In my writeup on our new OmniOS fileservers I mentioned that we had built them out with 10G-T networking fortheir iSCSI networking (using onboard Intel X540-AT2 based ports)and their public NFS interface (using one port of a dual-port Intel82599EB TN card). Since then, well, things have not gone so well and in factwe're in the process of moving all production fileservers to 1Gnetworking until we can understand what

This is a war story, but not my war story; this is all my coworkers'work.

Writing a working Samba configuration is a lot of painful work.There are many options, many of them interact with clients in oddand weird ways , and the whole thing oftenfeels like a delicately balanced house of cards. As a result we wehave a configuration that we've painstakingly evolved over the manyyears that we've been using Samba. When we needed a second Sambaserver dedicated to a particular

The tech news has recently been full of reports that some ISPs aremodifying SMTP conversations passing through them in order to removeencryption, or more specifically to remove a note that the serveris offering it (this goes by the name of 'STARTTLS'). Some peopleare up in arms over it; others are saying that this is no big dealbecause it's not as if TLS on SMTP conversations means muchin the first place.This latter viewpoint may raise some eyebrows. The reason why TLSSMTP means

In light of the lurking Unicode conversion issues in my DWikiport to Python 3 , one of the things I've realizedI would like in Python 3 is some way to turn off all of the implicitconversions to and from Unicode that Python 3 currently does when ittalks to the outside world.

The goal here is the obvious one: since any implicit conversion isa place where I need to consider how to handle errors, characterencodings, and so on, making them either raise errors or producebytestrings would allow

For quixotic reasons I recently decided to see how far I could get withporting DWiki (the code behind this blog ) to Python 3 beforeI ran out of either patience or enthusiasm. I've gotten much furtherthan I expected; at this point I'm far enough that it can handle thisentire site when running under Python's builtin basic HTTP server,rendering the HTML exactly the same as the Python 2 version does.

Getting this far basically took three steps. The largest step was updating the code

Recently I decided that Ineeded a non-default icon aka profile picture for my Twitter account.Although I have pictures of myself, I never considered using one;it's not something that I do. Mostly I don't set profile pictureson websites that ask for them and if I do, it's never actually apicture of me.

Part of this habit is certainly that I don't feel like giving nosywebsites that much help (and they're almost all nosy). Sure

On most Unix systems NFS mounts come in your choice of two flavours,hard or soft. The Linux nfs manpage actually has a very good description of the difference; the shortsummary is that a hard NFS mount will keep trying NFS operationsendlessly until the server responds while a soft NFS mount willgive up and return errors after a while.

You can find people with very divergent opinions about which isbetter ( cf , 2 ). My opinion is fairly strongly negative about soft mounts. The problem is thatit is

For quixotic reasons I decided to take a shot atporting DWiki to Python 3 just to see how difficult and annoying itwould be and how far I could get. One of the surprising things aboutthe process has been that a great deal of porting to Python 3 has beenless about porting the code and more about modernizing it to currentPython 2 standards.

DWiki is what is now a pretty old codebase ( as you might guess ) and even when it was new it wasn't written withthe latest Python idioms

Exerpted from a comment on my entry about my problem with reportingCentOS bugs :

You could not be more wrong about your assumptions:

[...]

• Bugs.centos.org is community help .. meaning that our users andvolunteer QA team answer questions there. Not only should you reportbugs there .. you should also find and fix, the report the fixthere. That is how open source works. You should fix the problem,report the fix to bugs.centos.org and bugzilla.redhat