Notices by Peter Tribble (ptribble@mastodon.social)

"It looks like you're using an unsupported browser"

No, sorry, what you meant to say was:

"It looks like we've written an unsupported website"

Almost every time I call a business they tell me they're experiencing a high volume of calls. If, as it seems, that's always true, then they clearly need more operators to answer the calls.

Then they tell you to go to their website. If the answer to my query was on the website, I wouldn't have bothered going to the hassle of calling you and dealing with your byzantine options menu.

And the ultimate insult, "we're too busy" and cutting me off. At least I didn't have to listen to hold muzak.

Another piece of security theatre - forcing you to reauthenticate (or reverify with MFA) if you log in to a service from a different IP address. It's not as if anyone ever has their IP address change, fortunately mine is reasonably stable, but in general it's a fair assumption that IP addresses are likely to be dynamic these days.

Grumpy old git time.

Every time I see “we’ve redesigned our website” my heart sinks. Invariably it means “we’ve replaced a simple, easy to use, attractive website with a slow, ugly, bloated, dysfunctional pile of garbage”.

@sxa Every time I come across that sort of nonsense I immediately think "This is best avoided".

And one way in which this is interesting is that it's actually rather unusual for Tribblix to make changes that get it ahead of illumos-gate. Is this just an outlier, or will I start to push more changes into Tribblix first? I don't know yet.

One of the more interesting changes in Tribblix m37 is the removal of the ZFS restriction that forces 32-bit timestamps. This means that ZFS on Tribblix now allows files that have timestamps after Y2038. Other filesystems (eg tmpfs) allow this already, but this will highlight some applications that aren't ready for the future.

https://www.illumos.org/issues/17413

Another #illumos distribution appears - Illumarine

https://illumarineos.com/

@stefanlindbohm I like it, although the alien mm/dd/yyyy date format was quite jarring.

A Tribblix release provides an opportunity to bump the version of a component. In the next release, for example, the default PostgreSQL version will get updated, and PHP, and go. Probably ruby too. I ought to bump gcc, but that will probably get deferred.

The open question is whether I should push the default openjdk from 17 to 21. (On x86, that is - SPARC will have to stay at 17.) I'm not worried about whether old code will continue to run, but building apps with jdk21 is very noisy.

And, if you're interested, the list of root CAs that got dropped this time around is present in this bug report:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1957685

It's entertaining when you try and visit a CyberSecurity company website and it's blocked because it uses an invalid security certificate.

Why is this becoming an issue? Because Mozilla are removing trust bits for really old CAs. So there are a few CAs that are starting to drop out of the list of trusted CAs that Mozilla publish, and that propagates through to distributions as explained on the Mozilla wiki.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Root_CA_Lifecycles

@charadon Oh I understand why they think it's necessary/desirable. It's unfortunate that you have a clash with what society would benefit from.

Of course, the dates are when the cpu architecture was introduced. The chips persisted in the market for a while after that.

Another thing is that I'm so used to having run systems for decades that dynamically optimize for the cpu found in the system that I'm somewhat surprised such techniques aren't more widely used.

Here we are faced with an ever increasing mountain of e-waste, and RHEL and Rocky go and render even more perfectly viable computers obsolete by requiring x86-64-v3 (Alma, is slightly better, because you can optionally run that on x86-64-v2).

I'm less than convinced by the concept of National Email Week. Sure, email can have value, but having a celebration of spam, phishing, and general time-wasting seems suboptimal.

International Dark 'n Stormy® Day sounds much more fun!

@freya A networked package manager is basically `wget && pkgadd`, the more interesting part is having some sort of catalog so that you know what packages are available and whether they need updating.

The End of 10 project is largely focused on getting Linux onto PCs that aren't capable of running Windows 11, to avoid them becoming e-Waste and possibly just ending up in landfill.

I was just thinking, though, that the era of machines impacted - maybe 10 years old or so - would also make ideal candidates for running Tribblix. Run Tribblix, reduce e-Waste!

https://endof10.org/

Achievement unlocked: Mention of Tribblix in an article from Oracle

https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/whats-new-in-the-oracle-solaris-11481-cbe-release

A little while ago I wrote down a few thoughts On efficiency and resilience in IT

https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2025/04/on-efficiency-and-resilience-in-it.html

@sxa I remember the time when Mosaic was considered a resource hog, and things like chimera were trialled as lightweight alternatives.