Carousel is a lie!

Well, I did the right thing today -- twice. Damn right I'm bragging.

First off, it turns out that the FreeBSD Foundation has run into a (good!) problem: its donations have been too big. In order to keep its US charitable status, it needs to have two-thirds of its donations be relatively small. Due to a couple of big donations, this ratio is a little out of whack at the moment, and they need a bunch of small donations.

Welp, I've been administering FreeBSD systems for a living for...well, I was gonna say four years, but it's more like two and a half or three. I've been working on them for four, though; my rent and food has been paid in large part because of the generosity of the people who put together FreeBSD. A donation went off in short order.

Then I remembered that I've been meaning to join the Free Software Foundation for a while now. The motivation is the same: I've been paying my bills for a long time now (and enjoying myself immensely in the process) because of the generosity of Free-as-in-Freedom software people: Stallman, Torvalds, Wall, and a zillion others. I have a hard time imagining what I'd be doing now without Free software; I suspect that, if I was lucky, I'd be working as a grocery store manager right now. So: off to the FSF website to sign up for an associate membership.

And what did I find but two, count 'em TWO cool things:

1. If you refer three people to the FSF for associate memberships, RMS or Eben Moglen will record a message for you, suitable for voicemail, Hallowe'en or impressing the ladies. I did a quick search on Google, but couldn't find anyone with the link...damn shame. Better than a free iPod, cooler than a CmdrTaco TiVo -- join the FSF and get RMS to say "All Hail Liddy!"

2. The FSF is looking for a senior sysadmin. God, that'd be cool. Decent enough pay (no, it's not the sort of job you take because of the money, but it's nice to think about), all the Free software you can handle, and an IBM Thinkpad to run it on. Of course, I think I'd have some 'plainin' to do about the laptop I'm writing this on...and, of course, it would mean living in the US. Frankly, that scares the crap out of me these days. Goddamned PATRIOT Act...

In other news, work continues apace. We're losing two coop students and gaining one, gaining another full-time person, and I'm still trying to get my RAID array -- credit app is with the boss, and after that's done the order'll finally go in.

Rough guess (wild hope) at this point is that it'll be in my hands in mid-January, which won't be a moment too soon. There's a new Linux server I'm setting up that I'm desperately hoping won't have problems due to proprietary kernel modules in the software I'm installing. (I'm just writing myself further and further out of that job, aren't I?)

And I'm wondering if the simplest way to get Nagios to make sure the right machines are exporting the right filesystems is to check if amd is mounting them correctly. (No matter whether the machine or amd fails, something needs to be fixed.) Or maybe I just need to figure out the right wrapper for showmount -e.)

On the spam front: good god, what a smoking hole Movable Type is turning out to be. First there were the license changes, then the comment spammers (who seem to be posting a lot more aggressive to MT than to WordPress)...Of course, comment spam affects all blogs, not just MT. Still, this whole idea of rebuilding static pages every time the stars move seems to be causing them a lot of trouble. (Yep, that last sentence was pure FUD. Or bullshit.) And okay, no, I don't use MT, so what precisely is my beef?

As I'm not going to put up, I should shut up. I still have to upgrade WP -- though according to this posting, there are still lots of XSS issues left unfixed. I'm also upgrading PHP, and I should probably use ApacheToolbox to do that automagically, rather than periodically editing my own Makefile.

The release party for Where Are They Coming From? came off JUST FINE, thank you. EVERYONE was there. Top Stars include Topo, Phil Knight and Mos Def, fresh from the set of HHGTTG. Uh huh.

Further thoughts on the MySQL + GPhoto2 thing: gphoto2 does have the ability to pipe to STDOUT, which I don't think I knew...maybe it won't be as much work to insert directly into a database as I thought. Might even be able to do it as a Perl script.

Finally: what a gorgeous day. It's downtown Vancouver on the back steps of the Art Gallery, it's sunny (in December, too) and just cold enough to make you go "brr". The skater kids are practicing their synchronised jumping -- just in time for the Olympics, I'm sure. A far-too-generous co-worker has handed out chocolate, another has handed out home-made rum and brandy balls, and I'm taking off early to go drinking with a third. Feeling pretty damned good right now.

Update: Too bad Topo's not so great -- fever of 102.8F, as of a couple minutes ago. (Still haven't figured out what that is in Celsius; bad Canuckistanian!) It's down a bit from earlier this afternoon, though, so I'm thinking good things. And these pages say to not worry if it's less than a couple days, so I'm not worrying. Nope.

So Pouxie, my new OpenSolaris box, started displaying the same let's-shut-down-randomly-'cos-it's-Friday problems it previously did -- guess it's not the case after all. No problem, 'cos I happen to have a spare mobo and CPU that I've been itching to try out.

As it happens, it's got an onboard Intel ethernet interface which is detected just fine (iprb0, thank you) by Belenix/OpenSolaris, but fails to be brought up properly during boot. The problem is that while the interface is assigned an IPv4 address, it's not actually up, which means that adding the route fails, and /lib/svc/method/net-physical (which surprised me by being a simple shell script) declares failure. (I think it's just the route command that fails, but I should check this out.)

No idea why this happens on iprb0 and not nfo0, but what the hell. Looking around the script shows that it does do ifconfig plumb up on IPv6 interfaces -- but when I tried touching /etc/hostname6.iprb0 and running the script again (yeah, I know, probably a horrible thing that makes Bill Joy cry) it created a duplicate iprb0 interface with only an IPv6 interface. It was up, the IPv4 version was still down, and the IPv4 route command failed.

In the end I just edited the script to make it run ifconfig plumb up like it does with IPv6, and it seemed to do the trick just fine. I'm currently trying to see if there's a similar bug already filed on OpenSolaris.org; looks like I have a lot of slogging.

In other news, I thought I'd be posting this using BlogFS, but I'm running into library problems. First, I had to change import xmlrpc to importxmlrpclib. No biggie, even I can do that, but now I'm getting this when I try to create the directory that would mount the blog:

#  mkdir foo:bar@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/blog/xmlrpc.php
mkdir: cannot create directory `./foo:bar@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/blog/xmlrpc.php': No such file or directory

Not sure what's going on.

I've just come across AsciiDoc, and this is SO CLOSE to what I want: Ascii-based markup, still intelligible, and rendered into pretty CSS-compliant whatnot.

For a while now I've been toying with the idea of leaving WordPress behind and just writing all my stuff in Emacs, the way RMS intended, and converting it all to pretty HTML through <handwave>some sort of script or Makefile</handwave>. But this...this is perfect. See this? If it were a black monolith orbiting Jupiter, I would say "My God, it's full of stars!" It's clean, it's spare, it looks good, and it does not require verdammnt patching to stop it from throwing in br tags every time it sees a newline. And you know what it requires? Python! That's it!

I know what you're saying: this is like wiki markup without the wiki. EXACTLY! It's easy to write, easy to read, it looks good and it's just static: no PHP remote inclusion waiting to happen, no heavy load, just simple plain text and html. Oh yes.

As you can see, I've changed my blog a bit. I'm now using Gnu make, Perl, AsciiDoc and Emacs to generate everything. The old blog can still be found here, though i'll eventually be turning off comments for it.

Which brings me to another thing: comments on the new one are going to be a little funny, at least at first. Comments will be emailed to me; while I'll be scripting it eventually, for right now I'll be applying comments by hand. I'll write later about exactly what I'm trying to accomplish with all this, but right now my wife wants her laptop back. ("Are you writing in your new blog yet? Is it dreamy? Are you going to tell anyone where it is?" Aye, it's a fine marriage. :-)

Inna meantime, if you notice any problems please email me: aardvark at saintaardvarkthecarpeted dot com. In particular, I've tried to make sure that RSS continues to work with the old links; let me know if you run into problems.

Hi everyone...in case you haven't noticed, I've changed the software I use for my blog. This is just here for archival purposes; no comments or trackbacks or pings are allowed. The new blog is where all the action'll be. C'mon over and have a look!

But apparently not: this guy's blog also takes comments by email. (His links for reading or sending a comment are a lot better labelled than mine, so I might as well steal that too… :-)

In other news, I am finally getting close to being finished a new credit card payment page for work. The place that processes our CC payments has a new API, so this has been a good chance to rewrite the current page. I flatter myself that my version (helped out a lot by a simpler API) is much easier to understand than the old, and that's gratifying…but by the beard of Shuttleworth, I'm sick of web work. It feels like that's all I've been doing since January, and I'm really looking forward to being done with it.

Oh, and another thing -- don't take abstracts for mathematical pages in PDF. Everyone uses LaTeX or plain text for a reason, and that reason is that it's easy on the sysadmin. :-)

Just came across norman.walsh.name while looking for information on Mercurial, and I'm intrigued. I'll have to take a look at the Makefile and maybe steal some ideas...by the beard of Saint Tim, this site could use a rewrite.

The move of all the websites and mail from the server in Atlanta to home took longer than I thought. First I came across problems with the quad-hme interface in the Sparc Ultra 1 workstation I'd been using as a firewall, and I had to resurrect Francisco, an AMD Pentium clone, and install OpenBSD 4.1 on it. Then using pf and spamd to do greylisting didn't work so well, and I had to turn it off. Then some DNS/routing stuff I'd missed before…

Done, though, at long last. Time to sleep.

While obsessively prowling my referrers today, I noticed that I've been aggregated on Planet Sysadmin. I'm incredibly flattered. Looks like there's some damn fine reading there, and it looks like I have to fix my RSS feed...apologies for the lack of paragraph breaks.

I came across Steve's blog compiler (wonderful phrase; he tells me it comes from wiki compiler) Chronicle t'other day, and I'm intrigued. It's a great deal more polished than what I've got; his Makefile alone inspires envy in me. It's easy to tell that he's an actual programmer…

Chronicle does Markdown or Textile, not AsciiDoc, but it should be simple enough to grab the guts of this and make it do the job. And in any case my love of AsciiDoc is at least half due to its nice CSS, which I could steal.

The one thing that might be nice is that, looking in the code, Chronicle seems to recompile/regenerate all the HTML, whether or not anything has changed; I'm using make for regenerating the pages here, so as to avoid that. Of course, I could be wrong — I've only given Chronicle a once-over — and in any case my crappy lack of server-side includes makes for many rebuilds when (say) I add another link to the sidebar.

About a year ago, I started using a cobbled-together system of Bash and Perl scripts and Makefiles to put together this blog. One of the reasons was my general dislike for PHP; another was my desire to try living (at least in some small way) by Saint Aardvark's Axiom of Information Utility, and try keeping this in plain text. (Another was a desire to use Emacs to write these damn things; I want the control that's thrown out when you start using a GUI to edit.)

But one of the problems that faced me was how to deal with comments, and comment spam. Having a web form that allowed comments made commenting easy, but the downside was that it made spamming easy too. WP and others keep this down to a dull roar, but it's not perfect and I've had problems with false positives — people being unable to post comments because their IP address was on some blacklist, and the plugin had made no provision for whitelisting.

I decided to lash together something that would use email. For me — a very small, low-traffic website, with a blog devoted to a rather obscure set of concerns and a tech-savvy audience (Hi Dad!) — this seemed like a good choice. Email spam, for me, has been pretty much solved by greylisting and SpamAssassin. (There's the problem of a ten — no, fourteen — year-old email address that I've been meaning to get changed for a while now, but that's another story; they don't seem to do greylisting, and SpamAssassin does catch most of it.) So taking comments by email seemed, you know, righteous, dude.

The system for comments is pretty simple: every post gets an epoch timestamp embedded in it. (I think if you look in the HTML source, you can see it.) I use it for sorting the order of the posts, and I use it to generate email addresses for post-specific comments. The format is simple: comments+(seconds since the epoch)@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com. The address is included in the post, though I haven't done much to make it obvious. (This blog, and I think this whole website, would make baby Jacob Nielson cry.)

My thinking was that, even though I was publishing the addresses, it wouldn't matter: as I mentioned, spam for me has been mainly solved (insert disclaimers here). Between greylisting and SpamAssassin, I figured I pretty much wouldn't see any spam at all.

Turns out there's another benefit: the addresses have been picked up by spam bot crawlers, but they're screwing up the scraping. From 24 days of mail logs, I see a crapload of attempts to deliver to the wrong address:

$ perl -ne'/NOQUEUE/ && s{.*to=<(\S+?)>.*}{$1} && print "$_\n";' mail.log* | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
[much snippage]
     36 1181577610@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com
     36 1182947701@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com
     37 1181326150@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com
     37 1183667208@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com
     38 1182949918@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com
     40 1183349604@saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com

There were more than 2500 of these messages turned away by greylisting. They've all stripped off everything up to the plus, not realizing (as I didn't until a few years ago) that a plus in an email is valid.

In fact, the only attempts to deliver to legitimate comment addresses were two actual comments to my blog…which brings up a shortcoming: I never got that many comments with WordPress, but I sure got more than I do now. It's possible my writing has just gone 'way downhill, but I think it's more likely that this system just puts people off, or they're just unable to find it with my current (crappy) design.

(One interesting problem: my wife tried to comment once, using Lotus Notes at her workplace. It converted the plus sign into an underscore. Weird.)

I still regard this setup for comments as an experiment. Its results are definitely mixed; no spam, but fewer comments as well. Given the tiresome mess that comes with the lack of an HTTP equivalent of greylisting, I'm inclined to keep doing it.

Anyhow...that's my interesting research result for the day. You may now talk amongst yourselves.

Work...hell, life is busy these days.

At work, our (only) tape drive failed a couple of weeks ago; Bacula asked for a new tape, I put it in, and suddenly the "Drive Error" LED started blinking and the drive would not eject the tape. No combination of power cycling, paperclips or pleading would help. Fortunately, $UNIVERSITY_VENDOR had an external HP Ultrium 960 tape drive + 24 tapes in a local warehouse. Hurray for expedited shipping from Richmond!

Not only that, the Ultrium 3 drive can still read/write our Ultrium 2 media. By this I mean that a) I'd forgotten that the LTO standard calls for R/W for the last generation, not R/O, and b) the few tests I've been able to do with reading random old backups and reading/writing random new backups seem to go just fine.

Question for the peanut gallery: Has anyone had an Ultrium tape written by one drive that couldn't be read by another? I've read about tapes not being readable by drives other than the one that wrote it, but haven't heard any accounts first-hand for modern stuff.

Another question for the peanut gallery: I ended up finding instructions from HP that showed how to take apart a tape drive and manually eject a stuck tape. I did it for the old Ultrium 2. (No, it wasn't an HP drive, but they're all made in Hungary...so how many companies can be making these things, really?) The question is, do I trust this thing or not? My instinct is "not as far as I can throw it", but the instructions didn't mention anything one way or the other.

In other news, $NEW_ASSIGNMENT is looking to build a machine room in the basement of a building across the way, and I'm (natch) involved in that. Unfortunately, I've never been involved in one before. Fortunately, I got training on this when I went to LISA in 2006, and there's also Limoncelli, Hogan and Chalup to help out. (That link sends the author a few pennies, BTW; if you haven't bought it yet, get your boss to buy it for you.)

As part of the movement of servers from one data centre across town to new, temporary space here (in advance of this new machine room), another chunk of $UNIVERSITY has volunteered to help out with backups by sucking data over the ether with Tivoli. Nice, neighbourly think of them to do!

I met with the two sysadmins today and got a tour of their server room. (Not strictly necessary when arranging for backups, but was I gonna turn down the chance to tour a 1500-node cluster? No, I was not.) And oh, it was nice. Proper cable management...I just about cried. :-) Big racks full of blades, batteries, fibre everywhere, and a big-ass robotic Ultrium 2 tape cabinet. (I was surprised that it was 2, and not U3 or U4, but they pointed out that this had all been bought about four or five years ago…and like I've heard about other government-funded efforts, there's millions for capital and little for maintenance or upgrades.)

They told me about assembling most of it from scratch...partly for the experience, partly because they weren't happy with the way the vendor was doing it ("learning as they went along" was how they described it). I urged them to think about presenting at LISA, and was surprised that they hadn't heard of the conference or considered writing up their efforts.

Similarly, I was arranging for MX service for the new place with the university IT department, and the guy I was speaking to mentioned using Postfix. That surprised me, as I'd been under the impression that they used Sendmail, and I said so. He said that they had, but they switched to Postfix a year ago and were quite happy with it: excellent performance as an MTA (I think he said millions of emails per day, which I think is higher than my entire career total :-) and much better Milter performance than Sendmail. I told him he should make a presentation to the university sysadmin group, and he said he'd never considered it.

Oh, and I've completely passed over the A/C leak in my main job's server room…or the buttload of new servers we're gonna be getting at the new job…or adding the Sieve plugin for Dovecot on a CentOS box...or OpenBSD on a Dell R300 (completely fine; the only thing I've got to figure out is how it'll handle the onboard RAID if a drive fails). I've just been busy busy busy: two work places, still a 90-minute commute by transit, and two kids, one of whom is about to wake up right now.

Not that I'm complaining. Things are going great, and they're only getting better.

Last note: I'm seriously considering moving to Steve Kemp's Chronicle engine. Chris Siebenmann's note about the attraction of file-based systems for techies is quite true, as is his note about it being hard to do well. I haven't done it well, and I don't think I've got the time to make it good. Chronicle looks damn nice, even if it does mean opening up comments via the web again…which might mean actually getting comments every now and then. Anyhow, another project for the pile.

I'm in the process of setting up a bunch of new servers for $job_2. All but one are CentOS 5.2, kickstart installed and managed with cfengine. This is the third time I've goen thorugh a cfengine setup, and it always feels like starting from scratch each time. It seems -- and I'm not at all sure this is fair or accurate -- that each time I set up one of these systems, there's a lot that I've lost from the last time and have to relearn. I'm fortunate this time that I can refer to $job_1's setup to see how I did things last time, but if I didn't have that I'd be significantly further behind than I am.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Part of me thinks I should just be more aggressive about taking notes, or committing stuff to a private repository, or writing it down here more; part of me thinks that this might be a clue that cfengine is too low-level for my head. It feels like when I was trying to learn C, and couldn't believe that I had to remember all this stuff just to print something, or read a file, or connect to another machine over the Internet. By contrast, Perl (or any other scripted language) was such a relief...just print, or open, or use the Net::Telnet module, or whatever. The details are there and they are important, sometimes very much so; that doesn't mean I want to learn more metallurgy every time I need a fork. (No, I don't think that metaphor's tortured; why do you ask?)

Another thing is that I'm trying to get multipath connections working for the first time. We've got two database servers, each of which is connected via dual SAS HBAs to outboard disk arrays. (I don't think anyone else calls them "outboard", but I like the sound of it. See this hard drive? It's outboard, baby!) The arrays are from Sun and come with drivers, but the documentation is confusing: it says it's available for RHEL 5 (aka CentOS 5), but the actual download says it's only for RHEL 4.

As a temporary respite, I'm trying to see if I can get these working using Linux's own multipath daemon, and it's also confusing. The documentation for it is tough to track down, and I just don't understand the different device names: am I meant to put /dev/dm-2 in fstab, or /dev/mpath/mpath2p1? If the latter, why does the name sometimes change to the WWUID (/dev/mpath/$(cat /dev/random)) when I restart multipathd? (use_friendly_names is uncommented in the config file.) If the whole point of multipath is failover, why does this sequence:

• touch /mnt/1
• remove first cable
• rm /mnt/1
• replace first cable
• touch /mnt/2
• remove second cable
• rm /mnt/2
• replace second cable

(where /mnt is where I've got this array mounted, obvs) sometimes work, and sometimes end with "I/O error" being logged, and the filesystem being read-only? Is this the sort of thing that the Sun driver will fix? I can't find anything about this.

And I mentioned electrical problems. When we got our servers installed, the Sun guys told us they'd tripped breakers on the PDU and/or breakers in the room's electrical cabinet. Since it had a sign on it saying "100A", I figured we might be running up against power limtis -- either in the room as a whole, if my figures were 'way out, or on individual PDUs. Turns out I was probably wrong: I missed the bit on the sign that said 3-phase, which means (deep breath) we probably have 3 x 100A power available (I think).

It's more complicated than that, because some of it is in 120V, some of it is in twist-lock 220V 30A circuits, and so on. But I should've checked before emailing the faculty member who, in a year or two, will be going into this room (we're there as guests of the department) and happens to sit on the facilities committee. He had asked how we were doing, so I sent him an email -- nice, polite, and including a bit about how grateful we were for the room and the help of the local sysadmins (all of which is true).

I was under the impression that he was asking for info now, so that he could bring it up for action in a few months when we were out. Instead, two hours later when I'm swearing at multipath, in come the facilities manager and one of the sysadmins I was dealing with, looking to find out just how much power we were using anyhow. I apologized profusely, and they were very cool about it. But when the committee guy asks questions, people jump. I had not anticipated this. Welcome to University Politics 101. I emailed again and explained my mistake.

There are lots of remedial courses I could take. However, today I would most like to take "Electricity and wiring for sysadmins".

And on another note: Ack! My laptop's home partition is 93% full! How the hell did that happen?

And again: How did I not know about apt-file? This is perfect!

(Touch o' the hat to Tears For Fears and Steve Kemp; I'm moving closer every day to switching to Chronicle.)

I've been hlding off mentioning this 'til all my ducks were in a row, but at last it's settled. The job I've been working at part-time for the last six months will be my full-time job starting next Wednesday. w00t!

I've been spending my time at $job_1 making sure the documentation is complete, getting a spare workstation set up and ready to go, and dumping my brain into the sysadmin who will be helping fill in 'til a new person is hired (which might take a while).

I'm really excited about this. First off, I'll get my lunch hours back; I've been walking between the two offices (mornings at one, afternoons at the other, back to the first for the last half hour), and it'll be nice to have an hour to myself again. But the new job is exciting for me: nice big servers used for scientific computation, the chance to build an infrastructure from scratch, and some big projects. The people are friendly. The boss is nice. The place has funding for the next five years or so. It's all good. About the only thing missing is a rocket pack so I can cut down on this 90-minute commute.

And on top of all that, they're open to the idea of sending me to LISA this year. Now that would be nice…have to see if it works with the family, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

In other news:

• Though I'm starting to be a bit frustrated with its organization, the Postfix book has proved its worth again by helping me not only get SASL set up at $job_2, but understanding what it's doing. This is in contrast to the don't-touch-or-you'll-lose-a-finger approach I'd taken to getting this working at my current job.
• I'm growing increasingly comfortable with Fedora Directory Server, thanks in no small measure to being able to play with it in a couple of virtual machines. Man, it makes a difference to have that freedom. (And in other news, water continues to be wet.)
• Got my third batch of home-made beer (Grapefruit Bitter, from my local homebrew shop's recipe) into the fermenter on Saturday. My father-in-law is a retired millwright, and he made me an immersion chiller 'cos he's just that cool. Worked a treat; not so sure about the washed yeast. Here's hoping. My parents are coming for a visit in the summer; I figure my dad and I should be able to do a batch and bottle it before they leave, which'll give him a good souvenir.
• Enjoying the hell out of Anathem, which my wife got me for Xmas.
• Closer to migrating to Chronicle. The only thing I want is to not dump all generated HTML pages into one directory; shouldn't take too long to add. Wouldn't that be a lovely thing?

I am a) going for beer and b) actually blogging. Yay me!

Heyo...I've finally migrated to Chronicle and switched the website to ikiwki. Things should be working, aside from a few links I'll be cleaning up as time goes on...however, if you notice anything truly wrong please drop a line. (The comment system is no longer email-based, btw.)

And in the interest of keeping this on-topic...looks like work may be sending me to LISA! Here's hoping...

I've set up ipv6 again on my home server; a reboot + doing everything by hand + not writring it down means a) I'm a baaaad sysadmin and b) had to wait 'til now to find the time to get it going again.

I'm really curious to know what IPv6 connectivity is available at UBC. Must ask mailing list...

Sorry -- importing some old entries from my Slashdot journal, and I forgot the date from one of 'em...which made it look like it was 2002 all over again.

Got a root canal today. Wish me luck.

This is not quite me but a) I did have a phall, once, long ago, and b) he really does look like me. (Or I look like him...what are the rules of precedence in these things?)

I have been very, very busy over the last couple of days but I am finally starting to see a way through it. I'm hoping that Bacula problems are behind me for now.

Update: Nope, locked up two minutes after I wrote that. But I got the backtrace I needed!

It's been nearly ten years since I started blogging. I counted up my entries earlier this year and realized that a thousand entries were within reach, in time for that anniversary, if only I applied myself. And here we are, last entry dated June 8th -- nearly two months ago. (Perhaps longer by the time I post this...)

I started writing about computers, and that's still what I write most about. I'm a sysadmin by trade, and there's a lot that I want to pass on to other people (or to myself, at a later date): problems to avoid, fixes I've found, war stories to brag about. But I'm becoming...somewhat disenchanted with system administration. I remember being ten years younger and shaking my head with disbelief when a coworker -- old then as I am now -- explained that he did not run a server at home; that was work, and he didn't want to spend his time at home doing work. I couldn't believe I'd ever think that myself.

But I do. My wife's laptop is not backed up regularly; the music server sometimes craps out; I've been meaning to move my website off Linode (who have been great) to my own machine for a month now. But I keep putting it off, and I spend my time on other things: family; other hobbies; reading; watching TV. (There's an awful lot of good stuff on Netflix.)

I've been wanting to write about some of this stuff here, but I don't. Partly that's laziness, or time constraints, or simple reluctance to make public what I think of as private. But partly -- and this is surprising to me, foreign -- I think this isn't the place to put those things. Which is bullshit.

This is my blog. It's got a tech focus, sure, but it's where I write. When I read other people's blogs, I realize that -- shock, horror -- they don't always write about the same things. I like those details -- and if I don't, I know where PgDn is on my keyboard. Yet I've read entries by people, conscious that their blogs are being aggregated on subject-specific sites, apologizing for writing about "unrelated" subjects...or responding to complaints about "unrelated" subjects. Which is also bullshit. It's their place. We're welcome to look, and that's great; their generosity makes our day better. But to quote an admonishment someone's mother gave them, you get what you get and you don't get upset.

I'm not being aggregated anymore, so I don't have to worry about that. (No, you're bitter.) But I still find myself thinking about starting up an "astronomy blog", or a "beer blog". Of course, in a couple years it'll be different: a "coding blog", or a "geology blog", or a "dendrology blog", or a "geneology blog". Which, third time's the charm, is bullshit. I've never understood the nervousness some have about keeping writing about different subjects separated. I hop about, when it comes to hobbies; I hop about, when it comes to life. I'm able to organize subjects without having stupid borders around them. Read, or don't read: that's your job.

So I'm becoming less inclined to write about system administration, just as I'm becoming less focused on system administration. I'm going to be writing more (maybe) on the other things I'm interested in. Fair warning.

TODO:

• Brew again, dammit
• Messier sketching project
• Create account on UnmannedSpaceflight.com
• Migrate my damn server back home
• New sciences: dendrology, geology