My dividing line between working remotely and working out of the office
I want to talk about working out of the office (because I have someviews on it) but before I launch into that I want to draw a carefuldividing line between remote work and simply working outside of theoffice, lest I accidentally drag the former into a discussion ofthe latter.
To me, working remotely is when you are not in the same (general)location as your employer so you couldn't come in even if you wantedto; there simply is no local office for you. Working
Why I want a solid ZFS implementation on Linux
The short version of this is 'ZFS checksums and ZFS scrubs '. Without strong per-block integrityprotections, there are two issues that I increasingly worry aboutfor my Linux workstations with mirrored disks: read errors on theremaining live disk when resynchronizing a RAID-1 mirror after itloses one disk and slow data loss due to undetected read errors andcorrupted on-disk data. Slow data loss is also a worry for backupson a single backup or especially an archival disk (I'll have morethan one
Why I'm not looking at installing OmniOS via Kayak
As far as I can see, OmniOS's Kayak network install system is therecommended way to both install a bunch of OmniOS machines and tocustomize the resulting installs (for example to change the defaultsizes of various things ). However, even settingaside my usual issues with automatic installers (which can probably be workedaround) I've found myself uninterested in trying to use Kayak.The core problem for me is that Kayak only seems to really besupported on an OmniOS host.
The blunt truth is that
You cannot have just one network install server
Suppose, hypothetically, that you want to install your fleet of machinesin the approved modern way, which is through an automated over thenetwork install system. You PXE boot your new server, pick 'installsystem' from a boot menu ( for good reason ), andafter a while it's all done for you. This sounds great, doesn't it.
So here's a question: how many network install servers do you have?
Your network install server (or servers) is a crucial
A surprise with OmniOS disk sizing: the rpool/dump ZVOL
Until recently, all of my work installing and reinstalling OmniOS hasbeen in a virtual machine, which had a modest configuration. RecentlyI started doing test installs on our real fileserver hardware, whichresulted in a disk sizing surprise in the default OmniOS install.
Our fileserver hardware has 64 GB of RAM and an 80 GB SSD systemdisk (well, two of them but they're mirrored). On this hardware theOmniOS installer set up a dedicated 32 GB chunk of space for kerneldumps (the
A followup to what sudo emails to ignore and not ignore
So I wrote this entry on what sudo emails to ignore and not ignore the other day. Today we got some email from sudo , reporting:
appsN : Feb 7 12:36:24 :: 3 incorrect password attempts ; TTY=pts/NN ; PWD=/h/ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/echo great post Chris! I've got to award this a special bonus prize for probably the mostamusing and clever blog feedback I
Some thoughts on what sudo emails to ignore and to not ignore
If you run a multi-user system with
sudoand your users are anythinglike ours, you will periodically get email alerts fromsudoaboutusers trying to do things. In theory and in an ideal world all of theseemails would be evidence of malign intent because, after all, they'reall from unauthorized users trying to do things as root.In the real world this is not at all the case. In practice we get alot of email from
sudoabout users trying to run things like, oh
An interesting internal Django error we just got
As a result of someone trying to either exploit or damage it, ouraccount request system just notified usthat it had hit an internal exception in the depths of Django. Whilethat's not too great, what was really interesting was the specificexception and where it happened; it boiled down to:
[...]File ".../django/db/backends/sqlite3/base.py", line XXX, in execute return Database.Cursor.execute(self, query,
The big attraction of SQLite
Recently I came an obvious in retrospect realization about what is to methe big and game changing feature of SQLite. I'll put it this way:
SQLite gives you a powerful relational database that doesn't requireyou to run a server .
Running a separate database server is all sorts of hassle. You have toconfigure it, set up access to it, arrange for it to be started whenthe system boots up and then kept running, monitor it to make sure thatit's still running, and
Technological progress and efficiency
Let's start with a tweet (via @etrever ):
Sit down and ponder the fact that the fastest tools on your machinecome from the 1970s and tool speed correlates negatively with time.
My reaction to this is 'isn't technological progress great?'
Tools in the 1970s had no choice but to be both screamingly efficientand generally relatively limited because they ran on machines that todaywe would consider extremely tiny. For one extreme example, the embeddedCPU on your
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