Viewing profile — thatcks

I am the parent, and any competent fsck should find these issues. Fsck traditionally explicitly verifies claimed free space against actual free space, and in a filesystem with ACLs…

Two examples that I can find are https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/7910 , where very old versions of ZFS appear to have quietly written slightly incorrect ACL information, and …

The article is correct but it downplays an important limitation of ZFS scrubs when it talks about how they're different from fsck and chkdsk. As the article says (in different word…

I can't remember the 10G firewall figures we got in testing off the top of my head, but we didn't max out the 10G network; I think we were getting somewhere in the 8G range. This i…

The short version is that we wound up not feeling particularly enthused about OpenBSD itself. We have a much better developed framework for handling Ubuntu machines, making it simp…

The computers that moved from OpenBSD to Ubuntu were our local resolving DNS servers. These don't use PF and we also wanted to switch from our previous OpenBSD setup to Bind, where…

There is no 'RAW' format as such. In practice, 'RAW' is a jargon term for "camera specific format with basically raw sensor readings and various additional information". Typically …

One problem is that you cannot have a universal format that is both truly raw and doesn't embed camera specific information. Camera sensors from different companies (and different …

This should be fixed for you now. To my surprise, some legitimate versions of Firefox report 'rv:109.0' with a Firefox/ version that is not 109 (along with all of the crawlers that…

There was a little glitch in the scraping protection where an errant regular expression briefly blocked all Firefox versions. Which is especially bad because I (the blog author) ex…

mypy sadly doesn't accept 'NewType('MyType', Any)'; it complains 'error: Argument 2 to NewType(...) must be subclassable (got "Any") [valid-newtype]'. Possibly this is allowed by o…

My understanding is that the original SunOS windowing system was deeply connected to the kernel (for instance, windows were devices). The original purpose of the signal (in SunOS) …

That's mostly explained in Zack Weinberg's Fediverse post/answer: https://hackers.town/@zwol/111684752785283333 The one open thing is why BSD picked 'l' for lstat() to mean symboli…

A CLA is a legal contract between two parties. An open source license is a general grant of additional permissions under copyright (and sometimes some additional promises regarding…

As far as I can see, generalized control flow complicates the situation because you need to propagate a variety of signalling results up the tree. Consider a for loop with a switch…

One of the problems with domain restrictions on CAs is that real world geography has turned out to not correlate with domain name 'geography' for general use. Organizations located…

This was (is) a lack of clarity in my entry. When the system locks up, it only recovers by rebooting through the BIOS; it doesn't resume operation from some suspension. System logs…

Apparently the use of an empty read is to probe to see if you get various errors or an immediate 0-size return. This is merely a 'may' requirement in the Single Unix Specification,…

I was going to assert that read significantly predates getchar, but it turns out that both may have existed from V1 Unix onward. However, getchar in V1 through V6 had a different E…

Funny you should mention that: ; ls -l -rwxr-xr-x. 1 cks man 65536 Dec 4 1991 ./bin/bin.ultrix-mips/atty I see that GIDs around here have drifted a bit over the years.

Raw mode by itself is essentially useless for almost all programs; in order to do anything with it, you already need an entire surrounding collection of code to handle editing (eve…

I think I can boil down an example about why I prefer not to talk about trust by itself as it relates to CAs. Imagine a hypothetical version of Let's Encrypt that has all of its op…

My apologies for not being clear about my DigiNotar and StartComm examples. What I intended to point out here is that in neither case were these failures something which one could …

I disagree. A CA's actual product (what you pay money for) is some magic bits that put a padlock in the browser URL bar or, alternately, allow you to do HTTPS with browsers without…

The C standard was (and is) written so that it allowed for machines that didn't have simple pointers; a highly relevant example for the time was x86 machines in real or protected m…