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It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu
Recently I ran across (and eventually reported) an issue on pre-beta Ubuntu 24.04 where a grub...
Bash's sadly flawed smart (programmable) completion
Bash has an interesting and broadly useful feature called 'programmable completion' (this has sort of come...
Some notes on Firefox's media autoplay settings in practice as of Firefox 124
I've been buying digital music from one of the reasonably good online sources of it (the...
How I would automate monitoring DNS queries in basic Prometheus
Recently I wrote about the problem of using basic Prometheus to monitor DNS query results, which...
Sorting out PIDs, Tgids, and tasks on Linux
In the beginning, Unix only had processes and processes had process IDs (PIDs), and life was...
The Linux kernel.task_delayacct sysctl and why you might care about it
If you run a recent enough version of iotop on a typical Linux system, it may...
Disk write buffering and its interactions with write flushes
Pretty much every modern system defaults to having data you write to filesystems be buffered by...
More notes on Linux's ionice and kernel IO priorities
In the long ago past, Linux gained some support for block IO priorities, with some limitations...
A realization about shell pipeline steps on multi-core machines
Over on the Fediverse, I had a realization: This is my face when I realize that...
A peculiarity of the X Window System: Windows all the way down
Every window system has windows, as an entity. Usually we think of these as being used...
The speed of improvement in servers may have slowed down
One of the bits of technology news that I saw recently was that AWS was changing...
How to make your GNU Emacs commands 'relevant' for M-X
Today I learned about the M-X command (well, key binding) (via), which "[queries the] user for...
Open source culture and the valorization of public work
A while back I wrote about how doing work that scales requires being able to scale...
A recent abrupt change in Internet SSH brute force attacks against us
It's general wisdom in the sysadmin community that if you expose a SSH port to the...
What ZIL metrics are exposed by (Open)ZFS on Linux
The ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) is effectively ZFS's version of a filesystem journal, writing out hopefully...
Options for genuine ECC RAM on the desktop in (early) 2024
A traditional irritation with building (or specifying) desktop computers is the issue of ECC RAM, which...
Chris's Wiki :: blog/programming/GoReflectTypeForOptimization
Go's reflect.TypeFor() is a generic function that returns the reflect.Type for its type argument. It was...
Accidentally making windows vanish in my old-fashioned Unix X environment
One of the somewhat odd things about my old fashioned X Window System environment is that...
We might want to regularly keep track of how important each server is
Today we had a significant machine room air conditioning failure in our main machine room, one...
Chris's Wiki :: blog/programming/GoAvoidingAnyAsAType
'I'm Going to Avoid using any as an Actual Type' — Generics introduced the any type,...
