Over on Twitter, I saw the following question ( via ):

There is lot of conversation around generics in #go, can't we havesomething like OpenGo, where community can implement generics , ratherthat waiting for official #go generics to happen ? Something likeOpenJDK

There are many answers for why this won't happen, but one that doesnot usually get said out loud is that Go is Google's language,not the community's .

Yes, there's a community that contributes things

Brian Brazil recently wrote Analyse a metric by kernel version , wherehe shows how to analyze a particular metric in a new way by,essentially, adding a label from another metric to the metric, inthis case the kernel version. His example is a neat trick, but it'salso reasonably tricky to understand how it works, so today I'mgoing to break it down (partly so that I can remember this in sixmonths or a year from now, when my PromQL knowledge has inevitably rusted)

Over on Twitter, I said :

So [mimecast.com] bills itself as a cyber-security firm that makesemail more secure, and of course the only email I get from them isa spam email, with most of the contents being an brag ad footer forMimecast itself.

Also, @Mimecast does not DKIM signoutgoing email, so I suspect that it is not going to be so good atbeing delivered to the increasing number of places that care aboutthat.

(Not our mail server, obviously

One of the probably lesser known features of xterm is that it hasa quite complete but obscure and tangled system of adding customkey bindings. Because xterm is a traditional X program, this isconfigured through X resources instead of a dotfile somewhere, andbecause xterm is an old program, the syntax for this is what youcould politely call interesting. The full gory details are in theKEY BINDINGS section of the xterm manpage ,and you can also see the Arch wiki xterm page's section on this .

(Urxvt

OmniOS has generally been pretty good to us over the lifetime of our second generation ZFS fileservers , butas we've migrated various filesystems from our OmniOS fileserversto our new Linux fileservers ,it's become clear that one of the costs we paid for using OmniOSwas not having 10G networking.

We certainly started out intending to have 10G networking on OmniOS;our hardware was capable of it, with Intel 10G-T chipsets, andOmniOS seemed happy to drive them at decent speeds.

For a long time I've used the OpenSSL command line tools to dothings like looking at certificates and chasingcertificate chains (although OpenSSL isno longer what you want to use to make self-signed certificates ). This works, and is in many waysthe canonical and most complete way to do this sort of stuff, butif you've ever used the openssl command and its many sub-optionsyou know that it's kind of a pain in the rear. As a result of this,

Over on r/golang, someone asked What's the point of limiting.(type) evaluations to type switches :

I know the Go feature set is very well thought out and I'm surethere's a good reason for it, but I'm curious why I can't do fmt.Println(x.(type))

(As pointed out in the replies, you can get the same informationwith fmt's %T formatting verb.)

Although there are a number of

I have in the past talked about our shiny new Prometheus based metrics system and some interestingthings we've seen due toits metrics, especially its per-host system metrics (collectedthrough node_exporter ,its host agent). What I haven't mentioned is that we're not runningthe host agent on one important group of our machines, namely ournew Linux fileservers . This isn't becausewe don't care about metrics from those machines. It's because whenwe do run

Last September we discovered that the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS versionof Alpine was badly broken when used over NFS , andeventually traced this to a general issue with NFS in Ubuntu18.04's kernel and probably all modern Linux kernels .Initially we thought that this was a bug in the Linux NFS client,but after discussions on the Linux NFS mailing list it appears thatthis is a feature, although I was unable to get clarity on whatNFS client behavior is guaranteed in general . To