Wandering Thoughts: Your feed reader is fetching from a limited network area

An unusual way for your DHCP server to run out of dynamic IPs

Jul 10, 2026, 3:00 AM Updated Jul 10, 2026, 3:02 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

BMCs and a surprising USB network device on your server

Jul 9, 2026, 1:41 AM Updated Jul 9, 2026, 1:50 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Notes on pulling from multiple upstream Git mirrors

Jul 8, 2026, 2:35 AM Updated Jul 8, 2026, 2:38 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Our mixed building network wiring and its consequences

Jul 7, 2026, 10:53 PM Updated Jul 7, 2026, 10:54 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Using Linux <code>tc</code> to limit the outgoing bandwidth of a web server

Jul 7, 2026, 3:05 AM Updated Jul 7, 2026, 3:06 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Sometimes it actually is the network: a war story

Jul 6, 2026, 2:13 AM Updated Jul 6, 2026, 2:17 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

What buffer size (OpenSSH) <code>ssh</code> seems to use for streaming output

Jul 4, 2026, 11:27 PM Updated Jul 4, 2026, 11:28 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Go maps, hashes of map keys, and pointers: a little surprise

Jul 4, 2026, 2:01 AM Updated Jul 4, 2026, 2:02 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Discovering rsync's -W option and our use for it

Jul 3, 2026, 2:41 AM Updated Jul 3, 2026, 2:42 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

I'm only interested in "native" installation systems

Jul 2, 2026, 1:33 AM Updated Jul 2, 2026, 1:34 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Our long path from IPMI remote installs to network installs

Jul 1, 2026, 2:52 AM Updated Jul 1, 2026, 2:54 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

As expected, using kexec to switch to a new Ubuntu kernel works

Jun 30, 2026, 3:10 AM Updated Jun 30, 2026, 3:12 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

There's a plague of Googlebot impersonation going on (in June 2026)

Jun 29, 2026, 3:18 AM Updated Jun 29, 2026, 3:19 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Go interfaces, reflection, and binary size

Jun 28, 2026, 2:16 AM Updated Jun 28, 2026, 2:17 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

How your Ubuntu 26.04 server boots with a software RAID array root filesystem

Jun 27, 2026, 3:28 AM Updated Jun 27, 2026, 3:29 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

You can't always trust a BMC's inventory of the server's hardware

Jun 26, 2026, 3:25 AM Updated Jun 26, 2026, 3:26 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Some things on '<code>systemctl kexec</code>' as compared to '<code>kexec -e</code>'

Jun 25, 2026, 2:42 AM Updated Jun 25, 2026, 2:43 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Two versions of a 'is SSH up on a machine' check

Jun 24, 2026, 2:18 AM Updated Jun 24, 2026, 2:20 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The quiet issue of lurking settings (and how it bit me)

Jun 23, 2026, 2:30 AM Updated Jun 23, 2026, 2:31 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Configuration is a liability, just like code

Jun 22, 2026, 3:08 AM Updated Jun 22, 2026, 3:09 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

PyPy and Python 3 for us

Jun 21, 2026, 3:13 AM Updated Jun 21, 2026, 3:14 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Limiting web server bandwidth the brute force way

Jun 20, 2026, 2:59 AM Updated Jun 20, 2026, 3:00 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Some reasons why your server may not be doing a UEFI network boot

Jun 19, 2026, 3:30 AM Updated Jun 19, 2026, 3:30 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

How to correctly not wait for network carrier in Netplan

Jun 18, 2026, 2:02 AM Updated Jun 18, 2026, 2:03 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Why servers running Ubuntu can stall on boot for two minutes

Jun 17, 2026, 2:29 AM Updated Jun 18, 2026, 2:03 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

What the new Linux NFS mount option 'fatal_neterrors' is

Jun 16, 2026, 2:07 AM Updated Jun 16, 2026, 2:08 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Systemd-resolved and sticking (or not) to what distributions do

Jun 15, 2026, 2:50 AM Updated Jun 15, 2026, 2:51 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Linux distribution packaging and third party 'package' systems

Jun 14, 2026, 3:20 AM Updated Jun 14, 2026, 3:22 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Running a modern email system requires non-trivial staff time

Jun 13, 2026, 12:26 AM Updated Jun 13, 2026, 12:27 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Why disk warranties are useful at work but not for me at home

Jun 12, 2026, 1:39 AM Updated Jun 12, 2026, 1:40 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

My Firefox addons as of Firefox 151 (and the current development version)

Jun 10, 2026, 10:04 PM Updated Jun 10, 2026, 10:11 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Making extensions work on file: URLs in Firefox 153

Jun 10, 2026, 2:37 AM Updated Jun 10, 2026, 2:38 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Understanding Embark in GNU Emacs (a bit) and some 'stupid' Embark tricks

Jun 9, 2026, 3:46 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Should we care any more about Googlebot crawling our sites?

Jun 8, 2026, 2:04 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

'Vim' has many faces

Jun 7, 2026, 2:32 AM Updated Jun 7, 2026, 2:33 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

It seems unlikely that I'll have basic ARM servers to deal with

Jun 5, 2026, 11:52 PM Updated Jun 5, 2026, 11:52 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The Emacs packages that I use (as of June 2026)

Jun 4, 2026, 7:09 PM Updated Jun 4, 2026, 7:10 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

My GNU Emacs completion setup (as of June 2026)

Jun 3, 2026, 9:09 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A wish for automatic or semi-automatic disk setup in Linux server installers

Jun 3, 2026, 2:44 AM Updated Jun 3, 2026, 2:45 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

When <code>su</code> replaced <code>login</code> for becoming another Unix login

Jun 2, 2026, 1:19 AM Updated Jun 2, 2026, 1:20 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

I'm not sure we'd use AppArmor much even if we could

Jun 1, 2026, 2:47 AM Updated Jun 1, 2026, 2:48 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Our unusual system of "web home directories" for people

May 30, 2026, 11:50 PM Updated May 30, 2026, 11:51 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Our servers mostly don't seem to have high peak power usage

May 30, 2026, 3:34 AM Updated May 30, 2026, 3:35 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The Go language server can do some impressive code navigation

May 29, 2026, 1:37 AM Updated Jun 1, 2026, 7:47 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Using typing in Python leads to different sorts of code

May 28, 2026, 1:56 AM Updated May 28, 2026, 1:57 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

My views on some Python LSP servers in GNU Emacs (as of mid 2026)

May 27, 2026, 2:06 AM Updated May 27, 2026, 2:07 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Anti-robot techniques can be nice but the problem is, they're not static

May 25, 2026, 5:13 PM Updated May 25, 2026, 5:14 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

An idea: user level WireGuard for UDP based encryption and authentication

May 24, 2026, 2:24 PM Updated May 24, 2026, 2:26 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

How our environment still needs the security boundary of Unix logins

May 23, 2026, 11:28 PM Updated May 23, 2026, 11:30 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

My views on Flymake and Flycheck in GNU Emacs (as of mid 2026)

May 23, 2026, 2:57 AM Updated May 23, 2026, 2:58 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Notes on respectfully getting a personal copy of a website's contents

May 21, 2026, 10:45 PM Updated May 21, 2026, 10:46 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Unix has been changing, but in places where I don't see it

May 21, 2026, 1:57 AM Updated May 21, 2026, 1:58 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Notes about reading messages with the Python email packages

May 20, 2026, 3:01 AM Updated May 20, 2026, 3:02 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The hardware needs of our mail system (as of mid 2026)

May 19, 2026, 9:08 PM Updated May 19, 2026, 9:21 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Unicode and Emoji in terminals, or my simple but difficult wish

May 18, 2026, 2:26 AM Updated May 18, 2026, 3:13 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Our servers seem to have surprisingly low power consumption

May 17, 2026, 3:03 AM Updated May 17, 2026, 3:04 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Getting C code navigation even for Debian (or Ubuntu) packages

May 16, 2026, 2:00 AM Updated May 16, 2026, 2:06 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

I've finally ported <a href="https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/dwiki/DWiki">DWiki</a> from Python 2 to Python 3

May 15, 2026, 12:17 AM Updated May 15, 2026, 12:18 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A GNU Emacs learning experience with text-mode hooks

May 14, 2026, 5:51 PM Updated May 14, 2026, 5:53 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Going from a ZFS object ID to its path the easier way

May 14, 2026, 2:52 AM Updated May 14, 2026, 2:53 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

In praise of the Linux kernel netconsole (in the right circumstances)

May 13, 2026, 12:29 AM Updated May 13, 2026, 12:30 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A code (reformatting) conundrum in Python, and heuristics

May 12, 2026, 2:26 AM Updated May 12, 2026, 2:27 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Moving from lsp-mode in GNU Emacs to Eglot

May 11, 2026, 3:15 AM Updated May 11, 2026, 3:16 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Using a Python 3 LSP server with Python 2 code works (more or less)

May 9, 2026, 9:57 PM Updated May 9, 2026, 9:58 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Notes on using GNU Emacs' Tramp system in an unusual shell environment

May 9, 2026, 2:09 AM Updated May 9, 2026, 2:10 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Detecting (or not) the use of -l and -c together in Bourne shells

May 8, 2026, 3:31 AM Updated May 8, 2026, 3:32 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Your Linux distribution may no longer auto-generate new SSH host keys

May 7, 2026, 3:03 AM Updated May 7, 2026, 2:30 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Splitting up my .emacs, or "use-package doesn't solve all problems"

May 6, 2026, 2:41 AM Updated May 6, 2026, 2:42 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Straightforward checklists don't fit every situation

May 5, 2026, 3:28 AM Updated May 5, 2026, 3:29 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Some views on Eglot and lsp-mode in GNU Emacs

May 4, 2026, 2:40 AM Updated May 4, 2026, 2:41 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

How backups work depends on the goals of the people setting them up

May 2, 2026, 8:12 PM Updated May 2, 2026, 8:14 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Some of our servers revived themselves unexpectedly

May 2, 2026, 3:54 AM Updated May 2, 2026, 3:55 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Learning my lesson that Python virtual environments aren't always movable

May 1, 2026, 2:53 AM Updated May 1, 2026, 2:54 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Switching entirely to Corfu in my GNU Emacs configuration

Apr 30, 2026, 2:23 AM Updated Apr 30, 2026, 2:24 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

If it's in JSON, it's not really a configuration file

Apr 29, 2026, 2:14 AM Updated Apr 29, 2026, 2:15 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The easy way to switch my libvirt-based virtual machines to UEFI

Apr 28, 2026, 3:27 AM Updated Apr 28, 2026, 3:28 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Browsers, OCSP, and a view of the web in practice

Apr 27, 2026, 3:42 AM Updated Apr 27, 2026, 3:43 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Understanding the Ubuntu server installer initramfs

Apr 26, 2026, 2:48 AM Updated Apr 26, 2026, 2:49 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Our backup MX server was easy to build, but yours might not be

Apr 25, 2026, 2:40 AM Updated Apr 25, 2026, 2:41 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Configuring the ISC DHCP server to pick the right network boot option

Apr 24, 2026, 3:53 AM Updated Apr 24, 2026, 3:54 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The various steps of a UEFI network install from an Ubuntu server ISO

Apr 23, 2026, 3:28 AM Updated Apr 23, 2026, 3:29 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Some general notes on network booting UEFI machines

Apr 22, 2026, 3:26 AM Updated Apr 22, 2026, 3:27 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A backup MX will get accessed by various sorts of people

Apr 21, 2026, 3:10 AM Updated Apr 21, 2026, 3:11 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Ignoring missing TLS "Client Authentication" usage in practice

Apr 20, 2026, 3:26 AM Updated Apr 20, 2026, 3:27 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Tiny Go and Rust programs appear to start equally fast (on some machines)

Apr 18, 2026, 9:30 PM Updated Apr 18, 2026, 9:31 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Hiding the option to leave comments from some visitors to here

Apr 18, 2026, 3:26 AM Updated Apr 18, 2026, 3:27 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Does your DSL little language really need operator precedence?

Apr 17, 2026, 2:36 AM Updated Apr 17, 2026, 2:37 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Our options in remote server installation and management

Apr 15, 2026, 10:31 PM Updated Apr 15, 2026, 10:32 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Universities, email, and the issues of running things in house

Apr 15, 2026, 3:06 AM Updated Apr 15, 2026, 3:07 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Having an inventory of anything is a non-trivial thing

Apr 14, 2026, 3:23 AM Updated Apr 14, 2026, 3:24 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Vim and 'forward delete' (in modern terminal programs)

Apr 13, 2026, 1:31 AM Updated Apr 13, 2026, 1:32 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Apache 2.4, ETag values, and (HTTP) response compression

Apr 12, 2026, 2:25 AM Updated Apr 12, 2026, 2:26 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

I'm now using nftables for (new) static rulesets

Apr 11, 2026, 1:54 AM Updated Apr 11, 2026, 1:55 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Some quick notes to myself on nftables 'symbolic variables'

Apr 9, 2026, 11:40 PM Updated Apr 9, 2026, 11:41 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Systemd v258's 'systemctl -v restart' and its limitations

Apr 9, 2026, 2:43 AM Updated Apr 9, 2026, 2:44 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Users and session classes in Systemd v258 and later (and a gotcha)

Apr 8, 2026, 12:14 AM Updated Apr 8, 2026, 12:15 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Wondering about the typical retry times for email today

Apr 7, 2026, 3:22 AM Updated Apr 7, 2026, 3:23 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Finding out what your big RPMs are, in two different 'sizes'

Apr 6, 2026, 2:50 AM Updated Apr 6, 2026, 2:51 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Two little scripts: <code>addup</code> and <code>sumup</code>

Apr 5, 2026, 1:20 AM Updated Apr 5, 2026, 1:21 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Web server ratelimits are a precaution to let me stop worrying

Apr 4, 2026, 12:03 AM Updated Apr 4, 2026, 12:04 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Using '<code>pkg</code>' for everything on FreeBSD 15 has been nice

Apr 3, 2026, 3:00 AM Updated Apr 3, 2026, 3:01 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

I should use argument groups in Python's argparse module more than I do

Apr 2, 2026, 2:43 AM Updated Apr 2, 2026, 2:44 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Updating Ubuntu packages that you have local changes for with dgit

Mar 31, 2026, 10:07 PM Updated Mar 31, 2026, 10:08 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Here in 2026, we're retaining old systems instead of discarding them

Mar 31, 2026, 2:45 AM Updated Mar 31, 2026, 2:46 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

How old our servers are (as of 2026)

Mar 30, 2026, 2:25 AM Updated Mar 30, 2026, 2:39 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

New old systems in the age of hardware shortages

Mar 29, 2026, 2:52 AM Updated Mar 29, 2026, 2:53 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Canonical's Netplan is hard to deal with in automation

Mar 28, 2026, 3:10 AM Updated Mar 28, 2026, 3:11 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Considering mmap() verus plain reads for my recent code

Mar 26, 2026, 11:05 PM Updated Mar 26, 2026, 11:06 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Early notes on switching some libvirt-based virtual machines to UEFI

Mar 26, 2026, 3:09 AM Updated Mar 26, 2026, 3:10 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Going from an IPv4 address to an ASN in Python 2 with Unix brute force

Mar 25, 2026, 2:45 AM Updated Mar 25, 2026, 2:46 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Fedora's virt-manager started using external snapshots for me as of Fedora 41

Mar 24, 2026, 2:51 AM Updated Mar 24, 2026, 3:33 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Mass production's effects on the cheapest way to get some things

Mar 23, 2026, 2:00 AM Updated Mar 23, 2026, 2:01 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A traditional path to getting lingering duplicate systems

Mar 21, 2026, 8:36 PM Updated Mar 21, 2026, 8:37 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Lingering duplicate systems and the expense of weeding them out (an illustration)

Mar 21, 2026, 3:05 AM Updated Mar 21, 2026, 3:06 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

DMARC DNS record inheritance and DMARC alignment requirements

Mar 20, 2026, 2:56 AM Updated Mar 20, 2026, 2:57 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

One problem with (Python) docstrings is that they're local

Mar 19, 2026, 2:40 AM Updated Mar 19, 2026, 2:41 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Wayland has good reasons to put the window manager in the display server

Mar 18, 2026, 2:26 AM Updated Mar 18, 2026, 2:27 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Cleaning old GPG RPM keys that your Fedora install is keeping around

Mar 17, 2026, 1:56 AM Updated Mar 17, 2026, 1:57 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Making empirical decisions about web access (here in 2026)

Mar 16, 2026, 2:12 AM Updated Mar 16, 2026, 2:13 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Your feed reader User-Agent is generic

Mar 15, 2026, 3:54 AM Wandering Thoughts: Your feed reader has a problem

I think dependency cooldowns would be a good idea for Go

Mar 14, 2026, 8:26 PM Updated Mar 14, 2026, 8:26 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

On today's web, HTTP results depend on the HTTP User-Agent you use

Mar 14, 2026, 3:27 AM Updated Mar 14, 2026, 3:28 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

You (I) should document the forms of your Django web application

Mar 13, 2026, 3:18 AM Updated Mar 13, 2026, 3:19 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

UEFI-only booting with GRUB has gone okay on our (Ubuntu 24.04) servers

Mar 12, 2026, 1:24 AM Updated Mar 12, 2026, 1:25 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The story of one of my worst programming failures

Mar 11, 2026, 1:58 AM Updated Mar 11, 2026, 1:59 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Power glitches can leave computer hardware in weird states

Mar 10, 2026, 3:58 AM Updated Mar 10, 2026, 3:59 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

If there are URLs in your HTTP User-Agent, they should exist and work

Mar 9, 2026, 2:18 AM Updated Mar 29, 2026, 5:29 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Restricting IP address access to specific ports in eBPF: a sketch

Mar 8, 2026, 3:04 AM Updated Mar 8, 2026, 3:05 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Your terminal program has to be where xterm's ziconbeep feature is handled

Mar 7, 2026, 3:26 AM Updated Mar 7, 2026, 3:27 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

How I think systemd IP address restrictions on socket units works

Mar 6, 2026, 4:43 AM Updated Mar 6, 2026, 4:44 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Sometimes, non-general solutions are the right answer

Mar 5, 2026, 3:33 AM Updated Mar 5, 2026, 3:34 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A taxonomy of text output (from tools that want to be too clever)

Mar 4, 2026, 1:41 AM Updated Mar 4, 2026, 1:42 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

Mar 3, 2026, 4:48 AM Updated Mar 3, 2026, 4:51 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The things that make me so attached to xterm as my terminal program

Mar 2, 2026, 4:27 AM Updated Mar 2, 2026, 4:28 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Sometimes the simplest version of a text table is printed from a command

Mar 1, 2026, 3:17 AM Updated Mar 1, 2026, 3:18 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

On the Bourne shell's distinction between shell variables and exported ones

Feb 28, 2026, 3:44 AM Updated Feb 28, 2026, 3:45 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

How to redirect a Bash process substitution into a <code>while</code> loop

Feb 27, 2026, 3:37 AM Updated Feb 27, 2026, 3:40 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

With disk caches, you want to be able to attribute hits and misses

Feb 26, 2026, 3:06 AM Updated Feb 26, 2026, 3:07 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Systemd resource controls on user.slice and system.slice work fine

Feb 25, 2026, 3:54 AM Updated Feb 25, 2026, 3:55 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Gnome, GSettings, gconf, and which one you want

Feb 24, 2026, 3:22 AM Updated Feb 24, 2026, 3:23 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

PDUs can fail (eventually) and some things related to this

Feb 22, 2026, 11:23 PM Updated Feb 22, 2026, 11:24 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The importance of limiting syndication feed requests in some way

Feb 22, 2026, 1:27 AM Updated Feb 22, 2026, 1:28 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Consider mentioning your little personal scripts to your co-workers

Feb 21, 2026, 3:59 AM Updated Feb 21, 2026, 4:00 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Parsing hours and minutes into a useful time in basic Python

Feb 20, 2026, 3:48 AM Updated Feb 20, 2026, 3:49 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

How GNU Tar handles deleted things in incremental tar archives

Feb 19, 2026, 4:10 AM Updated Feb 19, 2026, 4:11 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Two challenges of incremental backups

Feb 18, 2026, 4:25 AM Updated Feb 18, 2026, 4:26 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Understanding the limitation of 'do in new frame/window' in GNU Emacs

Feb 17, 2026, 3:09 AM Updated Feb 17, 2026, 3:10 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Sometimes giving syndication feed readers good errors is a mistake

Feb 16, 2026, 3:56 AM Updated Mar 29, 2026, 5:29 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The problem of delivering errors to syndication feed readers

Feb 15, 2026, 4:30 AM Updated Feb 15, 2026, 4:31 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Your feed reader is fetching from a limited network area

Feb 15, 2026, 3:54 AM Wandering Thoughts: Your feed reader is fetching from a limited network area

The (very) old "repaint mode" GUI approach

Feb 14, 2026, 4:34 AM Updated Feb 14, 2026, 4:35 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Testing Linux memory limits is a bit of a pain

Feb 13, 2026, 4:23 AM Updated Feb 13, 2026, 4:24 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Undo in Vi and its successors, and my views on the mess

Feb 12, 2026, 4:19 AM Updated Feb 12, 2026, 4:20 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Moving to make many of my SSH logins not report things on login

Feb 11, 2026, 4:32 AM Updated Feb 11, 2026, 4:33 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A fun Python puzzle with circular imports

Feb 10, 2026, 4:12 AM Updated Feb 10, 2026, 4:13 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Systemd and blocking connections to localhost, including via 'any'

Feb 9, 2026, 4:21 AM Updated Feb 9, 2026, 4:22 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The original vi is a product of its time (and its time has passed)

Feb 8, 2026, 3:50 AM Updated Feb 8, 2026, 3:51 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

How we failed to notice a power failure

Feb 7, 2026, 4:25 AM Updated Feb 7, 2026, 4:26 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A surprising path to accessing localhost URLs and HTTP services

Feb 6, 2026, 3:43 AM Updated Feb 6, 2026, 3:44 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The meaning of connecting to INADDR_ANY in TCP and UDP

Feb 5, 2026, 2:55 AM Updated Feb 5, 2026, 2:57 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

I prefer to pass secrets between programs through standard input

Feb 4, 2026, 4:12 AM Updated Feb 4, 2026, 4:13 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The consoles of UEFI, serial and otherwise, and their discontents

Feb 3, 2026, 3:07 AM Updated Feb 3, 2026, 9:27 PM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Estimating where your Prometheus Blackbox TCP query-response check failed

Feb 2, 2026, 4:20 AM Updated Feb 2, 2026, 4:21 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Early Linux package manager history and patching upstream source releases

Feb 1, 2026, 3:19 AM Updated Feb 1, 2026, 3:22 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Making a FreeBSD system have a serial console on its second serial port

Jan 31, 2026, 4:57 AM Updated Jan 31, 2026, 4:58 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Why I'm ignoring pretty much all new Python packaging tools

Jan 30, 2026, 3:59 AM Updated Jan 30, 2026, 4:00 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Why Linux wound up with system package managers

Jan 29, 2026, 4:37 AM Updated Jan 29, 2026, 4:38 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The two subtypes of one sort of package managers, the "program manager"

Jan 28, 2026, 2:08 AM Updated Jan 28, 2026, 2:09 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Forcing a Go generic type to be a pointer type (and some challenges)

Jan 27, 2026, 4:48 AM Updated Jan 27, 2026, 4:58 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Scraping the FreeBSD 'mpd5' daemon to obtain L2TP VPN usage data

Jan 26, 2026, 4:00 AM Updated Jan 26, 2026, 4:01 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Printing things in colour is not simple

Jan 25, 2026, 3:47 AM Updated Jan 25, 2026, 3:48 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Understanding <code>query_response</code> in Prometheus Blackbox's tcp prober

Jan 24, 2026, 2:54 AM Updated Jan 24, 2026, 2:55 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Pitfalls in using Prometheus Blackbox to monitor external SMTP

Jan 23, 2026, 4:15 AM Updated Jan 23, 2026, 4:15 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

What ZFS people usually mean when they talk about "ZFS metadata"

Jan 22, 2026, 4:14 AM Updated Jan 22, 2026, 4:15 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The long painful history of (re)using <code>login</code> to log people in

Jan 21, 2026, 3:36 AM Updated Jan 21, 2026, 3:38 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

TCP, UDP, and listening only on a specific IP address

Jan 20, 2026, 2:33 AM Updated Jan 20, 2026, 2:34 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Single sign on systems versus X.509 certificates for the web

Jan 19, 2026, 3:59 AM Updated Jan 19, 2026, 4:00 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

People cannot "just pay attention" to (boring, routine) things

Jan 18, 2026, 2:04 AM Updated Jan 19, 2026, 4:21 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Systemd-networkd and giving your virtual devices alternate names

Jan 17, 2026, 3:28 AM Updated Jan 17, 2026, 3:29 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

TCP and UDP and implicit "standard" elements of things

Jan 16, 2026, 2:34 AM Updated Jan 16, 2026, 2:35 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Linux network interface names have a length limit, and Netplan

Jan 15, 2026, 2:19 AM Updated Jan 17, 2026, 3:08 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Safely querying Spamhaus DNSBLs in Exim

Jan 14, 2026, 2:53 AM Updated Jan 14, 2026, 2:54 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Something you don't want to do when using Spamhaus's DQS with Exim

Jan 13, 2026, 4:16 AM Updated Jan 13, 2026, 4:21 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

An annoyance in how Netplan requires you to specify VLANs

Jan 12, 2026, 4:27 AM Updated Jan 12, 2026, 4:28 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Early experience with using Linux tc to fight bufferbloat latency

Jan 11, 2026, 3:52 AM Updated Jan 11, 2026, 3:53 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Distribution source packages and whether or not to embed in the source code

Jan 10, 2026, 3:46 AM Updated Jan 10, 2026, 3:46 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The Amanda backup system and "dump promotion"

Jan 9, 2026, 3:05 AM Updated Jan 9, 2026, 3:06 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

What 24 hours of traffic looks like to our main web server in January 2026

Jan 8, 2026, 3:54 AM Updated Jan 8, 2026, 3:55 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Why we have some AC units on one of our our internal networks

Jan 7, 2026, 3:13 AM Updated Jan 7, 2026, 3:14 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Prometheus, Let's Encrypt, and making sure all our TLS certificates are monitored

Jan 6, 2026, 3:11 AM Updated Jan 6, 2026, 3:12 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

Some notes to myself on Super-based bindings in GNU Emacs

Jan 5, 2026, 3:11 AM Updated Jan 5, 2026, 3:13 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A small suggestion in modern Linux: take screenshots (before upgrades)

Jan 4, 2026, 3:50 AM Updated Jan 4, 2026, 3:51 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

The complexities of getting programs to report the TLS certificates they use

Jan 3, 2026, 3:17 AM Updated Jan 3, 2026, 3:18 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A Go question: how do you test <code>select</code> based code?

Jan 2, 2026, 3:24 AM Updated Jan 2, 2026, 3:25 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog

A little bit of complex design in phone "Level" applications

Jan 1, 2026, 2:24 AM Updated Jan 1, 2026, 2:25 AM Chris's Wiki :: blog