- Our setup of Prometheus and Grafana (as of the end of 2019): Practical initial setup of prometheus and related processes circa 2019 at University of Toronto.
- You should automate some basic restore testing of your backups: This seems like a good idea.
- Everything I know about the XZ backdoor: Story of a backdoor in sshd introduced over a number of years. The hackers were patient if nothing else.
- The “I Don’t Know” Problem: Twelve questions for your engineering leadership: Several more good questions to add to the spolsky test that is apparently 25 years old now but still very relevant!
- What Is Swappiness on Linux? (and How to Change It): Reading about swap this week for an issue that has come up at work. Swappiness is a hint to the kernel but not a guarantee.
- In defence of swap: common misconceptions: Kernel engineer talks about how swap works, file backed and anonymous memory pages and how swap isn’t a thing the kernel goes to in an emergency. Swap let’s the kernel make an egalitarian decision (anon pages vs file backed) around what it should page out …
- An anonymous page is one that’s used by a process for dynamic memory allocation. It does exist on disk. If the kernel decides to swap it out, it has to write it to disk first. File-backed pages are different - if the kernel decides it can drop one of those, it just has to release the memory. If the system needs it back, it can just read it in again. (Unless we’re looking at a dirty page which should be written back to disk before dropping it.)
- Meta.ai Oh My!: Tim Bray tries facebook’s current LLM and finds that it largely manufactured answers to his questions. Not a new idea for me about these things but it’s a good reminder. As a general purpose machine that can answer any question it shouldn’t be relied on. Maybe there are contexts where they can be better with help? (eg Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG))
