The irritation of all of the Ubuntu kernels you wind up with
Let's start with my tweet :
I really dislike just how difficult Debian and Ubuntu make it to onlykeep the last N kernels and remove all the rest. What a stupid mess.
(I may be unfairly slamming Debian here, but if so they have theirown terrible problem with kernel updates.)
One of the many stupid things about the Ubuntu kernel update processis how if you just use ' apt-get install ' to install kernel updates,you'll wind up with a steadily increasing collection of
I don't trust Linux distributions to leave directories alone
In yesterday's entry I said in passing:
My view is that basically every directory that your OS distributioncreates is best left alone and unused, and thus should be left on theroot filesystem. [...]
In theory there are any number of directories on typical Linuxdistributions (and typical Unix distributions in general) thatshould be safe for you to use without disturbance by the OS. There'sthings like /usr/local , /home , /opt , and yes, some of you
How many recent sender domains are in the Spamhaus DBL
The Spamhaus DBL is, well, let'squote it directly:
The Spamhaus DBL is a realtime database of domains (typically web sitedomains) found in spam messages. [...]
Per Spamhaus's documentation, the recommended or best way of usingthe DBL is to check URLs in incoming messages against it. Howeveryou can also use it to check domain names from other sources, suchas DNS hostnames, EHLO claimed names, and the host or domain namein the envelope sender address (the
There's no point in multiple system filesystems any more
Over the years I've written a number of things about how I thinkone should partition up your disk or disks for your system filesystems.Three things have been constant in those successive updates; thesizes of everything has kept growing, the amount I trust thingslike software RAID and LVM has kept increasing, and the number ofseparate filesystems has kept shrinking. Today I feel like writingdown my current views, which are really simple. To wit, I feelthere's no point in having more than /
There are two approaches to disaster recovery plans
One of the things I've come to believe in is that there are twoways to approach thinking about your disaster recovery planning(even if you're being quite abstract ).The first approach is to think about how you'd restore your services,while the second approach is to think about how you'd get your usersworking again.
Thinking about how you'd restore your services is very sexy. Itleads to planning out things like alternate server rooms, temporarycloud hosting, essential initial infrastructure
What creates a good wikitext dialect depends on how it's going to be used
One of the things I've learned over the course of writing DWiki andthen using it here on Wandering Thoughts is that whatmakes a good wikitext is partly contextdependent. In this case, 'context' means 'what sort of things thewiki is going to be used to write about'.This comes about because of two things; the rule that a good wikitextdialect doesn't get in your way, and the limited supply of specialcharacters that we have available to use as markup characters. Good
Why I can't see IPv6 as a smooth or fast transition
Today I got native IPv6 up at home . My homeISP had previously been doing tunneled IPv6 (over IPv4), exceptthat I'd turned my tunnel off back in June for some reason (I thinksomething broke and I just shrugged and punted). I enjoyed the feelingof doing IPv6 right for a few hours, and then, well:
@thatcks :The glorious IPv6 future: with IPv6 up, Google searches sometimes justcut off below the initial banner and search box
There are good and bad wikitext dialects
One of the things about wikitext dialects that I've essentiallyasserted in passing is that there are 'good' and 'bad' dialects.Perhaps this raises your eyebrows, either because you think allwikitext dialects are a bad idea or because you don't see whatcreates such a difference.
There are two possible criteria for goodness in wikitext (or ingeneral any simple markup scheme), depending on why you're usinga wikitext . For a markup aimed at empoweringbeginners, what probably matters is how
Maybe I should try to find another good mini keyboard
As I've mentioned a few times before ,I've been using one particular mini keyboard for a very long time now andI've become very attached to it. It's thoroughly out of production(although I have spares) and worse, it uses a PS/2 interface whichpresents problems in the modern world .One solution is certainly to go to a lot of work to keep on usingit anyways, but I've been considering if perhaps I shouldn't try tofind a
On not having people split their time between different bosses
In some places, it is popular (or occasionally done) to say somethinglike 'well, this area only has the money for 1/3rd of a sysadmin,and this area has the money for 2/3rds of a sysadmin, so I know;we'll hire one sysadmin and split her up'. It is my personal viewthat this is likely to be a mistake, especially as often implemented.There are at least two pathologies you can run into here.
The basic pathology is