LLM Musings
Like most people in tech in the year of our lord 2026 I have opinions about AI. None of these are particularly unique (probably), but I want to get them written down.
stroppykitten.com
An occasional sysadmin blog
Latest posts
Static site
Blogs have gone through various styles over the years; static hand-crafted posts, forum-based, CMS's (Drupal, Wordpress), and back to static sites. I used Joomla for a while, but never got the hang of it. Then I converted to Drupal, which was fine and dandy, but at some point, some major release, it all changed and if I wanted to stay updated I was going to have to do an enormous amount of work to…
What's so different about development vs operations?
On starting a new job recently (well, last year when I started this entry), I have been reminded yet again just how long it takes an Operations person (Sysadmin, SRE, whatever you want to call us this year; I'm going to use 'Ops' for this post) up to speed, compared to a developer.
Bread part 2
Since /random/bread we have moved cities, and I'm continuing to make bread. It's been fine, but a week or so ago I did it on autopilot and put 1.25 cups of water in again.
Bread
Or, how I lost my mind
Situational Awareness as a Sysadmin
System Administration, or more accurately the Operations side of IT, is at its heart a technically complex job. However, there are some soft skills that are important. Note that I'm using 'soft' in a non-derogatory sense. The raw technical aspects are 'hard' in that they have well-defined edges, and typically very clear right and wrong answers. The 'soft' aspects tend to be fuzzier, with softer…
HTTP Cookie Date format - oh the huge manatee
For a holiday project I'm enhancing Cookiemaster to be able to force cookies for your choice of domains to be Session (transient, go away when you close the browser) rather than persistent. In doing so, I found it wasn't parsing the date in 'Expires' correctly, and in discovering why, I found the horror that is the Date format as specified in the RFC.
Fixing (one case of) AWS EFS timeouts/stalls
AWS Elastic File System (EFS) is an NFS compatible network-accessible shared storage system. It allows you to outsource the problem of HA network storage, which is highly attractive in some circumstances. But, there are some sharp edges, which we discovered at work.
Actively avoiding bias
I recently read this excellent article https://www.producttalk.org/2018/02/co-creating/ which, amongst other things, talks about avoiding a commitment and confirmation bias. It's well worth a read, quite by itself.
AWS Security Groups: A glimpse behind the curtain
Or: a little clue as to how the sausage is made.
Fun with SCSI tapes on Linux
I inherited an LTO-4 SCSI-attached tape drive recently (yes, old-school, I know, it's mostly just for fun), and have been fiddling with it to do some tape-based offsite backups (to complement my other offsite backups). In doing so, I learned a bunch of things about the SCSI protocol (including its many many tendrils and offshoots), and about handy tools for interacting with SCSI devices. Some of…
Building a grafana Debian package
I had reason to re-build a custom grafana Debian package a few weeks back. It was a little bit tricky to figure out the right steps, and I wasn't able to find this process documented anywhere else, so here it is (for my future benefit as much as anyone else's). This is brief, and is intended to be an outline/guide only. Your mileage may vary
My First WebExtension - CookieMaster
I finally completed my first WebExtension today. It's for controlling what domains may set cookies, in the style of the old CookieMonster add-on for Firefox that didn't get ported to WebExtensions.
Modern (2017/2018) CSS + Javascript guides
Despite being in IT and doing things in and around web-development for 20 years, my focus has been on System Administration for a long time. I 'know' HTML, Javascript, and CSS at a perfunctory level and can do all sorts of fun (but typically ugly) things in them, but modern 'front-end' development has changed a lot over the last 5-10 years, and I haven't had the time (nor inclination, to be frank)…
Prometheus, Grafana, rates, and statistical kerfluffery
I love performance graphs and monitoring software; graphs are pretty, and there's nothing quite like the feeling of using a graph to identify precisely the cause of a technical problem. It means, however, that every few years I end up delving deep into some aspect of them to figure out why my graphs don't look 'right'. A few years ago it was Cacti + RRD losing information we thought we were…