One of the things that's very useful about Prometheus is that it'spretty easy to write little ad-hoc scripts or programs that generatemetrics and then publish them. You can use either the host agent's'textfile' collector , which isa good fit for host-specific metrics on a host where you're alreadyrunning the host agent, or you can have your program publish themthrough Pushgateway ,including by just having your script pipe its output to an appropriate curl command. However,

On Twitter, I noted a milestone last evening :

This evening we took our last OmniOS fileserver out of productionand powered it off (after a great deal of slow work; all toldthis took more than a year). They've had a good run, so thank youIllumos/OmniOS/OmniTI/etc for the generally quiet and reliableservice.

We still haven't turned any of our iSCSI backends off (they're Linux,not OmniOS), but that will be next, probably Friday

Two weeks ago, I powered down all of our OmniOS fileservers thatare now out of production , which ismost of them. By that, I mean that I logged in to each of them viaSSH and ran ' poweroff '. The machines disappeared from the networkand I thought nothing more of it.

This Sunday morning we had a brief power failure. In the aftermathof the power failure, three out of four of the OmniOS fileserversreappeared on the network, which we knew mostly because they sentus some

I was recently reading Christian F.K. Schaller's On the Road toFedora Workstation 31 (via both Fedora Planet and PlanetGnome ). In it, Schaller says in onesection (about Gnome and their move to fully work on Wayland):

Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenancemode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintainedby us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikelyto be any major new

The other day I was exploring Certbot ,which is more or less the standard and 'as official as it ever gets'client for Let's Encrypt, and it did something that I objected to.Certbot is a very big program with a great many commands, modes,options, settings, and so on, and this was the kind of thing whereI wasn't completely confident there even was a way to disable it.However, sometimes I'm a system programmer and the particular thinghad printed

Suppose that you have a modern 64-bit x86 Linux system (often calledan x86_64 environment) and that you want to run an old 32-bitx86 program on it (a plain x86 program). What does this requirefrom the overall system, both the kernel and the rest of theenvironment?

(I am restricting this to ELF programs, not very old a.out ones.)

At a minimum, this requires that the (

I have a very old mail address that I have made into a completespamtrap through my sinkhole SMTP server . Simplifying only slightly,my SMTP server rejects all email to this address no later than afterthe end of transferring the message (at the message termination afterSMTP DATA ). When it rejects email this late, I capture the fullmessage.

On September 5th of last year (2018), this spamtrap email addressrejected a message from Google Groups informing it that it had beenadded to a

On Twitter, I said :

There sure are a surprising number of places that are trying to sendus SMTP MAIL with a MAIL FROM that contains the Unicode characterU+FEFF (either 'zero width no-break space' or a byte order mark,apparently, although it's never at the start of the address).

I was looking at the logs on our external mail gateway machinebecause we use Exim and I was interested to see if we had been pokedby anyone trying to exploit CVE-2

Over on Mastodon, I said :

Belated obvious realization: using a metrics system for alerts insteadof hand-rolled checks means that you can outsource handling state toyour metrics systems and everything else can be stateless. Want toonly alert after a condition has been true for an hour? Your 'checkthe condition' script doesn't have to worry about that; you can leaveit to the metrics system.

This sounds abstract, so let me make it concrete. We have some self serve registration portals that work