Today, not for the first time, I discovered that one project that we use locally had made a newrelease (of one component) by updating my local copy of their Gitrepository and noticing that 'git pull' had fetched a new tag. Likevarious other projects, this project has an official channel toannounce new releases of their various components; in this case, amailing list. Sadly, the new release had not been announced on thatmailing list, although other releases have been in the past.

In the sidebar to yesterday's entry I (originally) made a Unix command line mistake by unthinkinglyleaving out an ordinary, innocent looking space (it's corrected inthe current version of the entry after it was noted by Emilio in acomment). This innocent looking mistake and its consequences arean illustration of something in Unix shell command lines, althoughI'm not sure of just what, so I'm going to write it up.

The story starts with the general arguments of Bash's

Suppose that you need to scan your filesystems and pass some fileswith specific names, ownerships, or whatever, except that you wantto exclude scanning under /tmp and /var/tmp (as illustrativeexamples). Perhaps also you're feeding the file names to a shellscript, especially in a pipeline, which means that you'd like toscreen out directory and file names that have (common) problemcharacters in them, like spaces.

(If you can use Bash for your shell script, the

One of the things that I sometimes need to do with my libvirt-basedvirtual machines is connect to their 'graphical'consoles. There are a variety of ways to do this, but generally themost convenient way for me has been virt-viewer , followed by virt-manager . Virt-viewer is typically pretty great,but it has one little drawback that surfaces with some of my VMs,especially the Fedora ones that boot into graphics mode. The standardbehavior for Fedora machines sitting idle in graphics mode,

Today, for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I was interestedin arranging to boot a libvirt-based virtual machine with a networkinterface that had no link signal, or at least lacked the virtualequivalent of it. It was not entirely obvious how to do this, andsome of the ways I tried didn't work. So let's start with the easierthing to do, which is to set up a network interface that exists butdoesn't talk to anything.

The easiest way I

Today one of the machine rooms that we have network switches inexperienced some kind of air conditioning issue. During the issue,one of our temperature monitors recorded a high temperature of 44.1 C (it normally sees the temperatureas consistently below 20C). The internal temperatures of our networkswitches undoubtedly got much higher than that, seeing as the onethat I can readily check currently reports an internal temperatureof 41 C while our temperature monitor says the room temperature isjust under 20 C.

Recently, Unix shells keeping track of where they'd found commandscame up on the Fediverse again , as it does everyso often; for instance, last year I advocated for doing away withthe whole thing . As far as I know, (Unix)shell command hashing originated with BSD Unix's csh. which addedcommand hashing and a 'rehash' builtin. However, if you actuallyread the 4.2 BSD csh(1) manual page ,it says something a bit odd (emphasis mine

For reasons that don't fit in the margins of this entry, I wasrecently looking at the filesystems that we have mounted on ourUbuntu machines and their types. Some of these filesystems areexpected and predictable, such as the root filesystem (ext4), anyNFS mounts we have on a particular machine ( which can be of twodifferent filesystem types ), maybe a tmpfs mount with a size limit that we've set up , and ZFS filesystems on ourfileservers . But a modern Linux systemdoesn

We recently got some hardware that has a networked managementinterface, which in today's world means it has a web server andfurther, this web server does HTTPS. Naturally, it has a self-signed TLS certificate (one it apparently generated on startup). For reasonsbeyond the scope of this entry we decided that we wanted to monitorthis web server interface to make sure it was answering. This gotme curious about how long the duration of its self-signed TLScertificate was, which turns out to