I have an odd confession: sometimes I feel (irrationally) embarrassedthat despite being a computer person, I don't have a laptop. Everyoneelse seems to have one, yet here I am, clearly behind the times,clinging to a desktop-only setup. At times like this I naturallywind up considering the issue of what laptop I might get if I wasgoing to get one, and after my recent exposure to a Chromebook I've been thinking aboutthis once again.

I'll never

I mentioned yesterday that Ihave a Chromebook hanging around here at the moment. It's for arelative so I haven't played with it very much, but I have pokedat it enough to spot one obvious issue: the login and password youuse to log into and unlock the Chromebook is your Google account'spassword. This is a potential problem because the properties you'dlike for the two passwords are relatively different.

My perception is that many people keep themselves logged in to theirGoogle account

A couple of months ago I hacked together an IPv6 configuration formy home wireless network, which I wrote up in What I did to setup IPv6 on my wireless network . Today Icompletely ripped that configuration apart and put something backtogether again that does IPv6 totally differently and almost certainlyrather better. In the process I discovered all sorts of mistakes I'dmade the first time around, mistakes that I'm going to document foryour amusement and my education.

The direct cause of completely changing

Yesterday I mentioned thatwe have a locally written PAM module that runs a shell script todo various post-password-change things. If you're reasonably familiarwith PAM modules, you may be reminded of the pam_exec module , and you might even bewondering why we don't just use it instead of having our own module.That's actually a good question, and when I was working on thisrecently I wondered it myself and went as far as setting it up andtesting it to

I recently said some things about our experience with ZFS checksums on Twitter ,and it turns out I have to take one bit of it back a bit. And in thatlies an interesting story about what may be a coincidence and may notbe.

A couple of weeks ago, we had our first disk failure in our newfileserver environment ; everything went aboutas smoothly as we expected and our automatic spares system fixed things up in the short term. Specifically,what failed was one of the SSDs in our all-

(This is a sysadmin war story.)

We have a password master machine , whichruns some version of Ubuntu LTS like almost all of our machines.More specifically, it currently runs Ubuntu 12.04 and we need toupgrade it to Ubuntu 16.04. Naturally upgrading our master machinefor passwords requires testing, which is a good thing because Iwound up running into a whole cascade of interesting issues in theprocess. So today I'm going to walk through how one innocent change

If you read RFCs, you may know about the standard use of the MUST,SHOULD, and so on key words that come from RFC 2119 . RFC 6919 , issued April 1st 2013, addssome useful additional key words like "MUST (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T)","REALLY SHOULD NOT", and the like.

By itself this would be amusing and interesting. But what reallymakes RFC 6919 rewarding to read is that

I know myself, so I know that I'm prone to bursts of enthusiasmwith things that start abruptly and then wear off later into moremoderate and sensible views (or all the way down to dislike). Inthe past I've been quite down on Python 3, and even recently I wasonly kind of lukewarm on it, but for no really good reason I'velately wound up feeling pretty enthused about working in it.

Part of this is certainly due to my recent positive experiencewith it

One of our fileservers had a kernel panictoday as we were adding some more multipathed iSCSI disks to it.This was unfortunate but not fatal; we caught the panic almost rightaway and fixed things relatively fast. Which is unfortunate in itsown way and brings me to my wish.

You see, this was perhaps our most important and core fileserver.Everything depends on it and everything eventually goes out to lunchif and while it's down. And in our experience, in our environment,making an OmniOS crash