Earlier this year, Byran Cantrill kind of issued a call for peopleto talk about their DTrace success stories . I dowant to write up a blog entry about all of the times we've usedDTrace to solve our problems, but it's clearly not happening soon,so for now I want to stop stalling and at least say a bit about thekind of situations we use DTrace for.

Unlike some people, we don't make routine use of DTrace; it's nota part of ongoing

I've written about how we can divide DNS blocklists into 'simple'and 'complex' ones , where simple DNSBLs basicallylist things based on them sending spam or other bad stuff withouttrying to do more complex things like assess how much legitimatetraffic also comes from the source. To put it one way, if a DNSBLlists one of GMail's outgoing SMTP servers because it sent somespam, it's almost certainly a simple one. I also said that rejectingemail based on a simple DNSBL isn

I have a long-standing dislike of Grub2 ( eg , and ). Ever since I started having to deal with itI've felt that it's really overcomplicated, and this complexitymakes it harder to deal with. There's a lot more to know and learnwith Grub2 than there is with the original Grub, and I resent theadded complexity for what I feel should be a relatively simpleprocess.

You know what? The world doesn't care what I think. Grub2

For reasons well beyond the scope of this entry, I don't use agraphical login program like gdm; I log in on the text console andstart X by hand through xinit (which is sometimes annoying ). When I want to log out, I cause theX server to exit and then log out of the text console as normal.Now, I don't know how gdm et al handle session cleanup, but for methis always leaves some processes lingering around that just haven'tgotten the

A long time ago, I hung around Usenet in various places. One of thethings that certain Usenet groups featured was what we would todaycall trolls; people who were deliberately nasty and obnoxious.Sometimes they were nasty in their own newsgroups; sometimes theytook gleeful joy in going out to troll other newsgroups full ofinnocents. Back in those days there were also sometimes gatheringsof Usenet people so you could get to meet and know your fellowposters. One of the consistent themes that came out of these meetupswas reports

I know, I've said bad things about Chrome extensions before . Still, I seem to have slowly accumulated a numberof extensions that I use, some of which I even trust, and thatmeans it's worth actually documenting them so I can keep track(and easily put them into a new Chrome instance someday).

Unsurprisingly, my Chrome extensions are broadly similar in spiritto my normal set of Firefox extensions .Some of these Chrome extensions date back to years ago when I madea serious attempt to

I tweeted :

So, Ubuntu 16.04 can't apply MySQL server updates if you have theserver installed but have disabled it running. Good show, you lot.

We install the MySQL server package on a few machines but deliberatelydon't start the daemon. In older versions of Ubuntu, this workedreasonably well; you could do it, you could keep the daemon fromstarting on boot, and you could apply updates (although doing sogenerally started the daemon up, so you had to

For reasons beyond the scope of this entry , I recentlyset up a new Firefox profile. As a new profile it needs to be (re)customized for my preferences, including extensions. I can't justuse my regular browser's set of extensions because this profile is for staying logged in to Twitter and needsto be set up so that Twitter is usable. Also, I don't want to spenda lot of time maintaining it, because I'm only going to use it oncein

I will put my conclusion up front:

Official source releases should not build software with -Werror orthe equivalent .

(By official source releases I mean things like 'we are releasingversion 1.x.y of our package today'.)

Perhaps you disagree. Then the rest of this entry is for you.

As I write this, the current release version of Rust is 1.10.0. This version (andprobably all previous ones) won't build on the recently releasedFedora 2