My self-inflicted UPS and computer conundrum
Today the area where I live experienced what turned out to be anextended power outage ,and I wound up going in to the office. In the process, I wound upshooting myself in the foot as far as my ability to tell from theoffice if power had returned to home, oddly because I have a UPSat home.
The easy way to use a UPS is just to let it run down until it powersoff. But this is kind of abrupt on the computer, even if you'vemore
People at universities travel widely and unpredictably
Every so often, people make the entirely reasonable suggestion thatif one day you see a particular person log in from locally and thena few days later they're logging in from half way around the world,perhaps you should investigate. This may work for many organizations,but unfortunately it is one of the ways in which universities arepeculiar places. At universities, a lot of people travel, they doit a fair bit (and unpredictably), and they go to all sorts ofstrange places, where they
The Firefox source code's 'StaticPrefs' system (as of Firefox 128)
The news of the time interval is that Mozilla is selling out Firefoxusers once again (although Firefox remains far better than Chrome),in the form of 'Privacy-Preserving Attribution', which you mightimpolitely call 'browser managed tracking'. Mozilla enabled thisby default in Firefox 128 ( cf ), and if youdidn't know already you can read about how to disable it here or here .In the process of looking into all of this, I attempted to findwhere in the Firefox
That software forges are often better than email is unfortunate
Over on the Fediverse, there was a discussion of doing softwaredevelopment things using email and I said something :
My heretical opinion is that I would rather file a Github issueagainst your project than send you or your bug tracker email, becauseI do not trust you to safeguard my email against spammers, so I haveto make up an entire new email address for you and carefully manageit. I don't trust Github either, but I have already done all of thisemail address handling for them.
(I
Network switches aren't simple devices (not even basic switches)
Recently over on the Fediverse I said something about switches :
"Network switches are simple devices" oh I am so sorry. Hubs weresimple devices. Switches are alarmingly smart devices even if theydon't handle VLANs or support STP (and almost everyone wants themto support Spanning Tree Protocol, to stop loops). Your switch hasonboard packet buffering, understands Ethernet addresses, oftengenerates its own traffic and responds to network traffic (see STP),and is actually a (layer 2) high speed router with
Brute force attackers seem to switch targets rapidly if you block them
Like everyone else, we have a constant stream of attackers tryingbrute force password guessing against us using SSH or authenticatedSMTP, from a variety of source IPs. Some of the source IPs attackus at a low rate (although there can be bursts when a lot of themare trying ), but some of them do so ata relatively high rate, high enough to be annoying. When I noticesuch IPs (ones making hundreds of attempts an hour, for example),I tend to put them in our
Fedora 40 probably doesn't work with software RAID 0.90 format superblocks
On my home machine , I have an old pair of HDDsthat have (had) four old software RAID mirrors. Because these wereold arrays, they were set up with the old 0.90 superblock metadataformat . For years the arrays workedfine, although I haven't actively used them since I moved my homemachine to all solid state storage. However, when I upgraded fromFedora 39 to Fedora 40, things went wrong. When Fedora 40 booted,rather than finding four software
Some (big) mail senders do use TLS SNI for SMTP even without DANE
TLS SNI (Server Name Indication) is a modernTLS feature where clients that are establishing a TLS session witha server tell it what name they are connecting to, so the servercan give them the right TLS server certificate. TLS SNI is essentialfor the modern web's widespread HTTPS hosting, and so every usableHTTPS-capable web client uses SNI. However, other protocols alsouse TLS, and whether or not the software involved uses SNI is muchmore variable.
DANE is a way to bind TLS certificates
Using WireGuard as a router to get around reachability issues
Suppose that you have a machine, or a set of machines, that can'tbe readily reached from the outside world with random traffic (forexample, your home LAN setup), and you also have a roaming machinethat you want to use to reach those machines (for example, yourphone). If you only had one of these problems, you could set up astraightforward WireGuard tunnel, where your roaming phone talkedto the WireGuard machines on your home LAN. But on the surface,having both
I think (GNU) Emacs bankruptcy is inevitable in the longer term
Recently I read Avoiding Emacs bankruptcy, with good financialhabits ( via ). To badly summarizethe article, it suggests avoiding third party packages and minimizingthe amount of customization you do. As it happens, I have experiencewith more or less this approach, and in the end it didn't help . Because I built my old Emacs environment in thedays before third party Emacs package management, it didn't includethird party packages (although it may have had a few functions I'dgotten from other