patrck

4 ms·

1.
by patrck 4y ago
Yeah, the Mitnick hack of Shimomura (rsh + predictable TCP seq #s) was already out there due to that incident's publicity. How many BOFHs generated keys for everyone, mailed them out, and disabled telnetd / rlogind?
2.
by patrck 4y ago
Nice. like a command-line version of Charlie Cheever's bunny1. https://github.com/ccheever/bunny1
3.
by patrck 4y ago
Yeah, Harford overweights the trade-offs and does not cover any benefits. For parents, one large gain is explaining your work to your kids. They get to see how you work, and this provides a template for them. Of course, whether this is good
4.
by patrck 4y ago
Yeah, think cheap and distributed. Like Tsutomu Shimomura's quiet Xterminal connected to a noisy box in another room. The alternative gamer-mentality of tightly coupled cpu, gpu, and storage with huge IO is quite costly.
5.
by patrck 4y ago
Though, if your bias is towards action, how do you avoid stepping on toes? These discussions seem like MBA brain-teasers, ie. there can't be any hard and fast rules, so each case needs to be individually worked out. There's probab
6.
by patrck 4y ago
Yeah, it seems odd that a golang solution was used instead of just shell. paths() { dir=`dirname $1` while test "$dir" != '/' && test "$dir" != '.' ; do echo $dir
7.
by patrck 4y ago
One of the best classes I ever had was a stats class where the prof assigned a paper a week for us to review and mark up any and all faults. In the beginning, the papers were from journals like The Canadian Journal of Forest Research (which
8.
by patrck 4y ago
Gnu M4 manual works well, while for TeX there's the Gentle Introduction. For an abstract, design/implementation introduction, though? There isn't. We don't learn about macro languages just as we don't learn about do
9.
by patrck 4y ago
Schools don't teach macro languages is probably the biggest problem. Before YAML or Dockerfiles, it was the way to declare state and reduce complexity for sysadmins. Basically, any time you had data that needed multiple projections (eg
10.
by patrck 4y ago
Yeah, Audit for the win. And it's not "billing", it's Compliance + Bill Presentment (marketing!) where we are always trying to find the most profitable local maximum of explainability to Sales, Customers, and Management&
11.
by patrck 4y ago
Yeah, think like equity analysts during upturns, and in a downturn think like credit, ie. map out the sources and uses of funds. The big caveat here is rising rates on floating rate debt, and the marginal response of revenue to higher rates
12.
by patrck 4y ago
I guess CCAN died? https://ccodearchive.net/
13.
by patrck 4y ago
Yeah, this is received unix lore: anything needed to recover a system needs to be statically linked and in /bin or /sbin.
14.
by patrck 4y ago
The gnu m4 manual is the go-to documentation. One way to think about m4 is as form-substitution, eg. the ssh-config customization via sed. Another is as text generator, eg. the classic sendmail config generator, where one writes m4 succinct
15.
by patrck 4y ago
Corollary to this is that Conferences are judged not by their overt content, but by their curation of the un-conferences / birds-of-a-feather meetings that they facilitate.
16.
by patrck 4y ago
Seems like it should use m4 instead of sed/awk for the templating. And `make` for the dependencies that will arise, eg. HUP sshd after config change.
17.
by patrck 4y ago
Typing directly into a shell is a smell for teams that manage unwieldy-without-automation amounts of machines. Shells are just REPLs; use your editor to drive them. This helps document what exactly was done on a machine, and encourages code
18.
by patrck 4y ago
Yeah, it seems a lot of this reduces to preferences. FWIW, my email has just INBOX, Archive, and Todo. When documenting, I will log the message-id of an email, so that I can just query on that later. For me, this feels like a don't-mak
19.
by patrck 4y ago
A couple reasons maybe: Specialization means everyone's chasing their own frontiers in their companies, which leads to less toe-stepping? "Everyone knows" IT is complex. So as long as things are working, there's no real
20.
by patrck 4y ago
> Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break. lol. I run IT. Nobody at my workplace knows wha
21.
by patrck 4y ago
It's good to practice the different situations. I spend most my time `duck-talking` with a TeX doc that alternates between annotated questions and answers from some REPL. When I go AFK and have a problem, I try to punt because otherwis
22.
by patrck 4y ago
Definitely. Nobody likes forklift upgrades in PROD. Unless it's a complete wreck and one's much better off moving to a different country or the like. Even smaller, more incremental experiments can be difficult to imagine. eg. beyo
23.
by patrck 4y ago
True. Was angling for that with the "that those will remain stable". It seems easier to personally define what one thinks winning is, and then evaluate (and modify if possible) the games we come across.
24.
by patrck 4y ago
Recognizing the games that others are playing is useful, however refining your own games seems the much better play. What are your personal win conditions? What are the odds and your confidence in those odds that those will remain stable fo
25.
by patrck 4y ago
Lots of people live out full productive lives in SQL, R, etc. I like the article's idea that DSLs are 4GLs. ie. crafting the nouns and verbs needed to work a problem.
26.
by patrck 4y ago
"strong preferences for navigation over search" is surprising to me. For email, Inbox Zero means everything is basically in Archive, and is findable by successive application of filters. For files, the requirements of a "proj
27.
by patrck 4y ago
Also, one should subscribe to the mailop mailing list, which serves as a Distant Early Warning line for email deliverability issues (ie. like NANOG for netops issues). https://www.mailop.org/best-practices/
28.
by patrck 4y ago
Maybe self-host an IMAP server, and periodically archive from FM to your box/VM?
29.
by patrck 4y ago
A couple sysadm red flags: 1) The article author is Testing in PROD 2) selinux debugging relies on auditd, so sanity checks required. df -P /var/log/audit # has space? tail -1 /var/log/audit/audit.lo
30.
by patrck 4y ago
Definitely. Debugging loves `duck-talking`. Didn't mean to come across as REPLs consisted only items in the set of { programming , shells }.

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