Every so often I do the unwise thing of turning over rocks in theweb logs for this blog . Today, one of the things that Ifound under there was a web spider with the claimed User-Agent of:

BuckyOHare/1.4 (Googlebot/2.1; +https://hypefactors.com/webcrawler)

The requests all came from AWS IP address space, so I have no idea ifthis actually belongs to the people that it claims to. As is typicalfor these spiders,

In the old days, one of the ways that you could irritate people wasto build your web pages using full-sized, full-resolution imagesand then tell the user's browser to resize them for you. This wasthe lazy person's way of building your pages (because it didn'trequire you to find a good image resizing program), and while itgenerally tested okay on your local network, it made a whole lotof people annoyed as their browsers slowly downloaded your bigimages only

In light of recent events , OmniOS badlyneeds people who really care about it, the kind of people who arewilling and eager to contribute their own time and efforts to thegenerally thankless work of keeping a distribution running; integratingupstream changes, backporting security and bug updates, maintainingvarious boring pieces of infrastructure, and so on. There is anidealistic portion of me that would like me to be such a person,and thus that wants me to step forward to volunteer for things here(on the OmniOS mailing list

Several years ago I wrote an entry about why we're switching toSSDs for system disks , yet the other day thereI was writing about how we recycle old disks to be system disks and maybe switching to fixed sizeroot filesystems to deal with some issues there . A reasonable person mightwonder what happened between point A and point B . What happened is not anyof the problems that I thought might happen ;instead it is a story of good intentions meeting rational butunfortunate decisions.

The first thing that happened was

Pretty much every modern system defaults to having data you writeto filesystems be buffered by the operating system and only writtenout asynchronously; you have to take special steps either to makeyour write IO synchronous or to force it to disk ( which can leadto design challenges ). When the operatingsystem is buffering data like this, one obvious issue is the maximumamount of data it should let you buffer up before you have to slowdown or stop.

Let's start with two obvious observations. First, if you

There are always some people who like to fiddle around with things.Some number of photographers are always shuffling camera settingsor experimenting with different post-processing; some number ofcyclists are always changing bits of their bikes; some car enthusiastslike fiddling with engines and so on. But most people are not reallyinterested in this; they want to get something that works and thenthey want it to keep on just like that, because it works and it'swhat they know.

Computers are not an exception to this

Recently (ie, today) there has been all sorts of commotion in the news about various organizations getting badly hit by malware thatexploits a vulnerability that was patched by Microsoft in MS17-010 ,a patch that was released March 14th. I'm sure that the usualsuspects are out in force pointing their fingers at organizationsfor not patching. In response to this you might want to read, say, Steve Bellovin on the practical difficulties of patching .I agree with all of this

Since Go 1.5, building Go from source requires an existing 'bootstrap'Go compiler. For at least a while, the fastest previous Go versionto use for this was Go 1.4, the last version written in C and alsothe version that generally compiled Go source code the fastest.When I wrote up my process of building Go from source , I discovered that using Go 1.7.5 or Go 1.8.1was actually now a bit faster than using Go 1.4

I wrote recently about how ' zfs receive ' makes no attempt torecover from damaged input ,which means that if you save ' zfs send ' output somewhere and yoursaved file gets damaged, you are up the proverbial creek. It isworth mentioning that this is not an easy or simple problem to solvein general, and that doing a good job of this is likely going toaffect a number of aspects of your archive file format and how it'sprocessed. So let's talk a bit about what