It's good to check systemd for new boot-time things every so often
Oh. The reason my office workstation always took a somewhat unusuallylong time to (re)boot is that I had an ancient, nonexistent iSCSItarget configured, so finding all disk devices had to wait for theiSCSI connection attempt to time out. That was silly.
This turns out to not quite be the case. While my ancient iSCSItarget configuration had been there for a very long time, I onlyinstalled the iSCSI initiator programs recently, on September 4th,when I seem to have installed
Go basically never frees heap memory back to the operating system
Over on Reddit's r/golang, I ran into an interesting question aboutGo's memory use as part of this general memory question :
[...] However Go is not immediately freeing the memory, at least from
htop's perspective.What can I do to A) gain insight on when this memory will be madeavailable to the OS, [...]
The usual question about memory usage in Go programs is when thingswill be garbage collected ( which can be tricky ).
A deep dive into the OS memory use of a simple Go program
One of the enduring mysteries of actually using Go programs isunderstanding how much OS-level memory they use, as opposed to thevarious Go-level memory metrics exposed by runtime.MemStats . OS level memory usematters because it influences things like how much real memory yourprogram needs and how likely it is to be killed by the OS in alow-memory situation, but there has always been a disconnect betweenOS level information and Go level information. After researchingenough to write about how Go doesn't free
My non-approach to password management tools
In response to my entry on why I don't set master passwords inprograms , Bill asked a good question:
Does your skepticism extend to password-management tools ingeneral? If so, then what do you store passwords in? [...]
There are two answers to this. The first one is that I simply assumethat if an attacker compromises my machine, they get essentiallyeverything no matter what I do, so I either record a password inan unencrypted form on the machine or I don
Thinking about what we want to be alerted about
Thinking about the broad subject of what we probably want formetrics, alerting, and so on leads prettymuch straight to the obvious question of what do we want to bealerted about in the first place. It may seem peculiar to have toask this, but we've sort of drifted into our current set of alertsand non-alerts over time (probably like many places). So our currentalerts are some combination of things that seemed obvious at thetime, things we added in reaction to stuff that
Thinking about what we probably want for monitoring, metrics, etc
The more I poke at this, the more it feels like we should almostcompletely detach collecting metrics from our alerting. Most of whatwe want to alert on aren't metrics, and most plausible ongoing metricsaren't alertable. (Machine room temperature is a rare exception.)
Partly this is because there is almost no use in alerting on highsystem-level metrics that we can't do anything about. Our alertableconditions are mostly things like 'host down'.
(Yes,
An irritating limitation or two of addons in Firefox Quantum
It's reasonably well known that Firefox addons in Firefox Quantum(ie, WebExtensions addons) are more limited than pre-Quantum addonswere. One of these limitations is the places where addons work atall. Some addons are not deeply affected by these limitations, butones that deeply modify Firefox's UI, such as a gestures addon or an addon thatadds a Vim style interface ( via ) are stronglyaffected because the limitations restriction where they can be usedand thus where the UI works as you expect.
Why updating my Fedora kernels is a complicated multi-step affair
Ah, the delicate yak shaving dance of updating my Fedora system'skernel. Life will be easier when WireGuard is in the upstreamkernel. (It would be even easier if ZFS in the upstream, but that'ssadly probably never going to happen unless Oracle gets very strange.)
You might wonder why updating the kernel is such a complicated thingfor me. Part of the answer is that updating the kernel is, in onesense, not complicated at all. If all I want to
My Firefox addons as of Firefox '64' (the current development version)
As I write this, Firefox 62 is the current released version ofFirefox and Firefox 63 is the beta version, but my primary Firefoxis still a custom hacked version that I build from the developmenttree, so it most closely corresponds to what will be released asFirefox 64 in a couple of months. At this point I feel that I'm farenough into my Firefox Quantum era that my set of addons has moreor less stabilized, especially what I consider my core set, so it'
Using a very old ZFS filesystem can give you a kernel panic on Linux
I recently wrote an entry saying that how you migrate ZFS filesystemsmatters , because if you use ZFS'snative features for copying filesystems around a great deal of ZFS'sinternal on-disk data is retained completely intact. If that datahas problems, you have just replicated those problems from your oldenvironment to your new one. Unfortunately this turns out not tobe a theoretical problem; some people have hit a situation wherehaving used ' zfs send ' to copy very old ZFS filesystems on to amodern Linux