Yesterday I discussed the two sorts of program package managers , system package managers thatmanage the whole system and application package managers thatmostly or entirely manage third party programs. Commercial Unixgot application package managers in the very early 1990s , but Linux'sfirst program managers were system package managers , indpkg and RPM (or at least those seem to be the first Linux packagemanagers).

The abstract way to describe why is to say that Linux distributions had to assemble a whole thingfrom separate pieces

I've written before that one of the complications of talking aboutpackage managers and package management is that there are twocommon types of package managers , programmanagers (which manage installed programs on a system level) and module managers (which manage package dependencies for your projectwithin a language ecosystem or maybe a broader ecosystem). Today Irealized that there is a further important division within programmanagers. I will call this division application (package) managers and system (package) managers .

A system package manager is what

Recently I saw a Go example that made me scratch my head and decodewhat was going on (you can see it here ). Here's what I understand aboutwhat's going on. Suppose that you want to create a general interface for a generic typethat requires any concrete implementation to be a pointer type.We can do this by literally requiring a pointer:

type Pointer[P any] interface {   *P}

That this is allowed is not entirely obvious from the specification,but it's

We have a collection of VPNservers, some OpenVPN based and some L2TP based. They used to bebased on OpenBSD, but we're moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD and the VPN servers recentlymoved too. We also have a system for collecting Prometheus metricson VPN usage , which worked by parsing the output of things .For OpenVPN, our scripts just kept working when we switched toFreeBSD because the two OSes use basically the same OpenVPN setup.This was not the case for our L2TP VPN

Recently, Verisimilitude left acomment on my entry on X11's DirectColor visual type , where they mentioned that LPeter Deutsch, the author of Ghostscript, lamented using twenty-fourbit colour for Ghostscript rather than a more flexible approach,which you may need in printing things with colour. As it happens,I know a bit about this area for two or three reasons, which comeat it from different angles. A long time ago I was peripherallyinvolved in desktop publishing software, which obviously cares about

Prometheus Blackbox is somewhat complicated to understand .One of its fundamental abstractions is a 'prober', a generic wayof probing some service (such as making HTTP requests or DNSrequests). One prober is the 'tcp' prober, which makes a TCPconnection and then potentially conducts a conversation withthe service to verify its health.For example, here's a ClamAV daemon health check, which connects,sends a line with "PING", and expects to receive "PONG":

  clamd_pingpong:

The news of the day is that Microsoft had a significant outageinside their Microsoft 365 infrastructure. We noticed when we stopped beingable to deliver email to the university's institutional email system, which was a bit mysterious in the usual way of today's Internet :

The joys of modern email: "Has Microsoft decided to put all of ouremail on hold or are they having a global M365 inbound SMTP emailincident?"

(For about the last hour and a half, if it

Recently I read Understanding ZFS Scrubs and Data Integrity ( via ), which isa perfectly good article and completely accurate, bearing in mindsome qualifications which I'm about to get into. One of the thingsthis article says in the preface is:

In this article, we will walk through what scrubs do, how the Merkletree layout lets ZFS validate metadata and data from end to end, [...]

This is both completely correct and misleading, because what ZFSpeople mean we talk about "metadata

The news of the time interval is that Linux's usual telnetd hashad a giant security vulnerability for a decade . Aspeople on the Fediverse observed, we've been here before; Solarisapparently had a similar bug 20 or so years ago (which wasCVE-2007-0882, cf , via ), and AIX inthe mid 1990s (CVE-1999-0113, source , also )), and also