Viewing profile — siebenmann

One reason why Unix quotas are generally not maintained and imposed by path is that it's a lot easier to update quotas as things are created, deleted, modified, and so on if the on…

I've made a PDF of one of my bike club cue sheets from 2014 and put it at https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cks/tbn/tbn-gatineau-gallop-2014... ; the GPS route that is more or less equiv…

In 1989, the costs appear to have been significantly different, although on a casual search I don't see list prices for eg then-older Sun models like the 3/60. A brand new Sparcsta…

Pricing and charging for storage inside an organization is always ultimately a non-technical decision that has to balance who pays for it versus the consequences of it not being pa…

The problem with allocating bit-packed storage is that then you are into the issue where types don't agree on where any pointers are. Interface values solve this today because they…

Interfaces aren't bit-packed and they force storing all values as a separate allocation that the interface contains a pointer to (escape analysis may allow this separate value to b…

Because of our (work) situation, I was thinking of an OOB network with its own dedicated connections between sites, instead of the situation where you can plug each site into a 'ma…

In a lot of environments, you can at least choose to restrict what networks can be used to manage equipment; sometimes this is forced on you because the equipment only has a single…

The obvious advantage of using domain names and in general URLs as the package names is that the Go project doesn't have to run a registry for package names. Running a registry is …

My badly communicated overall point is that I don't think it's right to say that Go started without any thought about dependency management. Instead, the Go developers had a theory…

Based on an extremely quick skim, this appears aimed only at projects that are using autoconf purely for portability across standard Unix environments. It admits up front that it d…

NFS v2 writes are all synchronous. NFS v3 added an option to make them asynchronous, along with an additional 'COMMIT' NFS operation that flushes them to storage. In theory how it …

The publishing system takes some pains to provide an accurate last-modified value for HTTP caching purposes (and an ETag too); internally it tracks the most recent modification tim…

The current directory is a long-standing Unix concept, so you'd have to trace its history back quite far to hear arguments about why it was there. One obvious reason is that relati…

In this case, one reason to use printenv is that it is an external command, and so it is clearly and unambiguously seeing (and reporting) whatever the Bourne shell would export int…

Oops, my fallible memory bit me. We weren't specifically running into OOM, but into strict overcommit (which we had turned on on some machines). OOM will only kill big things, so i…

We used to use this sort of locking in (frequently running) system cron jobs and the like. Then these jobs started getting killed off by Linux OOM on some systems and we ran into t…

I think it's more that Linux root stores date from an era when everyone approached CA trust as a binary thing (even browsers), and there has never been enough pressure and coordina…

Chrome and Safari require that TLS certificates include cryptographic promises of future log inclusion ('SCTs') from N trusted CT logs. As far as I know, neither of them actually c…

A multi-node Prometheus setup is significantly more complex to design and operate than a Linux software RAID mirror, especially once you throw in Grafana, Alertmanager, and so on. …

You're absolutely right about the KMS requirement for kernel drivers being available and the social aspects of that; when I wrote the article I sort of blithely assumed they were, …

Unfortunately ZFS scrubs are not as complete as fsck on a regular filesystem. ZFS scrubs only verify that checksums are intact. They don't verify that filesystem level metadata is …

You're right; thanks for noticing and I've updated the first example. My C is a bit rusty these days and I didn't check it with a compiler the way I should have. (I'm the author of…

I'm in an academic department and we've historically blocked outgoing traffic for two separate reasons. First, we consider some protocols actively unsafe to use because they transm…

My feeling (and why I wrote the article) is that it's easy to overlook that you need to do something active to enable your users to use HTTP/3. Previous upgrades to HTTPS of variou…