One of the things you often get to do with Prometheus is to designyour own custom metrics for things (which may be generated andexposed in a number of ways, for example using mtail to extract them from log files).One piece of advice for designing metrics that I've seen is to groupclosely related measurements together under one metric name usinglabel values to differentiate between them. The classical examplehere is counting HTTP requests with different return codes usingone metric name with a label for the return code,

Go packages can have init() initialization functions, which arecalled when a Go program starts as part of package initialization . One of thepractical issues with init functions in Go so far is that theirperformance and even their existence is relatively opaque, so thatit's hard to tell how much of an impact they have on the startuptime of your programs.

The good news is that the Go team is moving to change this lack ofvisibility, as tracked through this issue and recently landed inthe development version

Go has some surprisingly complex rules for how packagesare initialized, partly because package level variables can beinitialized based on the value returned from function and methodcalls (and then other variables can be initialized from them). Aspart of package initialization, you can have an initializationfunction, called init() , that will be called.

Or at least that's what I would have told you before I actually hada reason to read that section of the Go language specificationtoday. In fact, the specification is

I recently read Josef "Jeff" Sipek's Email vs. Tool du Jour ( via ).I broadly agree with Sipek's call to generally use email to othermechanisms, but after mulling over my reaction to one portion ofit, I disagree with Sipek over issue tracking, at least some ofthe time. Sipek says:

First, what about issue tracking? How does that tie into myemail-centric world? Well, you can keep your issue tracker, but in myopinion, the comments

Partly in light of Microsoft SharePoint's problem with spam , here is an obvious thing:

If you send automated email to the outside world, you should alwaysrun it through some anti-spam system and raise big alarms if theyever trigger.

(If I was doing this today I would use ClamAV and rspamd becausethey're free and what I'm used to, but anything will do.)

You should do this even if you aren't allowing external people toinitiate the email and put content

I'm paying more attention to what our mail system detects as spamand where it's coming from than usual, so I'm getting to noticethings (or, in the alternate phrasing, being forced to noticethings). Today's thing that I noticed is that to no one's surprise,Microsoft SharePoint is currently being used as a spam sendingvector. I say 'to no one's surprise' because it's a long standingrule that anything that can be used to

Over the time I've been here ,we've had rather mixed experiences with UPSes. Initially we usedthem relatively freely on machines that we felt were important,such as our first generation ZFS fileservers . Unfortunately, after a while theUPSes themselves caused us problems (for example, a spontaneousUPS reset that power cycled the machine attached to it ), and we grew much more disenchantedwith them.

These days we still use UPSes on some machines, such as ourfileservers , but pretty much onlyon machines

Today, we had what you could call a "power event" at work. Therewas some sort of power blip in the electrical feeds from TorontoHydro to multiple university buildings, and a number of our serversrebooted (not all of them, though). We've seen this kind of thinghappen before so in one sense it's not surprising, but this timearound the actual experience was rather alarming and confusingbecause it happened during the working day and we were all workingremotely, so we couldn

Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you have a server withat least three or four spare drive bays and you want to build amirrored storage setup that can maintain redundancy without requiringan in-person drive swap should a drive fail. Let's say you go withthree drives in the system in total. Obviously two of them have tobe mirrored in order to get your basic redundancy, but the thirdone could be used either to make a three way mirror or held backas a (configured) hot