My workflow for testing Github pull requests
Every so often a Github-based project I'm following has a pending pullrequest that might solve a bug or otherwise deal with something I careabout, and it needs some testing by people like me. The simple case iswhen I am not carrying any local changes; it is adequately covered bypart of Github's Checking out pull requests locally (skip to the bit where they talk about ' git fetch '). A more elaborateversion is:
git fetch origin pull//head
A cynical view on needing SSDs in all your machines in the future
Let's start with my tweets:
@thatcks :Dear Firefox Nightly: doing ten+ minutes of high disk IO on startupbefore you even start showing me my restored session is absurd.
@thatcks :Clearly the day is coming when using a SSD is going be not merelyuseful but essential to get modern programs to perform decently.I didn't say this just because programs are going to want to domore and more disk IO over time. Instead, I said it because of atraditional developer behavior,
Why I still report bugs
I've written plenty of entries here over the years about why people don't reportbugs (myself included). Yet I still report bugs against some projects.
The quiet reality of bug reports that I haven't mentioned so far isthat when one of my bug report goes well, it's an amazingly goodfeeling. When I find a bug, isolate it, maybe peer into the code toidentify the cause, file a report, and have the project authors say'that's a
Spammers mine everything, Github edition
It's not news that spammers will trawleverything they can easily get their hands on for anything thatlooks like email addresses. But every so often I get anotherillustration of this effect and it strikes me as interesting.This time around it's with the email address I use for Github.
This email address is of course an expendable address , since it's exposed in git commits that Ipush to Github. It's also exposed to Github itself, but I don'tthink Github leaks it
Why I increasingly think we're unlikely to ever use Docker
Apart from my general qualms about containers in our environment , I have increasingly wound up thinking thatDocker itself is not a good fit for our environment even if we wantto use some form of service containerization for various reasons.The problem is access to data.
Our current solution for services gaining access to servicedata is NFS filesystems from our central fileservers . Master DNS zone files, webpages and web apps for our administrative web server, core datafiles used by our mail gateway, you name it and it lives in
Everything that does TLS should log the SSL parameters used
Every server and client that makes SSL connections should have anoption to log the protocols and ciphers that actually get used.
Having logs of SSL protocols/ciphers in use by your actual users isvital to answering the question of 'can we safely disablenow?' As we've seen repeatedly, every so often there are problems uncoveredwith TLS ciphers , key exchange protocols,and related things. That's certainly been the pattern in the pastand a
Fedora 22's problem with my scroll wheel
Shortly after I upgraded to Fedora 22, I noticed that my scrollwheel was, for lack of a betterdescription, 'stuttering' in some applications. I'd roll it in onedirection and instead of scrolling smoothly, what the application wasdisplaying would jerk around all over, both up and down. It didn'thappen all of the time and fortunately it didn't happen in any of mymain applications, but it happened often enough to be frustrating.As far as I can tell,
Some thoughts on log rolling with date extensions
For a long time everyone renamed old logs in the same way; the mostrecent log got a
.0on the end, the next most recent got a.1on the end, and so on. About the only confusion between systems wasthat some started from.0and some from.1, and also whetheror not your logs got gzip'd. These days, the Red Hat and Fedoraderived Linuxes have switched to lograte'sdateextsetting, wherethe extension that old logs get is date
A modest little change I'd like to see in bug reporting systems
It is my opinion that sometimes little elements of wording and culturematter. One of those little elements of culture that has been naggingat me lately is the specifics of how Bugzilla and probably other bugreporting systems deal with duplicate bug reports; they are set to'closed as a duplicate of
'. On the one hand, this is perfectly accurate. On the other hand,almost all of the time one of my bug reports is closed out this wayI wind up feeling like I shouldn'
The OmniOS kernel can hold major amounts of unused memory for a long time
The Illumos kernel (which means the kernels of OmniOS, SmartOS, andso on) has an oversight which can cause it to hold down a potentiallylarge amount of unused memory in unproductive ways. We discoveredthis on our most heavily used NFS fileserver ;on a server with 128 GB of RAM, over 70 GB of RAM was being helddown by the kernel and left idle for an extended time. As you canimagine, this didn't help the ZFS ARC size, which got choked down
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