Every so often these days, someone asks me if my blog supports RSS(or if I can add RSS support to it). These perfectly well meaningand innocent requests tell me two things, one of them obvious andone of them somewhat less so.

(To be completely clear about this: these people are pointing outa shortfall of my site design and are not to blame in any way. Itis my fault that although Wandering Thoughts has asyndication feed, they can't spot it.)

The

The versions of ZFS that we're running on our fileservers (both the old and the new ) don't support using TRIM commandson drives in ZFS pools. Support for TRIM has been in FreeBSD ZFS for a while ,but it only just landed in the ZFS on Linux development version and it's not in Illumos. Given our general upgrade plans , we're also not likely toget TRIM support over the likely production lifetime of our currentZFS SSDs through upgrading the OS and ZFS versions later.

Our approach to upgrading servers by reinstalling them from scratchon new hardware means that wehave a slow flow of previously used servers that we're going toreuse, and thus that need their disks cleaned up from their previouslife. Some places would do this for data security reasons, but herewe mostly care that lingering partitioning, software RAID superblocks,and so on don't cause us problems on new OS installs.

In the old days of HDs, we generally did this by zeroing out theold drives with

Our third generation of ZFS fileservers are now in full production, although we're less than half way throughmigrating all of our filesystems from our second generationfileservers . As peculiar as itsounds, this makes me think ahead to what our likely upgrade plansare.

Our current generation ZFS fileservers are running Ubuntu 18.04 LTSwith the Ubuntu version of ZFS (with a frozen kernel version). Givenour past habits, it's unlikely that we'll want to upgrade them toUbuntu 20

Every so often we need to make some significant upgrade or changeto one of our servers, for instance to upgrade from Ubuntu versionto Ubuntu version. When we do this, we do two things. The firstis that we reinstall from scratch rather than try to upgrade the machine's current OS and setup inplace. There are a whole bunch of reasons for this (for any OS, notjust Linux), including that it gets you as close as possible toinsuring that the current state of the machine

One of the things I sometimes consider for my current home machine is adding a mirrored pair of NVMe drives(to go with my mirrored pair of SSDs and mirrored pair of HDs). Sofar I haven't really gotten very serious about this, though, andone of the reasons is that I'm not sure how much faster NVMe drivesare going to be for me in practice and thus whether it is worthgetting higher end NVMe drives or not.

(Another reason for not doing anything is that the

My work laptop boots with UEFI ( and Secure Boot ) instead of thetraditional MBR BIOS booting, because that's what makes modernlaptops (and modern versions of Windows) happy. Since it only hasa single disk anyway, some of the drawbacks of UEFI booting don't apply to it. However, today I got todiscover a new and exciting failure mode of UEFI booting (at leastin the Fedora configuration), which is a damaged UEFI systempartition FAT32filesystem . Unfortunately both identifying this

Toward the end of last year (2018), the OmniOS CE people got around to migrating the OmniOS user mailing list fromits old home on OmniTI's infrastructure to a new home . When they didthis, they opted not to move over the existing list membership;instead, people who were still interested had to actively subscribethemselves to the new mailing list. At first, when I got the noticeabout this I thought I'd subscribe to the new list. Then I thoughtabout it

This winter I have been having a sporadic but surprisingly consistentproblem with my home desktop computer ,which is that, well, here's my Tweet :

So I definitely appear to have the most ironic of things, a computerthat doesn't like it when it's too cold. I don't think it's the CPUfan or the CPU, either, which leaves me strongly suspecting themotherboard. I guess it's time to update to the latest BIOS.

(Sadly, updating to