It’s 2019. How much RAM do you need?

For a desktop or laptop, it’s fairly easy: everyone needs 8GB to get general work done. 16GB is suitable for people who are doing heftier work, and people who need 32GB or more always have a specific reason that they can articulate and justify.

Servers are different. Servers can be scaled vertically (made or purchased in heftier configurations) for a ways, but nearly always you will have a reason to scale horizontally (more machines of the same calibre) – high availability, or recovery from disaster, or workloads that are cost-effective to …

The HP Envy 13z is a lightweight, reasonably high-performance laptop with a relatively low price tag - under $600 for the 1080P 13” touchscreen, flip-hinge to tablet, backlit keyboard, 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD, Ryzen 2300U four-core system weighing a little over two pounds.

(Those were the specs.)

It generally compares favorably to a non-Retina MacBook Pro.

Unsurprisingly, it ships with Windows 10 and HP support wants nothing to do with Linux. Honestly, if they just changed their stock answer away from hostility to polite indifference, it would be a remarkable improvement. Running Windows disk management utility produced a 112GB partition for …

We’ve had a nominal gigabit fiber connection for more than a year now. Let’s take a look at how much of it we’ve been using.

Luckily, my firewall keeps track for me.

$ vnstat -m -i eth3

There’s this notion of a technological cycle of reincarnation, where an implementation is followed by a logical successor which leads to another one which carries on down a chain until someone has a bright idea which looks an awful lot like the original implementation. For example, it used to be that CPUs did all their math by themselves, then they outsourced the hard parts to floating point coprocessors, then those got built in to the main CPU chip again. Graphics subsystems are particularly prone to the cycle.

It just occurred to me that with the recent trend to enabling …

Several people have asked me recently what hardware I would buy today for use as a home firewall.

About a year ago, we switched ISPs from RCN to Verizon. I had no particular issues with RCN except that their prices went up each year without providing better service. (It’s true that RCN also fails to handle IPv6 natively, but Verizon shares that failure.) What’s happened in that year?

• Three outages. Two were caused by trucks knocking down the fiber crossing the road; one by an unspecified problem that was fixed by rebooting the Optical Network Terminal (i.e. fiber termination device, which offers ethernet, cable TV and telephone services). The first fiber outage took a week …

All email disclaimers are utterly useless – except, possibly, one that a lawyer sends you that, on that particular message, reminds you that you are not in a privileged relationship.

Here’s the proof:

This message (including any attachment(s) hereto) is confidential and may also be privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution or taking any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this message in error you are requested …

One problem: we have built an immense network of supercomputers that is essentially a Commons. An abuse of this Commons that would be ridiculously unprofitable if it had to be carried out by humans – say, an expected return of one one-hundredth cent per attempt – is highly attractive to unscrupulous actors who can automate a billion attempts for an expenditure of a few days or weeks worth of setup and expect a hundred thousand dollars of return.

Another problem: there has been little incentive for software developers to guarantee the security (integrity, privacy, trustworthiness) of their products, because they face so …

Gas ranges have the UNIX nature: they are powerful, can be controlled precisely, and if you only half-know what you are doing, it’s possible to blow up your house. If you do know what you’re doing, nearly any problem can be solved by taking it apart and cleaning things or replacing components.

Electric ranges are like Windows: they might eventually do the thing they’re supposed to do, but it’s hard to control them, there is a propensity to wildly oversteer, and you really don’t get the same power. If it breaks in a way that …

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD10 (2017) is the high-end tablet of their line. The hardware is mediocre and the software is quite bad. I do not recommend you purchase this or any other Fire tablet… unless you have some very specific requirements.

Let’s consider the negatives, first.

Bootloader is locked

Having a locked bootloader means that you can’t replace the OS with a sane one. If you could do that, then all other software problems could be overcome by a slightly technical person. (If you can follow directions well enough, there are good guides for most systems to …

By all means, replace procmail with maildrop.

If you haven’t read a procmailrc in a few months, it’s so much line noise and you need to consult the man pages again.

If you haven’t read a maildrop recipe file, well – here’s a nearly maximum-complexity snippet:

   xfilter "/usr/bin/spamc -U /var/lib/spamassassin/socket"
      if (/^X-Spam-Status: Yes/)
      {   
        to Maildir/spam/
      }

   `reformail -D 16000 duplicate.cache`
   if ( $RETURNCODE == 0 )
       exit

   if (/^X-Facebook.*/:h)
       to Maildir/facebook/

   if (/^Subject: \[Slack\] Notifications.*/:h)
       to Maildir/slack/

You now know how to do 90% of everything you’ll ever want …

Someone on the debian-user list just discovered that gpt partitioning allows you to put 128 partitions on a disk. They got really excited at the granularity that would allow. They weren’t thinking about the exciting maintenance procedures that would inevitably follow – not enough space here, too much space there, backups all over the place.

This is the sort of thing that ZFS excels at.

For example, let’s say you have five 1 TB disks, and you have less than 1TB that you really really want to have safe.

You could set up the following:

mainpool: a zpool composed …

If you have a domain name registered, you need to renew your registration every few years. You can generally ask for a 1-3 year cycle.

If you like your DNS registrar, there is no need to switch.

Today I received paper mail from a company called iDNS. I’m not a customer. The mail looked an awful lot like a bill.

“You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights to it on the Web, and now is the time to transfer and renew your name from your current Registrar to Internet Domain Name Services. Failure to renew your …

The price for using a math library developed by Foobar Corporation is $10,000 plus 1% of the sale price of your product, or whatever you negotiate with them.

The price for using a GPL’d math library is that you must license your source code under the GPL as well.

The price for using an LGPL’d math library is distributing the source for the library along with your product. If you modify the library itself, then that falls back to the GPL.