Let's start with my tweets:

@thatcks :There's nothing quite like getting a weekend alert that a machine roomwe have network gear in is at 30C and climbing. Probably AC failure.

@thatcks : @isomer There is approximately nothing I can do, too. I'm not even sure who topotentially call, partly because it's not our machine room.

(This is the same machine room that got flooded because of an ACfailure , which certainly added a degreeof

Once your storage system is using more than a single disk to createa pool of storage, there are a number of operations that you canwant to do in order to restructure that pool of storage. Two ofthem are shrinking and reshaping. It's common for volume managersand modern filesystems like btrfs tobe able to shrink storage pool by removing a disk (or a set ofmirrored disks), although not all modern filesystems support doingthis . It's also becoming increasinglycommon for RAID (sub)

One of the things about ZFS that bites people every so often isthat you can't remove devices from ZFS pools. If you do ' zpool addPOOL DEV ', congratulations, that device or an equivalent replacementis there forever. More technically, you cannot remove vdevs oncethey're added, although you can add and remove mirrors from amirrored vdev. Since people do make mistakes with ' zpool add ',this is periodically a painful limitation. At this point you mightwell ask why ZFS can'

I've now been running ZFS on Linux for a while .Over that time, one of the small little annoyances of the ZoLexperience has been that all ZFS commands required you to be root,even if all you wanted to do was something innocuous like ' zpoolstatus ' or ' zfs list '. This wasn't for any particularly goodreason and it's not how Solaris and Illumos behave; it was justnecessary because the ZoL kernel code itself had no permissionsrestrictions on anything for complicated porting reasons

It's now been a bit over a year since Wandering Thoughts switched from HTTP to HTTPS, of coursewith a pragmatic permanent redirect fromthe HTTP version to the HTTPS version. In theory syndication feedreaders should notice permanent HTTP redirections and update theirfeed fetching information to just get the feed from its new location( although there are downsides to doing this too rapidly ).

In practice, apparently, not so much. Looking at yesterday's statsfrom this server , there are 6,700 HTTPrequests

XDG is what was once called the X Desktop Group and is now freedesktop.org . Part of theirwork is to create various cross-desktop and desktop agnostic standardsand tools for how to do things like determine what program shouldhandle a particular MIME type. This includes special 'scheme' MIMEtypes, like x-scheme-handler/ftp , which means 'whatever shouldhandle FTP' (technically this is 'FTP urls').The XDG tool for mapping MIME types to programs (actually .desktop files

Let's start with my tweet :

It sure would be convenient if xdg-open documented how it picked whichbrowser to use, so you could maybe change that to one you like.

XDG here is what used to be called the 'X Desktop Group' and is now freedesktop.org ( per wikipedia ). As you might thenguess, xdg-open the program is the canonical KDE/GNOME/etc agnosticway of opening (among other things) an URL in whatever is nominallyyour preferred browser.

As a slow little project for the past while, I have been addingsome accessible statistics to my sinkhole SMTP server , using Go's expvarpackage . This has resulted in melearning lessons both about expvar in specific and the process of adding statistics in general.

My big learning experience is going to sound fairly obvious andtrite: I only really figured out what statistics I wanted to exposethrough experimentation. I started out with the idea that countingsome obvious things would be interesting (and to a certain extentthey were

Here is a trite and obvious thing that I never the less feel likewriting down: in practice, there are (at least) two sorts of DNSanti-spam blocklists. Since I want to use value neutral terms here,let us call these 'simple' and 'complex' blocklists.

The operation of a simple DNSBL is, well, simple. If it sees spamfrom an IP, it lists the IP (or if it sees whatever is the DNSBL'sidea of 'bad stuff')