Why email is often not as good as modern communication protocols
I was recently reading Git is already federated & decentralized ( via ).To summarize the article, it's a reaction to proposals to decentralizelarge git servers (of the Github/Gitlab variety) by having themtalk to each other with ActivityPub. Drew DeVault ntes that notesthat Git can already be used in a distributed way over email,describes how git forges could talk to each other via email, andcontrasts it with ActivityPub. In the process of this article, DrewDeVault proposes using email not just between
Some more notes on Firefox 63 and perhaps later media autoplay settings
A few months ago I wrote some notes on Firefox's current mediaautoplay settings , which describedthe then state of affairs of Firefox Nightly and Firefox (and Ithen followed it up by discovering that Firefox needed some degreeof autoplay support ). It's perhaps notsurprising that Mozilla has kept evolving this (given the generalpublicity around how people are unhappy about auto-playing videos),so things have changed around a bit in Firefox Nightly and thuspresumably in Firefox 63 and later (until they change
How I want to use Go's versioned modules
I thought that I understood Go's 'vgo' versioned modules after reading thingslike Russ Cox's "Go & Versioning" series . Then I started poking at themfor the usage cases I'm interested in, and now I'm more confusedthan before.
The available Go documentation makes it pretty clear how to workwith Go modules for your own code, and there are walk-throughs likeDave Cheney's Taking Go modules for a spin . Butmuch of my use of Go is in
Firefox now implements its remote control partly over D-Bus
On Unix, Firefox has had a long standing feature where you couldremote control a running Firefox instance .This has traditionally worked through X properties (with twogenerations of protocols ), which hasthe nice advantage that it works from remote machines as well asyour local one, provided that you're forwarding X. Since I read mymail through exmh that's running on oneof our servers, not my desktop, this is pretty useful for me; I canclick on a link in mail in exmh,
Ubuntu 18.04's problem with Amanda's amrecover
If you use Amanda to back up your machines (as we do), and you havejust added some Ubuntu 18.04 LTS machines to your fleet and installedthe usual amanda-client Ubuntu package to get the necessary clientprograms, you may some day fire up amrecover on one of them torestore some of those backups. Well, to attempt to restore thosebackups:
# amrecover -s-t -C AMRECOVER Version 3.5.
The hidden danger of using rsync to copy files instead of cp
I have a long standing reflexive habit that most of them time whenI want to copy files around, I reach for '
rsync -a' by default.I do it on the command line, and I do it in things like our localpostinstall system setup scripts .It's not really necessary these days ('cp -a' now works fine oneverything I commonly use), but I started doing this in an era whenrsyncwas the clearly safest choice for a 'copy file, preservingall
Being reminded that an obvious problem isn't necessarily obvious
The other day we had a problem with one of our NFS fileservers , where a ZFS filesystem filledup to its quota limit, people kept writing to the filesystem athigh volume, and the fileserver got unhappy . This nice neat descriptionhides the fact that it took me some time to notice that the onefilesystem that our DTrace scripts were pointing to as having all of the slow NFS IO was a fullfilesystem. Then and only then did the penny finally start dropping(which led me to a temporary fix).
My own configuration files don't have to be dotfiles in $HOME
Back when I started with Unix (a long time ago), programs had asimple approach to where to look for or put little files that theyneeded; they went into your
$HOMEas dotfiles, or if the programwas going to have a bunch of them it might create a dot-directoryfor itself. This started with shells (eg$HOME/.profile) andspread steadily from there, especially for early open source programs.When I started writing shell scripts, setup scripts for my Xenvironment
Our ZFS fileservers aren't happy when you do NFS writes to a full filesystem
The ZFS pools on our fileservers all haveoverall pool quotas, ultimately because of how we sell storageto people , and we've historically hadproblems when a pool fills completely up to its quota limit andpeople keep writing to it. In the past, this has led to fileserverlockups . Today I got a reminder of somethingI think we've seen before, which is that we can also get problems whenjust a filesystem fills up to its individual quota limit even if thepool is still under its overall
Word-boundary regexp searches are what I usually want
I'm a person of relatively fixed and slow to change habits as far asUnix commands go. Once I've gotten used to doing something in one way,that's generally it, and worse, many of my habits fossilized many yearsago. All of this is a long-winded lead in to explaing why I have onlyrecently gotten around to really using the '
\b' regular expressionescape character. This is a real pity, because now that I have my bigreaction is 'whatMenu
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