Category: English

On testing

Last fall, I wrote a completely new configuration parser for OpenPAM Lycopsida. Although the new parser was far more robust than the one it replaced, it was large, unwieldy, and suffered from a number of issues relating to whitespace handling, which stemmed from reusing some old code which unfortunately was thoroughly documented and therefore could not be easily modified. So I decided to rewrite it again, from scratch this time.

Then I did what I should have done last fall but didn’t: I wrote some unit tests. And of the first dozen or so tests I came up with, three failed, revealing two different bugs—one of them fairly serious.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere…

Downtime

I haven’t been able to read email sent to des@des.no or des@freebsd.org for five days, due to a series of unfortunate incidents involving dodgy power supplies and the fragility of ZFS boot in FreeBSD. Work and other duties prevented me from addressing the issue in a more timely manner, but I am now regaining control. Luckily, neither my ~30 GB IMAP spool nor any other data was lost, nor did my backup MX bounce any mail. My IMAP server is now back up with a small UFS SU+J boot / root partition instead of ZFS. I am still unable to read email, but that should be fixed within 24 hours.

I also uncovered an annoying but luckily not fatal bug in the Cyrus IMAP server. When TLS is configured, the IMAP daemon stores state for each TLS session in a DB file. If that file is corrupted, the server will start, but it will refuse any incoming IMAP or LMTP connections, and will instead spit out a stream of completely unhelpful error messages. The only recourse is to delete the TLS session state database; I set up an rc script to do that at boot time, so hopefully this won’t bite me again.

Wires and switches

ESR is at it again:

I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our
philosopher / elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets
censorship as damage and routes around it.”

To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a
network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social
organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those
switches clicking. John Gilmore is one of them. I’m another. And there
are some things we will not stand having done to our network.

Dear ESR,

I’m pretty sure John Gilmore knows that wires aren’t supposed to hum and switches aren’t supposed to click. It seems you don’t. Perhaps it would be best if you stepped away from the Internet before you break something expensive.

Dag-Erling collating papers

As soon as I realized that I had forgotten to tick the “collate” box when I printed out five copies of The Eye of Argon and that I would therefore have to collate them by hand, I knew I had to have this photo taken.

I hereby challenge the Internet to collate the hell out of some papers. Remember to link to the original.

(backstory)

Dear Members of Congress

The Internet’s resilience and ability to heal itself and work around intentional or unintentional damage are the stuff of legends. As with most legends, however, it is only partly true. Key components of the Internet’s technical infrastructure are still, to a large degree, and despite repeated efforts to decentralize them, concentrated in and controlled by the United States.

As a non-US resident who makes his living largely from the Internet, I am extremely pleased to see that the United States House of Representatives has recognized this weakness and is considering decisive measures to remedy the situation. Continue reading “Dear Members of Congress”