing operation; or a

If you use Apache (as we do) and have relatively casual WSGI-basedapplications (again, as we do ), thenApache's mod_wsgi is often the easiest way to deploy your WSGI application. Speakingas a system administrator, it's quite appealing to not have tomanage a separate configuration and a separate daemon (and I stillget process separation and different UIDs). But at the moment thereis a little problem, at least for people (like us) who use theirUnix

Not that long ago, I set up Martin Tournoij's "fixed" bookmarkletto deal with CSS fixed elements .When I did this, I also decided to install Tournoij's "readable"bookmarklet ,because it was right there and it felt potentially useful. With itsitting in my tab bar, I started trying it out on sites that I foundnot so readable, or even vaguely marginally non-readable, and to mysurprise it's been a major quality of life improvement on many sites.

I recently upgraded my home machine from Fedora33 to Fedora 34. One of the changes in Fedora 34 is that the audiosystem switched from PulseAudio to PipeWire ( the Fedora change proposal , anarticle on the switch ).Part of this switch is that you need to run different daemons inyour user session. For normal people, this is transparently handledby whichever standard desktop environment they're using. UnfortunatelyI use a completely custom desktop ,so I have to sort this out myself (this is

In theory, at some point in the future Go will stop supportingthe traditional GOPATH mode . When this happens,if you want to still build old Go programs that you have sittingaround in checked out version control repositories, you will needto modularize them. Once upon a time, I thought that this would beas simple as going to the root of your copy of the repo, then running' go mod init ... ' and ' go mod tidy '. Unfortunately, life is notthis simple and

Over on Twitter, I had a view on where syslog messages should go :

Tired sysadmin take: Different sorts of syslog messages going todifferent places are a mistake. Throw it all into /var/log/allmessagesand I'll sort it out myself.

Like many Twitter takes of mine, in retrospect this one is heartfeltbut a little bit too extreme as presented. Specifically, I thinkyou should log all syslog messages to one place, but also log somesorts of messages to their own additional places so