Fermi is dapper even when eating a treat. It is very important to be dapper. #petRats #rats

Pretty much sums up entirely too much of the world around me these days (notably r/commandline, r/CLI, among the deluge)

@jggimi @mwl related: the 500 mile email

https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

Me, 4PM: "dang it, why is my incremental zfs send of /var/mysql sending the entire file instead of just the changes from yesterday???"

Me, now: "Oh. The contents of /var/mysql churn 99% between yesterday and today."

Anyway, I'm working hard on #openzfsmastery. I'd appreciate your support. https://mwl.io/sponsor

wrote about send:encrypted, which should make @dexter happy. #openzfsmastery

@mwl this reminds me of a problem my team was tasked to solve, about 20 years ago. Making response time for TCP packets between Detroit and Hyderabad get faster.

We had many meetings. Many, many meetings.

I recall trying to explain the speed of light as a constant -- and citing Einstein's special relativity formula -- to my director.

I don't mess with containers very much--I prefer the much greater security and load isolation offered by VMs--but I pretty regularly get questions about the best way to set up Docker and/or LXC with ZFS datasets.

I'm happy to tell you, today I discovered a pretty thorough guide that includes--among other things--how to properly isolate ephemeral data from necessary data, in order to de-clutter and reduce the load of your backup and restoration routines.

https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2026-05-16_rootless_docker_virtiofs_proxmox/

there's this new thing called the "publish" button? Huh. Cool.

Anyway, here's yesterday's #60secondsOfWIP: "Cleverness Is Your Only Option."

https://mwl.io/archives/25014

Back the Kickstarter now and leave room for dessert!

(My characters always enjoy a meal.)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidiansky/khumalo-tales

looks like you can't install Postfix and BIND together on today's #FreeBSD:

New packages to be INSTALLED:
lmdb: 1.0.2,1 [FreeBSD-ports]
postfix: 3.11.7_1,1 [FreeBSD-ports]

Installed packages to be REMOVED:
bind920: 9.20.29
lmdb0: 0.9.35

#sysadmin

Ok, looks like this is the week of funny experiences.

Customer: "I had an AI check our server and it says the SSH port is open and that's not very secure."

Me: "Yes, you asked us to open it so you could access the server via SFTP (actually, you wanted FTP, but we discussed it a bit and found this compromise). Don't worry, it's only accessible from your IP and you land in a dedicated FreeBSD jail. From there, you can only access the 'exchange' directory on your server, where you can upload and download files without affecting the application."

(NB: I had suggested a VPN, but they declined because it was too complicated.)

Customer: "Yes, but maybe it's still insecure. Can't we close it?"

Me: "No, unless you want to lose access to that directory."

Customer: "Ok, thanks."

One hour later:

Customer: "Hi, I think we've found a solution. We've just created an app (!!!) with AI that lets us access the files anyway, but more securely than SSH (!!!). Can we install that and close SSH? Oh, and not in the dedicated jail, but directly in the application's jail, because it needs access to the application's files."

Me: "Frankly, I trust SSH in a dedicated jail, restricted by the firewall, a lot more. I don't think this is a good idea."

Customer: "Ok, thanks."

Half an hour later:

Customer: "Ok, now it's secure. I had another AI check it and it found some security issues, but it fixed them all. Can you install it and disable SSH?"

Me: "I strongly advise against it. I can see problems coming."

Customer: "Ok, thanks."

One hour later, my phone rings.

Their internal IT guy (who has access to the machine, which, after all, belongs to them) had given the AI the login credentials to go ahead with the operation.

Except the AI had managed to lock itself out via the firewall, without even starting the app. And now they couldn't get back in.

Fortunately, I had my own access, via VPN, to a separate jail that the AI hadn't touched (or even considered).

Customer: "SORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRY! From now on, we do things your way."

Well, at least it ended well.

PS: The customer knows I'm sharing this story and agreed to it.

#IT #SysAdmin

Setting the Days Since Mullenweg sign back to zero again.

https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-orders-accessibility-revert-tells-core-committer-to-contribute-your-talents-to-another-project

Fermi is dapper even when eating a treat. It is very important to be dapper. #petRats #rats

good morning, I saw this so now you must as well

30k commits per day isn’t the flex you think it is

Some of us remember a time when we committed work when it was functional and shippable

(WIP commits were checkpoints, local, and were not intended to escape)

Switched to left-handed mousing, to prepare for the future.

"Don't worry. If I die, the rats know what to do."

hey istr someone was trying to stand up firefox in a codeberg? repo, but with all of the AI/LLM integration cut out.

anyone remember who as doing that?

The world is our hard-boiled egg.

Once we figure out how to get through the shell, it is OURS. But getting that first crack is an absolute pain. #petRats #rats

Surgery scheduled for 12 November.

I can, in theory, get a first draft of #openzfsmastery finished and off to reviewers before then.