Over in the Fediverse, I said :

A quietly great thing about Prometheus 2.23.0 is that it's finallyeasy and natural to display graphs for quick ad-hoc queries in localtime instead of UTC.

(No, we don't run our servers or do our work in UTC. There are manyreasons for this, including that our users don't work in UTC or aroundthe clock.)

All of our serious, full time graphs and other information are in Grafana dashboards

As people who regularly do web development and create web pagesknow, Firefox has long had a set of web developer tools to help you(accessed as Tools → Web Developer, or you can add an icon for itto the right of your tab bar). I've periodically used several ofthese tools; Inspector to see things like how a page is structuredand how fonts are being chosen (and what they are), Network to helpsee what's going wrong with requests, and sometimes Web Console

Satwik Kansal's wtfpython is at one level a whole collection of 'what the heck' Python moments,that outsiders might laugh at. At another level it's a valuablecollection of Python mistakes that you might make and misunderstandingsthat you might have. I certainly learned some things from reading allthe way through it, and hopefully have avoided some future mistakes.

We have a number of OpenBSD firewalls in service (along with someother OpenBSD servers for things like VPN endpoints), and I wasrecently asked how we monitor PF and overall network traffic onthem. I had to disappoint the person who asked with my answer,because right now we mostly don't (although this is starting tochange).

Due to past problems, we've long run scripts (from cron) that lookfor the PF state tables getting close to full and send us email ifthat

Although I'm generally happy with our Linux fileservers , every so often we run into anissue where I miss OmniOS's DTrace and mdb; DTrace for dynamicvisibility into what the system was doing, and mdb for staticinspection and tracing through kernel data structures. In theoryLinux has equivalents of both of these. In practice this Linuxfuture is unevenly distributed . It'slikely that our Linux fileservers will have great visibility oncewe upgrade them to Ubuntu 22.04 in 2022 or

A decade ago I wrote The quiet death of postmaster@anywhere , where I proclaimed that the postmaster@ addresswas dead, killed by steadily increasing spam volume (and decreasingactual use). I was recently reminded of that entry and, a decadelater, I have to sort of take back what I wrote. It's true thatpostmaster addresses are increasingly dead, but when they are it'snot for the reasons that I thought back then.

Perhaps ten years ago our postmaster account got a bunch of

Suppose, not entirely hypothetically ,that you're writing a Go program in an environment that normallydoesn't use Go . You're completelyfamiliar with Go, with a $GOPATH and a custom Go environment and so on, so you can easily build your program.But your coworkers aren't, and you would like to give them sourcecode that is as close to completely self-contained as possible,where they can rebuild your program with, say, ' cd /some/where;some

As part of our overall install process ,for years we've used customized Ubuntu server install images (ie,ISOs, often burned on to actual DVDs) that were set up with preseedfiles for the Debian installer and a few other things we wanted onour servers from the start. These ISOs have been built in thetraditional way with mkisofs and so booted with isolinux . This wasfine for a long time because pretty much all of our servers usedtraditional MBR BIOS booting, which is what ISOs use isolinux for

Yesterday I wrote about how I made a 20.04 ISO that booted onUEFI systems . It was a messy process withsome peculiar things that I didn't understand and places where Ihad to deviate from Debian's excellent documentation on Repackinga Debian ISO . In responseto my entry, Thomas Schmitt (the author of xorriso ) got in touch with me andvery generously helped me figure out what was really going on. Theshort version is that I was confused and my problems were due to