The scenario: You want to change your disk layout, which involves shrinking the partition with the root file system.
You know that you can grow a file system on the fly. At least: most filesystem types
But shrinking a file system invariably means umounting it first.
And that is a …
Sometimes things go wrong at work. Bad things happen. And our jobs demand that we endeavour to avoid such things happening again.
In my job, things like system outages are bad things. And when they do happen, we apply things like Five Whys to get to a root cause. Usually …
SSH is great. And so is tmux. But sometimes they can interact in ways which are not intuitive.
Consider this scenario:
You ssh to some remote server (a bastion server) and start a tmux session. Perhaps you need to do something long-running, or you are worried about losing your connection …
The problem: You have SSH access to a locked-down server with limited access to the internet. Perhaps your company policy has decreed this to prevent sensitive data from leaving the server. But you need to get something from the internet onto that server. What to do?
(Obviously, I'm not recommending …
In the last blog post I ruminated a bit on calculating the best place to fill up and got a plausible result. But the chosen metric suffered from a couple of flaws:
It only took into account the single journey. In the real world we do not fill up for …
Petrol has gotten more expensive, so we all drive less than before. Which raises the question: "When is the best time/place to fill petrol?"
Imagine that you are going on a car journey (go to some destination and then return home), but you need to add petrol to complete …
As you may know, I have been working on a little something to organise pictures in the family so we can share them properly. Everybody having their own little isolated drives, albums etc is just a mess.
Well... That turned out to be somewhat more complicated than I initially thought …
Java is the COBOL of today.
It is a language often used in education (fortunately nowadays Python is taking over there), but this just means that we have lots of “Java Programmers” with zero experience. And the only thing worse than a bad programmer is a bad programmer who thinks …
People often ask "Why does website X force me to change my password? It is annoying" or similar questions.
This page tries to answer that.
It is considered good security practice to change passwords regularly.
Why?
Because the longer you use a password, the larger the chance/probability of it …
Once thing new shell programmers struggle with is error handling. The shell does not use exceptions like the programming languages most developers are familiar with; basically the shell mostly pre-dates the notion of exceptions in higher-level programming languages.
Developers often conceptualise shell commands to be something similar to procedures: You …