a logbook for things I broke and mostly fixed
I work on infrastructure, mostly — the unglamorous middle layer where packets meet processes and somebody has to figure out why. This site is the place I write things down so I stop solving the same problem twice. The bar for posting is low: if I had to read three man pages and a forum thread from 2009 to fix it, it goes here.
Plain HTML, a Makefile, and a static generator I keep threatening to replace. No JS, no fonts loaded over the network, no analytics. Light and dark themes follow your system preference. RSS works. The whole thing fits in a tab and renders fine in a terminal browser, which I checked once and have been smug about ever since.
I am wrong with some regularity, especially about networking. If something here contradicts the actual behaviour of the actual software on your actual machine, the software is right and I owe you a correction. Email gets read; pull requests against the typos repo get merged faster than the ones against my opinions.
Spent two hours convinced the firewall was eating my packets. It was not. The packets were leaving fine; the other end was discarding them for a reason the logs declined to mention. tcpdump -i any -nn port 5432 on both sides for thirty seconds would have told me this immediately. It usually would have.
find trickTIL find . -newer somefile is the laziest way to figure out what a build step actually touched. Pair it with -not -path './.git/*' unless you enjoy noise. I have been doing this the hard way (timestamps, stat, regret) for approximately a decade.
Six-second pause on every login to a box I'd just rebuilt. Reverse DNS, of course — UseDNS no in sshd_config and the pause vanished. I knew this. I have known this since 2017. I will know it again, presumably, the next time.
The old one was 380 lines of bash and three nested case statements. The new one is 40 lines of bash and one comment that says "do not add features here." I give the comment about six months.
Bought a temperature-controlled iron after fifteen years of pretending the cheap one was fine. It was not fine. The first joint with the new one looked like a joint instead of a small silver tumour. Tools matter; I keep relearning this and writing it down.
email in the footer. plain text, please. signed mail welcome, html mail filed under /dev/null.