Sometimes I go out of my way to turn over rocks in the web server logs for WanderingThoughts , but other times my log monitoring turns them overfor me. The latter is how I know that Wandering Thoughts hasbeen seeing periodic bursts of unusual POST requests that don'tappear to have a Content-Type . I saw another such burst today,so I'm going to write this one up.

Today's burst is six requests from a single IP (86.139.1

As a university department with a centralized fileserver environment plus a wide variety of professors andresearch groups, we have a space allocation problem. Namely, weneed some way to answer the question of who gets how much space,especially in the face of uneven grant funding levels. Our historicaland current answer is that we allocate space by selling it to peoplefor a fixed one-time cost (for various reasons we can't givepeople free space ). People can have as muchspace as they're willing

As I mentioned back in December ,we are slowly working on the design and build out of our next (third)generation of ZFS NFS fileservers, to replace the current generation , which dates from 2014. Things havehappened a little sooner than I was expecting us to manage, but thebasic reason for that is we temporarily had some money . At this point we have actuallybought all the hardware and more or less planned out the design ofthe new environment (assuming that nothing goes wrong on the

I recently wrote an entry about the shifting goals of our customNFS mount authorization system , wherewe moved away from authenticating our own machines and now onlyneed to authenticate machines run by other people on other internal networks . You might wonderwhy we used to authenticate our own machines on our own network,or alternately why we were able to make the shift away from doingso (and if you're the right sort of person, you already have aguess).

The origins of our custom NFS mount authorization system

A lot of things about the how the CA business operates and what CAsdo is puzzling from the outside, and may even lead people to wonderinghow exactly a CA could ever do some particular crazy thing. I'vecome to feel that we can understand a lot by understanding that the first imperative of a commercial CA is to sell TLS certificates,no matter what it requires .

(This is different from the CA's first job of havingits root certificates included in all of the browsers, which these days

In the normal course of events, PID rollover is one of those things that I know about but that I don't reallyexpect to ever actively observe, especially on a workstation stylemachine. Linux may roll over PIDs after reaching PID 32767 (bydefault), but to to do this in even four days requires a consistentprocess creation and recycling rate of over five a minute for thosefour days, and my machines aren't that busy, at least notunless there's something

As a copy on write (file)system, ZFS can use the transaction group(txg) numbers that are embedded in ZFS blockpointers to efficiently find the differencesbetween two txgs; this is used in, for example, ZFS bookmarks . However, as I noted at the end of myentry on block pointers , this doesn't give usa filesystem level difference; instead, it essentially gives usa list of inodes (okay, dnodes ) thatchanged.

In theory, turning an inode or dnode number

On Unix, everything is a process (generally including the threadsinside processes, because that makes life simpler), and all processeshave a PID (Process ID). In theory, the only special PID is PID 1,which is init , which has various jobs andwhich often causes your system to reboot if it dies ( which isn'trequired even if most Unixes do it). SomeUnixes also have a special 'PID 0', which is a master process inthe kernel (on Illumos PID

Back in January, I switched over to my Ryzen-based office workstation and unfortunately more or less immediately hitproblems , the most pernicious of which wasan ongoing hang under some circumstances when the machine becameidle, which turned out to be a known issue that a fair number ofpeople were running into ( Fedora , kernel.org , Ubuntu ).From the bug reports about the issue, I was able to research somekernel parameters that stabilized my system ,but I didn't consider this really satisfactory for various