Notices by Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social)

@whitequark @0xabad1dea I once heard an Elizabeth Zwicky sysadmin war story from the late 80s or early 90s about how SRI's (I think) Bay Area machine room overheated during a rare Bay Area freezing snap ... because the AC pipes ran outside on the roof and no one had insulated them because why would you need to in the Bay Area of all places. So the sysadmins had to run around opening doors and windows to let all the outside freezing cold air in to cool the place down enough.

In a "that figures" thing, my home Linux desktop spontaneously rebooted today (not due to a power outage as far as I can tell). It's been up since November 11th so it was overdue for a kernel update and other things, but still.

But if it's going to spontaneously reboot, doing so on a day when all of Toronto is braced for freezing rain power outages is certainly appropriate.

@fanf This is my face when developers are mystified why dev and ops are at odds about software deployment. It's all in who gets rewarded (and punished) for what, and what is and isn't under their control (IMHO).

@CliftonR @grumpybozo It looks like there's a whole morass of various sorts of passthrough, but sadly it looks like there's nothing where you can easily say 'here is /dev/sdb, give it to the virtual machine'. (At least not in virt-manager, it may be possible with bare QEMU command lines if you want to wrangle them.)

Work has some computer toucher positions to fill that will be opening real soon now (... we hope¹), and I sort of feel that we should include "you don't have to use LLM/AI" in the position announcements. I'd certainly hope that it's increasingly a positive, given what so many companies seem to be doing.

¹ The current people in the positions are leaving very soon and we'd really like to have their replacements overlap, or at least start right away, but ... university processes.

In case people are interested, my university general workplace has (just) now posted its latest senior sysadmin position (where the previous person in it got recruited by Engineering in the great cycle of life here). https://jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-DGP-Research-Computing-Support-Specialist-ON/598361317/

Despite claims that you might work from home for this position, well, don't count on it¹. Remote work is not an option for (reasonable) reasons².

¹ https://mastodon.social/@cks/115311500839814027
² https://mastodon.social/@cks/115761145345455977

Could I just remember 'apt-show-versions -u | sort' rather than looking it up in our cron job every time? Sure. I could also put it in a script to save myself the bother. (Will I remember the script? Maybe.)

@drscriptt Remote isn't an option¹ and leadership is increasingly against any WFH, but we'll see how that goes. The university's general jobs page is https://jobs.utoronto.ca/ (but good luck sorting through it) and my department has a page at https://web.cs.toronto.edu/employment-opportunities that links to our positions on the general jobs site.

¹ One thing the university is apparently scared of is the (unknown to it) employer tax and benefit contribution requirements for other jurisdictions.

@drscriptt At one point we were told that it was theoretically possible to directly employ someone in a non-local jurisdiction but it would require the university's lawyers agreeing to sign off on it, which would require very senior leadership approval, which was effectively impossible. Having the person involved¹ form a single-person consulting firm and retaining/paying the firm was Much, Much Easier.

¹ They moved back home but we wanted to still tap their expertise for a while.

@gnomon It made me wonder what we (at the university) might have sitting around in a back room, but the answer is probably "nothing by now". There was some effort to copy old 9-track tapes as the university's 9-track tape drives dwindled, but that was decades ago and I doubt anyone kept tapes back with important stuff on them.

(Although I heard the other day that there are still some sitting around some places.)

@gnomon I've been following the news with quite a bit of interest, and I'm happy for the outcome so far (people are even booting V4 on simulated hardware now). If I get energetic I might look over old techblog entries to see if there's anything this new V4 treasury can clarify or expand.

One of the reasons we're so big on stealing each other's senior technical people in my university is good luck trying to hire good senior sysadmin and so on people from outside. Partly this is because the university environment is increasingly different from corporate IT, and partly this is because of, uh, well, how much money we (can't) offer. I'm pretty sure senior people moving in have to want a slower paced and lower paid life (so far with no 'AI' mandates).

I worry about this every so often¹. On the one hand, I could probably get another job within the university (we're big on stealing each other's senior technical people). On the other hand, it's probably completely hopeless to apply for jobs outside the university, since I have (eg) basically no cloud/k8s/etc experience. If in-university jobs dry up or are unappealing, I'm up the creek.

(I'm not looking, I hope to spend the rest of my career at my current position.)

¹ https://infosec.exchange/@hacks4pancakes/115748385758923389

Today, for no particular reason¹, I was reminded of the fun fact that at the South Pole research station, their stored ice cream winds up so cold that they have to let it warm up for a few days before they can actually serve it. This comes from https://brr.fyi/posts/the-last-egg (the whole blog is very interesting if you like this sort of infrastructure information).

¹ okay it was because of https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/115691337448389296

@thomholwerda @mos_8502 I have the ghost of late-90s Sun on the line, and I think they toted along the Ultra 20 (2005+).

(Late 90s Sun workstations (x86 or otherwise) were not good workstations, they were increasingly unimpressive and terrible. But Sun sure sold them as workstations, even the x86 variants. The Ultra 20 line was by all accounts decent hardware although Sun wasn't really a workstation company by that point.)

@thomholwerda @mos_8502 Sunrays, ah the second hand memories. Work (UofT CS) was a big Solaris place in the 00s and we had some Sunrays, although they were all out of service by the time I arrived. Apparently the people who had them on their desktops rather liked the silence, although they became increasingly unimpressed with the performance.

(Video and audio was the final killer of all of our remote desktop efforts, partly because we were late to 1G Ethernet.)

@gnomon Embrace the world of platform pedals and regular footwear, I say from over here in the weird people's corner.

(People in my bike club periodically have a "you're biking in ordinary sandals?" double take to my footwear choices, which is always funny to me.)

Is it useful for a Unix sysadmin to know how to use ed(1) and do basic things with it? Sure. Sometimes ed(1) is all you have or is your best choice. Is it a priority for a sysadmin to learn ed(1), given that there are so many other things to learn in this field? I don't know, but I feel much less certain. There's a ton of things in system administration that are 'useful' to know, too many for any one person to actually know.

Sometimes I stumble over absolutely classical bug reports. Glibc bug report, 'glibc doesn't work right when filesystems have 0 inodes in directories'. Opened 2010, closed 2010 WONTFIX by who you think, reopened in 2016 under a new maintainer, fixed 2022-09 for readdir() and 2024-09 for readdir64_r().

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12165

I discovered this via this Go bug about the same issue, https://github.com/golang/go/issues/76428 (which has a 'how you can get this yourself' example due to gvfs/FUSE).

@gumnos @rk As a sysadmin, I see and feel the appeal behind fast start/quick editing, but I've found that ed doesn't work for me because (I think) it requires me to keep too much context in my head. Visual editors give me visible context for me to readily work in, and with a stock/minimal vim setup they start and operate fast enough for me.

(I have a big, slow start editor environment for big editing. That's GNU Emacs, not vim.)