Wireless is now critical (network) infrastructure
When I moved over to here a decadeor so ago, we (the department) had a wireless network that was moreor less glued together out of spare parts. One reason for this,beyond simply money, is that wireless networking was seen as a niceextra for us to offer to our users and thus not something we couldjustify spending a lot on. If we had to prioritize (and we did),wired networking was much higher up the heap than wireless. Wirednetworking was essential; the wireless
Looking back at my mixed and complicated feelings about Solaris
So Oracle killed Solaris (and SPARC) a couple of weeks ago. I can'tsay this is surprising, although it's certainly sudden andunderhanded in the standard Oracle way . Back whenOracle killed Sun, I was sad for the death of a dream ,despite having had ups and downs with Sun over the years .My views about the death of Solaris are more mixed and complicated,but I will summarize them by saying that I don't feel very sad aboutSolaris itself (although there are
Sorting out the world of modern USB (at least a bit)
Part of thinking about new machines for home and work is figuringout what motherboard I want, and part of that is figuring out whatI want and need in motherboard features. I've looked into howmany SATA ports I want and what it willtake to drive a 4K monitor with onboard graphics ,so now I've been trying to figure out USB ports. Part of this istrying to understand the different sorts of USB ports that thereare and what you can do with them.
(This would
Why I didn't use the attrs module in a recent Python project
I've been hearing buzz about the attrs Python module for a while ( for example ). I was recentlywriting a Python program where I had some structures and using attrs to define the classesinvolved would have made the code shorter and more obvious. Atfirst I was all fired up to finally use attrs , but then I took astep back and reluctantly decided that doing so would be the wrongchoice.
You see, this was code for work, and while my co-workers can workin Python,
Ignoring the domain when authenticating your Dovecot users
In this recent entry , I wrote about howsome of our users periodically try to authenticate to our DovecotIMAP server with the user name ' Dovecot is somewhat underdocumented, at least online and in manualpages. Your best source of information for what specific configurationsettings Back in June I wrote an entry about the current state of pre-WebExtensions addons and what I thoughtwas the likely future of them. Based on Mozilla's wiki page on this , which said that legacyextensions could still be loaded on Nightly builds with a preference, Isaid I expected that they would keep working well into the future. Asfar as I can currently tell, I was wrong about that and my optimisticbelief was completely off. As of right now given the ongoing state of Firefox Nightly, Here's a mistake that I've made more than once and that I'm goingto try to get rid of by writing it down. Systemd organizes running processes into a tree of, well, let'scall them units for now (mechanically they're control groups), whichpartly manifests in the form of slice units . Oneof the big divisions in this hierarchy is between processes involvedin services, which are put under I've been a little harsh lately on how systemd has been ( not ) shutting down our systems,and certainly it has some issues and it could be better. But I wantto note that in general and in practice, shutting down a Unix systemis a complicated thing that involves tradeoffs and policy decisions;in fact I maintain that it's harder than booting the system. Further,the more full-featured you attempt to make system shutdown, themore policy decisions and tradeoffs you need to make. Most Unix init systems have a single way of stopping a daemon or aservice, and on the surface this feels correct. And mostly it is,and mostly it works. However, I've recently come around to believingthat this is a mistake and an over-generalization. I now believethat there are three different contexts and you may well want tostop things somewhat differently in each, depending on the daemonor service. This is especially the case if the daemon spawns multipleand somewhat independent processes as part Like many places, we have an IMAPserver (currently we're using Dovecot). This IMAP server is partof our overall Unix authentication environment ,so users log in to their IMAP mailboxes using their Unix login andpassword (well, their general login name and password, since it'salso used for Samba access, authentication with several web servers,and so on). More specifically, users log in to our IMAP server using just their Unix login; they do not use '
Firefox 57 and the state of old pre-WebExtensions addons
Sorting out systemd's system.conf, user.conf, and logind.conf
system.slice , and user sessionprocesses, which are under user
System shutdown is complicated and involves policy decisions
The different contexts of stopping a Unix daemon or service
Giving users what they want and expect, IMAP edition
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