today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 27, 2023

• How To Get Linux Filesystems Information Using Dysk Utility

  A filesystem in Linux refers to the method and data structure that an operating system uses to keep track of files on a disk or partition. It organizes and controls how data is read and written, ensuring that data can be stored and retrieved efficiently.

  In Linux, understanding the structure and details of your filesystems is essential for efficient system administration and data management.

  Many tools exist for identifying the currently available filesystems in Linux, with df command being the most commonly used command-line tool. A better alternative to the df command is dysk, which lists filesystems in Linux.

• Some questions about Unbound's domain-based rate limits (as of fall 2023)

  Unbound is a common resolving DNS server; we use it ourselves on our local recursive DNS resolvers. For a long time, Unbound has had the ability to set ratelimits, as covered in the unbound.conf manual page. These ratelimits have historically been a little complicated to understand (for example), and the situation is still not completely clear in the current (September 2023) documentation.

• A Mobile-Only Grid

  One way I could have done that is to target the sidebar, and turn it into a grid at that size so I could do the layout I wanted to with the first two boxes, then make sure all the rest of the boxes fill the width.

• A Web Component for Swapping Text between Text, HTML, and Markdown

  The big idea was to make it self-serve when someone asked me for this, say to accompany and interview or for an introduction at a conference. You never know what format they want it in, what the length limit is, or which tense. So I just did them all!

• Splitting our local DNS resolvers apart to serve different audiences

  It's a sad reality of modern life that you cannot count on arbitrary machines (or pieces of software) being sensible DNS clients. Every so often you're going to have a machine or a piece of software that freaks out or has something go wrong such that it sends your DNS resolvers a flood of queries, sometimes for DNS names that don't exist or don't currently resolve; this can happen if, for example, there's a program that rapidly retries failed DNS lookups (or DNS lookups that merely didn't get answered fast enough). Therefor, DNS resolvers that handle traffic from arbitrary clients are very likely to get hammered every so often, and if you're unlucky they'll be sufficiently badly affected that other clients start having their queries fail.

• Moving time capsule from host to jail and connecting my MacBook to ZFS on FreeBSD

  I first implemented this directly on the FreeBSD host. Today, I am moving that service into a jail.

• Masked email is a killer feature for Fastmail

  I last sang the praises of Fastmail in 2018, writing about how it’s pretty easy to avoid Google now that Google’s products are relatively middling. I’ve been using Fastmail exclusively since then and have only good things to say about it. The user interface is rock-solid and fast, and there have been very few times that they’ve had a server outage. But it’s just been qualitatively better than Gmail, not differentiated by a feature.

• The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

  No. Wi-Fi 7 is indeed a marvel, with each individual channel four times wider than the entire original 802.11 band in its entirety. With around 500MHz to play with in most of the world and double that in the US, it uses the new 6GHz band and a handful of new techniques to get a headline raw top speed of 46Gbps. Which is genuinely awesome, and as much use to the public as the toilets on the International Space Station. Wi-Fi 6's comparable maximum rate is 9.6Gbps. There is no consumer problem of today, no domestic use case imaginable, where 50Gbps works where 10 will not. The 6GHz band, which in the US actually goes some way beyond 7GHz, is more easily blocked by walls and other physical stuff necessary for gracious living than 5GHz, so coverage problems won't be fixed.

• [Old] Downloading a website as HTML files

  The place I usually start when rebuilding a site statically is to download the entire outgoing website as the rendered HTML pages. I then host the site to a new platform (almost always Netlify) and systematically refactor the site in a new framework (normally Eleventy). This allows me to work steadily over the course of a few weeks, which is important now that I’m not freelancing full time, so I can spread the work over evenings and weekends.

  But how do you go about downloading a whole website? Turns out it’s quite easy using Wget.

• Writing HTML by hand

  I write some of my pages using a markup language (emacs org-mode) and other pages using xhtml, with a few extra x:* tags that get expanded out into html later. I was curious, when I write html by hand, which tags do I use? I used Python's elementtree to get the answer: [...]

• False Friends - HTML Elements which are also Top Level Domains

  There is absolutely no relationship between the two sets of entities. But, just for fun, are there any HTML elements which happen to be false friends of the TLDs?

  Before we go any further, have a quick think. How many do you reckon there are? Are there some which spring to mind immediately?

• Tracing: structured logging, but better in every way

  It is no secret that I am not a fan of logs; I’ve baited (rapala in Finnish) discussion in our work chat with things like:

  "If you’re writing log statements, you’re doing it wrong."

  This is a pretty incendiary statement, and while there has been some good discussion after, I figured it was time to write down why I think logs are bad, why tracing should be used instead, and how we get from one to the other.

  Hopefully, with less clickbait. Step 3 will shock you, though.

• [Old] About Nano

  Based on the Pico message composition editor, Nano is a simple, display-oriented text editor for Unix. Although less powerful than programs such as vi and Emacs, Nano's basic feature set makes it easier for beginners to learn and use. To add text, just type it in, and it immediately becomes part of the document. You can also use the arrow keys to move about the document. Following is a brief overview of working with files in Nano.

• What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?

  Note that this is only a thought experiment. We are not suggesting that OpenDocument be changed. Nor is this article a criticism of the current OpenDocument design. The point of this essay is to suggest ways to improve future file format designs.

• How long does free hosting last?

  Note the last word.

  But, and I shit you not, these docs were updated as I was writing this blog post (the footer on the page says it was updated on September 18, 2023), and that line was removed. They now link to the hobby plan page, which, straight up, is very cool of them to offer, but doesn’t say anything about “forever”.

  Of course it won’t be forever.

• Restarting nfs-server on a Linux NFS (v3) server isn't transparent

  On Linux, the NFS server is in the kernel and runs as kernel processes, generally visible in process lists as '[nfsd]'. You might wonder how these processes are started and stopped, and the answer is through a little user-level shim, rpc.nfsd. What this program actually does is write to some files in /proc/fs/nfsd that control the portlist, the NFS versions offered, and the number of kernel nfsd threads that are running. To restart (kernel) NFS service, the nfs-server.service unit first stops it with 'rpc.nfsd 0', telling the kernel to run '0' nfsd threads, and then starts it again by writing some appropriate number of threads into place, which starts NFS service. The nfs-server.service systemd unit also does some other things.

• How to use the new element with WordPress

  There's a new HTML element in town! You can now use to semantically mark up a search box. It's great for letting screen-readers and other assistive tech know what a form does.

  It's only supported in WebKit for now - other browsers will get it eventually.