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Yesterday I wrote about an unexpected difference in how terminal programs handled 'backward line wrapping', which is sometimes known as 'reverse wrapping'.

A very simple way to present the progress of a parallel operation is to print one '.' for every operation started and then backspace and erase these as each operation finishes.

When I write about our ZFS fileservers I usually say that we've had three generations of them; the first generation Solaris fileservers, the second generation OmniOS fileservers, and then the current third generation Linux fileservers.

Over on the Fediverse, someone asked if there was a way to vary the terminal font depending on which machine they'd SSH'd into.

Not all that long ago by my standards, I wrote about how PyPy had been quietly working for me, then earlier this year I wrote about my concerns with PyPy and Python 3 versions, which somewhat dented my enthusiasm, but not by a lot because at the time we d…

Over on the Fediverse, I had an Emacs wish related to flyspell: The programmability of GNU Emacs is tempting me into a probably-huge project.

Yesterday I wrote about how Ubuntu 26.04's systemd apache2.service file restricted Apache a fair bit.

A change in Ubuntu 26.04 that surprised us today is that Canonical has chosen to add a lot of systemd unit restrictions to its apache2.service file (in /usr/lib/systemd/system, the standard place).

One of the things that you have to accept as a university system administrator is that people are going to do stuff, whether you like it or not.

Suppose, not hypothetically, that you use GNU Emacs to write Python code, with a Python LSP server and Eglot and that you use Flycheck for diagnostics, which I think you want to.

It seems reasonably likely that at some point in the future I'm going to have to build and test an authentication system that uses WebAuthn passkeys.

Exim has a complex system of string expansion that is part of it being a mailer construction kit.

A year ago I wrote about my approach to testing new versions of Exim for our mail servers, which was to have a written down test plan that involved a bunch of manual commands and checks (rather than anything automated).

Over on the Fediverse, I said something I've been stewing on for a while: Can I recommend GNU Emacs to people?

Lately I've been thinking about multi-factor authentication and policies around it (for reasons outside the scope of this entry), and a belated obvious realization emerging from that is that there are a number of decisions where you want to think about yo…

For a few months, some people have been telling me that their feed reader wasn't picking up new entries on Wandering Thoughts.

The university has a long standing MFA system for people's university-wide central accounts.

It's not news that "AI" crawlers are an ongoing plague and that broadly the plague is getting worse.

Suppose, not hypothetically, that you've encountered a problem in some Emacs feature: Yes, GNU Emacs, "Wrong type argument: integer-or-marker-p, nil", that sure is a problem.

A decade ago I wrote The many load averages of Unix(es), where I attempted to cover the different meanings of "load average" that the free Unixes of 2016 used, because it turned out there was a significant divergence.

In the beginning (in 3BSD), the Unix load average was simple, or at least it was conceptually simple.

Polkit is how a lot of things on modern Linux systems decide whether or not to let people do privileged operations.

Today I got a useful reminder about how you should always restart programs and daemons after changes, or at the very least explicitly check to make sure that they've picked up changes you recently made.

I recently wrote about our authentication versus authorization problem, where we've been forced to shoehorn a bunch of things that are actually about authorization into our authentication systems.

Over on the Fediverse, I took part in a small conversation about the lacking state of tools for making (structured) changes to code, what you'd often call refactoring.

One of the things that's said regularly is that authentication is not authorization, and there's a difference between the two.

Today I got around to upgrading my office desktop from Fedora 43 to Fedora 44.

A lot of things these days can report useful information about their status and health.

We have two sorts of multi-user Linux machines; there are ones for general purpose logins and normal Unix stuff, and ones that are specifically for heavy duty compute.

Over on the Fediverse I had a question: GNU Emacs people who write Python using venvs, what's the state of the art for getting linters, LSP servers, and so on started with the right paths/etc set up for a particular project's venv?

Suppose, not hypothetically, that there's some technology that is having terrible effects on the world; it's practically destroying websites, it's worsening energy and water usage, and so on.

We have a bunch of servers, which means that we need to give them (host)names.

Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you'd like to block some people's logins to some server based on things other than what OpenSSH's sshd directly supports in its sshd_config, such as the login's shell.

As I mentioned in yesterday's entry, the standard systemd behavior is that anyone can do 'loginctl enable-linger' for themselves.

Suppose, not hypothetically, that you operate a multi-server Linux environment where most people get to log in to some machines, such as your general purpose login servers, but not log in to others that still have to carry your full set of logins, such as…

On the Fediverse, I said: It has been '0' days since I discovered that I shot myself in the foot in Python 3 with a bytes/Unicode confusion issue, although this one was an unusually creative and subtle way to get things wrong (ie, it had no exceptions, it…

Suppose, not hypothetically, that you want to use systemd memory controls on either system.slice or user.slice to keep people from running the system out of memory.

For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I've been manually maintaining a group of files in sync across three 'machines' (my GNU Emacs configuration).

One of the things that ruff can be is a Python linter (in addition to at least a formatter and a not very attractive language server).

Today I use an extensively customized X environment, and I have every intention of clinging grimly to it for as long as I can.

We customize and set up a lot of things, sometimes on a per-system basis.

Yesterday I wrote about how on one of our servers, systemd took three seconds to load (user) units as part of setting up your systemd user session.

I'll start with what I said on the Fediverse a while back: Today's mystery: on exactly one system (with shared NFS home directories), logins take 3+ seconds to start because '/usr/lib/systemd/systemd --user' sits on its hands between running systemd-xdg-a…

Today I asked a question over on the Fediverse: In GNU Emacs, is there any way to 'undo' the loss of a selection region, especially a rectangle selection?

Tramp is a famous and often praised GNU Emacs system for editing remote files; lots of people will call it one of Emacs' compelling features.

Suppose, hypothetically, that you have a service that works on stuff in a mounted filesystem and will malfunction if that filesystem goes away (for example, a media server that's working from a NAS-mounted drive).

Grafana is a metrics dashboard and visualization system, mostly commonly used as the display side of a full metrics and monitoring system.

We have a number of Linux systems where we set strict memory overcommit handling and sometimes this can cause problems.

Not that long ago I wrote an entry on my views on Flymake and Flycheck in GNU Emacs, when Flycheck v36 was the latest release and my impression was that there hadn't been deep changes in Flycheck for a while.

We've recently wound up with some unusually big (x86) servers, from a vendor we don't normally get servers from.