sgarland.dev

I recently discovered the Time protocol, as defined by RFC 868. This delightfully simple RFC, if implemented, returns an unsigned 32-bit integer as bytes, then disconnects. That integer represents the number of seconds since 1900-01-01 00:00:00+00:00, the epoch stated in the RFC. That’s it. That’s the entire thing. NIST maintains this delightfully Web 1.0 page where they state that they service Time requests on port 37 (though they’d prefer you to use NTP). This, in fact, does work: ...

Recently, I wrote about being wrong. Specifically germane to this post, I wrote: Being wrong means I probably had some gross misunderstanding of a system’s architecture or the operation of a program, and that means I have an opportunity to learn more about it, and hopefully to be able to guide my decisions. I was involved in an incident where I thought that some EC2 instances had reached disk saturation. This was primarily driven by three factors: referencing an outdated man page, tunnel vision, and missing the units on a graph. ...

I wrote previously about how some things should just work, should not need mucking about with, and how I shifted my NAS’ duties to TrueNAS Scale. I must now inform you that I was incorrect, and have shifted back to running it manually on Debian. I’m a creature of habit. I also like knowing how things work, how to fix them when they don’t, and how to improve them. While TrueNAS (Scale, anyway; I assume Core also) does begrudgingly allow you to ssh in, the MOTD is a warning banner that they guarantee nothing once you’ve touched it outwith their blessed API path. I can’t fault them for this, as users are prone to breaking things. This is probably doubly so for the average TrueNAS user, based on reading through their forums. No offense to anyone who is technically competent and uses it (I personally know at least two such people), but it is designed as an appliance, and the fact that you don’t need to know how to navigate a CLI is a feature. ...

I grew up playing with computers. Our first computer was a Packard Bell 286, and I fondly remember getting a book on BASIC and trying to make a game with it. Later, we got a Gateway 2000 486, and on at least two occasions, I broke it by editing autoexec.bat and config.sys. A few years later, we got a Gateway (at this time, they had rebranded) Pentium III 550 MHz, which was an absolutely screamer for its time. My dad worked for Gateway, and an incredible perk they had was free computers for employees (with a mandatory contractual work period in lieu of payment). I think at the time (1999), this would have retailed for around $2000, or about $3600 in 2023 dollars. Utterly out of reach for a poor kid in rural Nebraska. ...

I suspect that most people with jobs involving any kind of production (widgets, software, energy…) are familiar with the idea of a post-mortem. You may know it by another name; the Nuclear Navy calls it a critique. A friendlier term is retrospective, with the idea that it emphasizes that it’s important to note what went well in addition to discussing areas for improvement. If you’re in tech, this is extremely familiar. You may even use the eponymous SaaS tool, which is IMO legitimately useful if for nothing else than automatically spinning up a Slack channel, Zoom meeting, and Jira ticket with a single command. ...