One of the ways that things like systemd and upstart are differentfrom the traditional /etc/init.d approach to starting and restartingservices is in who starts and restarts services. In the traditionalapproach, you do this directly by running /etc/init.d scripts (eitherexplicitly or through some cover scripts). In the systemd world, thingsare indirect; ' systemctl start foo.service ' just asks the mastersystemd to run the appropriate commands to start the service.

There is a somewhat subtle advantage

One of the SysAdvent entries I recently read was John Vincent's Always Be Hacking ,about how all sysadmins should be able to program. He gives a bunch ofsensible, rational, career-related reasons for this, all of which Iwholeheartedly agree with. Still, all of that career related stuff is abit dry and calculating, and maybe you're not really enthused by it (anymore than many Unix sysadmins are enthused by Windows, popular ornot).

As it happens, I feel that

If you're an innocent person (like I used to be), the Solaris iSCSIinitiator appears much like how it works on other Unixes. You have anadministrative command ( iscsiadm ), a system daemon ( iscsid , whichis what the SMF service svc:/network/iscsi/initiator starts), and akernel component that presumably turns iSCSI connections into SCSIdisks. Unfortunately this view of Solaris is highly misleading, oras I should actually admit, wrong.

Because of the complexity involved, most systems

In response to my entry on the boot time ZFS and iSCSI sequencing bug , a commentator asked if SMF dependencies couldbe used to work around the issue. As it happens, this is not a simplequestion to answer because how ZFS pools are activated at boot time isat best an obscure thing (at least as far as I can tell). Here's what Ithink is going on, which has to come with a lot of disclaimers.

ZFS pool information for pools that will be imported during bootis

In the middle of reading Go Isn't C I ran acrosssome remarks about how it was bad that programmers ignore debuggersin favour of print statements. This immediately sparked my standardreaction , which is that debuggers are focusedon telling you what happens next but generally I want to know how onearth my code got into its current state. Then I started thinking somemore and realized that I was being too strong because this isn't reallyaccurate. In fact I use debuggers periodically, but only on certainsorts

I'm in the process of migrating my office machine's Linux installationfrom an old, small pair of disks to a newer and somewhat larger pair ofdisks. As part of this I have been doing a bunch of reading about thecurrent state of PC technology as far as partitioning and booting goes,because getting new machines recently has made me clearly aware thatBIOSes have come a long way from the old days.

There are two parts of the new world, GPT and (U)EFI .GPT is

If you have any interest in regular expression matching,especially efficient regexps and understanding why Perl,Python, and so on have sometimes oddly slow implementations , you really want to read Russ Cox's series of articles on regular expressions .

The core things to read are his three part series, Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast , RegularExpression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach , and Regular ExpressionMatching in the Wild .

(I know, this is late, since Hacker News discussed this a couple ofyears ago

Recently I read Comments Off ( via ) andwhat struck me about Matt Gemmell 's framingof the issue is that he seems to view having comments as something thatyou do for your blog's readers. What this says to me is that Matt Gemmelland I have significantly different views of comments.

Let me tell you a little secret: I don't have comments here formy readers, at least not primarily; I have comments here for me . Ifthat ever was to change, if I stopped

In response to yesterday's entry , acommentator asked a question related to dual booting. That means it'stime to open the can of complexity that is dual booting on PCs. One ofthe reasons that dual booting is much more complex than how PCs bootthe main OS is that there are at least threedifferent ways that you can boot an alternate OS:

• you can load the other OS's boot sector and jump to it, just as ifit was the real MBR being loaded by the BIOS