In a comment on my most recent entry on CentOS Stream , Ben Cotton said:

I honestly believe that CentOS Stream will be suitable for themajority of CentOS Linux users, and a huge improvement for some. [...]

At one level, I agree with Ben Cotton on this. There's everyindication that CentOS Stream won't be worse than plain CentOS 7as far as bugs and security issues go; while it will now be getting(some) package versions before RHEL does instead of afterward

This past Wednesday, we didsome maintenance, including precautionary reboots of some of ourOpenBSD firewalls. All of our firewalls actually are pairs ofmachines, one of which is the active firewall and the other of whichis the inactive spare (which is at most running pfsync, and is noton the live networks or doing anything). One of the first firewallswe rebooted was what was supposed to be the inactive spare of thebridging firewall that sits between our networks and the rest of the university. Less than a

After the news broke of CentOS's major change in what it is , a number of sysadmins here at theuniversity have been discussing the wholeissue. One of the things that has become completely clear to meduring these discussions is that the limited ways that this shifthas been communicated has created a great deal of confusion, leavingsysadmins with a bunch of reasonable questions around the switchand no clear answers ( cf ).

(It doesn't help that the current CentOS Stream FAQ is clearly out of datein

A little while ago, I wrote about remotely turning on consoleblanking on a Linux machine , andin it I wondered if blanking LCD displays really mattered. Thetraditional reasons to blank your screen were a combination of CRTburn-in worries and the major power savings to be had from poweringdown a CRT display; LCDs mostly don't have burn-in ,and they have low power usage. But today I realized that there isstill a benefit to blanking out your idle LCD displays, or moreexactly to

The news of the time interval is that CentOS is making a majorchange in what it is that make it significantly less useful to manypeople, although their blog entry CentOS Project shifts focus toCentOS Stream will not tell you that. I had some reactions on Twitter and this isan expanded explanation of my views.

What CentOS has been up until this change is people taking thesource code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux that Red Hat was releasing(that was happening due to both obligation and cultural factors),rebuilding it

It's a common sysadmin desire to do things during (Unix) systemboot 'once the network is up'. But what do we actually mean by that,in relatively concrete terms? The many possible meanings of this,and the varied environments we can ask the question in, are partof why this can be a tangled issue on Linuxes that use systemd .

To simplify life and because it's the main thing I care about, I'mgoing to consider only servers with a static set of

Slightly over a decade ago I wrote an entry about our discoverythat ' hostname -s ' sometimes did DNS lookups ,depending on the exact version involved. We discovered this thehard way, when our DNS lookups failed at one point and suddenly' hostname -s ' itself started failing unexpectedly. We recentlyhad a reason to use ' hostname -s ' again, which caused me toremember this old issue and check the current situation. The goodnews is that common versions of hostname now don't do DNS

One of the things going on in web browsers over time is that they'rein the process of removing support for FTP, for instance Firefoxonce planned to do it this summer and Chrome may already have removed it . The obviousreason cited by Mozilla and Google for this is that use of ftp: URLs is very uncommon in web browsers (and on the web), and the FTPclient implementation is a bunch of old code that must be carriedaround just for this. Another reason is probably that the web

I was recently reading another guide to power supply units (PSUs),which repeated the common advice that you shouldn't over-size yourPC's power supply because its efficiency drops significantly at lowloads. The general guideline I've read is that a PSU needs to operateat around half load for optimal performance, and it's common for apower supply's efficiency to plummet below 15% or 10% of its load.This time around, reading all of that made me