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”

True Love

Around one in the morning…

“This is blasphemous, you know.”

“Hmmm?”

“This colostrum-based cold medicine. They have a promotion where they’ve hidden images of golden calves in some of the boxes and you win a prize if you find one. It’s blasphemous.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the golden calf? The false idol the Israelites made while Moses was up on the mountain and he got so angry when he saw it that he broke the tablets and had to go back and get a new set?”

“Yes?”

“It’s blasphemous. I’m probably going to hell for taking this cold medicine.”

“…”

“If I go to hell, will you come with me?”

“Yes. Now go to sleep.”