news
today's howtos
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Benny Siegert ☛ jj on NFS is not fun
You may have seen my relentless stanning of the
jjversion control system, e.g. in my recent FrOSCon 2026 talk. I thinkjjis super fun to use! But not on all setups.In fact, I recently ran into the worst type of setup for it. My pkgsrc repo was located on a home server, on spinning rust – this is bad already because of operation latency. But then I imported it via NFS, over Wi-Fi, onto my laptop, and the experience was miserable.
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ID Root ☛ How To Install DavMail on Fedora 44
Some companies still run Exchange or Abusive Monopolist Microsoft 365 and block plain IMAP.
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Ronalds Vilciņš ☛ Finding Hidden Content With hidden="until-found"
Ordinary hidden removes content from display and browser search. That is awkward for long reference pages where a section should start collapsed but still appear in Find in Page.
hidden="until-found" is designed for that case.
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University of Toronto ☛ Where you can (easily) put local man pages on a typical Linux system
Suppose that you have some local programs or scripts that could do with a manual page, and you're willing to write one. However, you're not willing to go to the bother of building a standard style package for this program and its manual page, and you don't want to have all of your system administrators and other people add something to environment variables, and you still want 'man ' to work. Is there anywhere safe you can put your local manual page? A bit to my surprise, the answer is generally yes.
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Benny Siegert ☛ jj on NFS is not fun
In fact, I recently ran into the worst type of setup for it. My pkgsrc repo was located on a home server, on spinning rust – this is bad already because of operation latency. But then I imported it via NFS, over Wi-Fi, onto my laptop, and the experience was miserable.
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[Old] Mike Dank ☛ Running & Using A Finger Daemon
The finger application was written in the 1970s to allow users on a network to retrieve information about other users. Back before Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms, someone could use the finger command to retrieve public contact information, project notes, GPG keys, status reporting, etc. from a user on a local or remote machine.
Finger has mostly faded into obscurity due to many organizations viewing the availability of public contact information as a potential security hole. With great ease, attackers could learn a target’s full name, phone number, department, title, etc. Still, many embraced the reach that finger could provide. Notably, John Carmack of id Software maintained detailed notes outlining his work in game development.
These days, finger is usually found only on legacy systems or for novelty purposes due to much of its functionality being replaced with the more-usable HTTP.
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Ben Calderon ☛ ARP! Tell your network to explain itself
Also, every device receives that broadcast. What if a misbehaving device sends broadcast messages nonstop? Look up broadcast storms, and be responsible with what you learn! 😎