The traditional way that operating systems (Unix and others) haveimplemented swapping (really paging) is on a global, system wide basis. All processes(from all users on a multi-user system) are in contention for thesame limited pool of RAM, and the operating system can pick on pagesfrom any process to be evicted from RAM. Page eviction decisionsare made using global page replacement algorithms that aregenerally blind to what process was using what RAM. There were (andare) good reasons for this

I recently said on Twitter that Iexpected x2go to have whatI considered significant limitations for my ongoing use of remoteX . This isn't because of any specific flaw inx2go; instead, it's because of a fundamental difference betweenremote X and what remote desktop software like x2go does even whenit's implementing what the Wikipedia comparison of remote desktopsoftware calls'seamless windows'.

Normally, remote desktop software like x2go gives you an entireremote desktop in a

Today, Chrome is by far the dominant web browser, which gives itsignificant influence and weight, including in the area of userprivacy. But Chrome is beholden to Google and Google is beholden tothe torrents of money that pour in from intrusive Internet advertisingand the associated consumer surveillance business. This means thatthere are limits on what Chrome will do; for instance it's probablynot likely to be aggressive about not sending Referer headers . In general, Chrome's support of userprivacy will always be limited and

It's now been a bit over a year since I was last regularly in theoffice (due to still ongoing events ). One of thethings that has turned out to be really important to workingproductively from home has been the X Window System 's remote support(and SSH's support for X forwarding too, let's not forget thatside). Especially, what has been important for me isn't just beingable to run GUI programs in some way from a remote host, but

There are a lot of newspaper and other media places that have ageneral paywall (where you must be a subscriber to see their content),but also make an exception to this paywall if the visitor is comingdirectly from an Internet search (or at least a Google search; Idon't know if these places will let visitors from other searchengines in). Today, how these places generally know that you'recoming from an Internet search is the HTTP Referer header that yourbrowser puts on your request

Although vim is now my most regularly used editor ( and it really isvim, not vi ), I still have lots to learn about it. Thus,every so often I wind up reading guides to Vim, which often labelthemselves as being for 'beginning users' or 'intermediate users' or'advanced users'. One of the interesting things in reading these guidesis hitting features labeled as basic that I don't know, or featureslabeled as advanced that I consider perfectly routine.

(My most

Prometheus has a reasonable number of features to let you determinethings about changes in ongoing metrics. For example, if you wantto know how many separate times your Blackbox ICMP pings havestarted to fail over a time range (as opposed to how frequentlythey failed ), a starting point wouldbe:

changes( probe_success{ probe="icmp" } [1d] )

(The changes() function is not ideal for this; what you would really like ischanges_down and changes_up

My home desktop can go down, crash,or lock up every so often ( for example when it gets too cold ). I run Prometheus on it forvarious reasons, and when this happens I not infrequently wind uplooking at graphs of various things (either in Prometheus or inGrafana). Much of the times, these graphs have a weird structurearound the time of the crash. The various metrics will be wigglingback and forth as usual before the crash, but then they go flat andjust run on

On Twitter, I recently was disgruntled about sshd's logging :

I really wish sshd logged one single line that said a session hadended, what user it was for (and where from), and what the reason forending the session was. You might think it already did this, but sadlynot.

There are many reasons you might care about the causes of SSH sessiondisconnections, including that you're trying to troubleshoot potentialnetwork or firewall problems and you want to see if people are gettingabruptly disconnected