Pourquoi faire simple quand on peut faire compliqué.
I have been battling Large Language Models (LLM 1 ) for the past couple of weeks and have struggled to think about what it means and how to deal with its fallout. Because the fight has come from many fronts, I've come to articulate this in terms of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse . Sound track: Metallica's The Four Horsemen , preferably downloaded from Napster around 2000 , but now I guess you…
Today I have made the tough decision of retiring the Wallabako project. I have rolled out a final (and trivial) 1.8.0 release which fixes the uninstall procedure and rolls out a bunch of dependency updates. Why? The main reason why I'm retiring Wallabako is that I have completely stopped using it. It's not the first time: for a while, I wasn't reading Wallabag articles on my Kobo anymore. But I…
This is a copy of an email I used to send internally at work and now made public . I'm not sure I'll make a habit of posting it here, especially not twice a year , unless people really like it. Right now, it's mostly here to keep with my current writing spree going. This is your bi-yearly reminder that time is changing soon! What's happening? For people not on tor-internal, you should know that…
This is also known as: " ifconfig is not installed by default anymore, how do I do this only with the ip command?" I have been slowly training my brain to use the new commands but I sometimes forget some. So, here's a couple of equivalence from the old package to net-tools the new iproute2 , about 10 years late: net-tools iproute2 shorter form what it does arp -an ip neighbor ip n ifconfig ip…
In the Tor Project system Administrator's team (colloquially known as TPA), we've recently changed how we take decisions, which means you'll get clearer communications from us about upcoming changes or targeted questions about a proposal. Note that this change only affects the TPA team. At Tor, each team has its own way of coordinating and making decisions, and so far this process is only used…
What if I told you there is a way to configure the network on any Linux server that: works across all distributions doesn't require any software installed apart from the kernel and a boot loader (no systemd-networkd , ifupdown , NetworkManager , nothing) is backwards compatible all the way back to Linux 2.0, in 1996 It has literally 8 different caveats on top of that, but is still totally worth…
During 2025-03-21-another-home-outage , I reflected upon what's a properly ran service and blurted out what turned out to be something important I want to outline more. So here it is, again, on its own for my own future reference. Typically, I tend to think of a properly functioning service as having four things: backups documentation monitoring automation high availability (HA) Yes, I miscounted.…
I originally setup a machine without any full disk encryption, then somehow regretted it quickly after. My original reasoning was that this was a "play" machine so I wanted as few restrictions on accessing the machine as possible, which meant removing passwords, mostly. I actually ended up having a user password, but disabled the lock screen. Then I started using the device to manage my photo…
Have you ever found yourself in the situation where you had no or anonymized logs and still wanted to figure out where your traffic was coming from? Or you have multiple upstreams and are looking to see if you can save fees by getting into peering agreements with some other party? Or your site is getting heavy load but you can't pinpoint it on a single IP and you suspect some amoral corporation is…
This morning, internet was down at home. The last time I had such an issue was in February 2023 , when my provider was Oricom. Now I'm with a business service at Teksavvy Internet (TSI), in which I pay 100$ per month for a 250/50 mbps business package, with a static IP address, on which I run, well, everything: email services, this website, etc. Mitigation Email The main problem when the service…