A few years ago I wrote about the divide in chown() about who gotto give away files , where BSD and V7 wereon one side, restricting it to root, while System III and System Vwere on the other, allowing the owner to give them away too. At thetime I quoted the V7 chown(2) explanation of this:

[...] Only the super-user may execute this call, because if userswere able to give files away, they could defeat

A while back I wrote about readdir()'s inode numbers versusOverlayFS , which discussed an issuewhere for efficiency reasons, OverlayFS sometimes returned differentinode numbers in readdir() than in stat() .This is not POSIX legal unless you do some pretty perverseinterpretations ( as covered in my entry ), but lots of filesystems deviatefrom POSIX semantics every so often. A more interesting questionis why, and I suspect the answer is related to another issue that'scome up, the problem of NFS

Yesterday I wrote about restarting or redoing something after asystemd service restarts . Thenon-hypothetical situation that caused me to look into this wasthat after we applied a package update to one system, systemd-networkdon it restarted and wiped out some critical policy based routingrules. Since I vaguely remembered this happening before, I sighedand arranged to have our rules automatically reapplied on bothsystems with policy based routing rules, following the patternI worked out .

Wait, two systems? And one of them didn't

Suppose, not hypothetically, that your system is running some systemdbased service or daemon that resets or erase your carefully cultivatedstate when it restarts. One example is systemd-networkd , although you can turn that off (orparts of it off, at least), but there are likely others. To cleanup after this happens, you'd like to automatically restart or redosomething after a systemd unit is restarted. Systemd supports this,but I found it slightly unclear how you want to do this and today

A while ago I wrote an entry about things that resolved wasn'tfor as of systemd 251 . One of those thingswas arbitrary mappings of (DNS) names to DNS servers, for exampleif you always wanted *.internal.example.org to query a specialDNS server. Systemd-resolved didn't have a direct feature for this and attempting to attach yourDNS names to DNS server mappings to a network interface could gowrong in various ways. Well, time marches on and as of

(This is a story about technology. Sort of.)

Many bicyclists with a GPS bike computer probablyhave it primarily to record their bike rides and then upload themto places like Strava. I'm a bit unusual in that while I do recordmy rides and make some of them public , and I've come to value this,it's not my primary reason to have a GPS bike computer. Instead,my primary reason is following pre-made routes.

When I started with my recreational bike

Over on the Fediverse I shared a fun Firefox issue I've just runinto :

Today's fun Firefox bug: if I move my (Nightly) Firefox window leftand right across my X display, the text inside the window reflowsto change its line wrapping back and forth. I have a HiDPI displaywith non-integer scaling and some other settings, so I'm assumingthat Firefox is now suffering from rounding issues where the exacthorizontal pixel position changes its idea of the CSS window width,triggering

Yesterday I wished for a way to do native "blind" WireGuardrelaying , without needing to layer somethingon top of WireGuard. I wished for this both because it's the simplestapproach for getting through NATs and the one you need in generalunder some circumstances. The classic and excellent work on all ofthe complexities of NAT traversal is Tailscale's How NAT traversalworks , whichalso winds up covering the situation where you absolutely have tohave a relay. But, as I understand things, in a fair

Over on the Fediverse, I sort of had a question :

I wonder if there's any way in standard WireGuard to have a zero-trustnetwork relay, so that two WG peers that are isolated from each other(eg both behind NAT) can talk directly. The standard pure-WG approachhas a public WG endpoint that everyone talks to and which acts asa router for the internal WG IPs of everyone, but this involvesdecrypting and re-encrypting the WG traffic.

By 'talk directly' I