That’s why there are all those “keep off the grass” signs. If people just walked all over the grass willy-nilly we’d soon be knee deep in benches and bins, and nobody wants that.

The problem with releasing them on day one is that you then can’t gather more. If you’ve only just exposed the edges of the malfeasance you need time to get the rest before exposing it. Go too early and the rest of the evidence can be destroyed, covered up or those holding it coearsed into silence.

Having a dead man’s switch is a way to ensure whatever you’ve gathered gets released if you’re no longer in a position to gather more. As such I disagree with the poster about making it public knowledge before release. Keep it secret until you have everything, then release it.

Trying to avoid using any arithmetic operators, and sticking just to binary (extending beyond 16 bit unsigned ints is left as an exercise for the interested reader):

#!/usr/bin/perl

# This increments $i

my $i=1;
print "Start: $i ";

if (($i & 0b1111111111111111) == 0b1111111111111111) {die "Overflow";}
if (($i & 0b0000000000000001) == 0b0000000000000000) {$i=(($i & 0b1111111111111110) | 0b0000000000000001);}
else
{
        if (($i & 0b0111111111111111) == 0b0111111111111111) {$i=(($i & 0b0000000000000000) | 0b1000000000000000);}
        if (($i & 0b0011111111111111) == 0b0011111111111111) {$i=(($i & 0b1000000000000000) | 0b0100000000000000);}
        if (($i & 0b0001111111111111) == 0b0001111111111111) {$i=(($i & 0b1100000000000000) | 0b0010000000000000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000111111111111) == 0b0000111111111111) {$i=(($i & 0b1110000000000000) | 0b0001000000000000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000011111111111) == 0b0000011111111111) {$i=(($i & 0b1111000000000000) | 0b0000100000000000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000001111111111) == 0b0000001111111111) {$i=(($i & 0b1111100000000000) | 0b0000010000000000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000000111111111) == 0b0000000111111111) {$i=(($i & 0b1111110000000000) | 0b0000001000000000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000000011111111) == 0b0000000011111111) {$i=(($i & 0b1111111000000000) | 0b0000000100000000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000000001111111) == 0b0000000001111111) {$i=(($i & 0b1111111100000000) | 0b0000000010000000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000000000111111) == 0b0000000000111111) {$i=(($i & 0b1111111110000000) | 0b0000000001000000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000000000011111) == 0b0000000000011111) {$i=(($i & 0b1111111111000000) | 0b0000000000100000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000000000001111) == 0b0000000000001111) {$i=(($i & 0b1111111111100000) | 0b0000000000010000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000000000000111) == 0b0000000000000111) {$i=(($i & 0b1111111111110000) | 0b0000000000001000);}
        if (($i & 0b0000000000000011) == 0b0000000000000011) {$i=(($i & 0b1111111111111000) | 0b0000000000000100);}
        if (($i & 0b0000000000000001) == 0b0000000000000001) {$i=(($i & 0b1111111111111100) | 0b0000000000000010);}
}
print "End: $i\n";

Things I was not expecting to see first thing in the morning: number 1…

Ha! Faking key presses, truly an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. If it works, it works.

The thing that got me to switch was being able to maintain my pane layout between connections. The various window and pane management niceties (naming, swapping, listing and the like) got me to stay. Now you can keep your screen, but you’d have to pry tmux from my cold, dead, tty.

It’s likely that you’re using a systemd based system and the admin hasn’t enabled linger for your user.

Spin it fast enough and everyone gets a serving of something. It’s the ultimate potluck meal serving system.

s/goat/potato/

Delightful though goats undoubtedly are, potatoes don’t typically try to escape or eat the scenery.

I agree with the sentiment regarding being woken up, but I used to look forward to being on call. I could go to bed happily, knowing I was earning a significant premium and I’d still get a good night’s sleep because the systems just didn’t go down. I had the advantage that most of the customers I supported had similar requirements, so I had their systems locked up pretty well. Minor problems (disk space. Why is it always disk space?) would self heal, catastrophic failures (hardware failures or the engineer who supposed to replace a component unplugging the wrong server) would fail over to the rest of the cluster. I never had much trouble with logging either, it was typically one of the first things set up, and I had most of the setup automated to avoid missing anything. I suppose the thing was I was supporting systems I’d built, and I’d built them to ensure I didn’t have to be woken up.

I do a lot more troubleshooting and rescue type work nowadays, and the number of times I run into systemd components just not doing what they should is frustrating to say the least. Being able to pull the logs by knowing the service name would be nice, but a) you could already do that because you set up different services to log to different places and b) you don’t always know the service name in question. Being able to just grep the log directory is a lifesaver. You can still do that, but only because distros set systemd up to log to file as well as it’s binary format. I loathe the way systemd ends up spreading it’s unit files over about a dozen different directories, with overrides increasing that even further. I just want to know what services I’ve got and what will start up, in exactly what order, on the next reboot, dammit! The last one is particularly tricky as, due to services being started in parallel, you can’t predict exactly what order things will actually start between targets. That shouldn’t matter, units should have all their dependencies properly listed, but it’s no fun tracking down a race condition that only happens once every x reboots when a particular network service takes a few hundred milliseconds longer to come up. Give me sequential boot any day. It might take a few tens of seconds longer, but it happens the same way each time, and I only need to look in one place to know what that is.

As to systemd’s dominance, once Redhat, where Mr Pottering worked, chose it, it became hard for other distros not to. Derivative distros obviously went with it, and if you look back through the various email discussions, it was far from a unanimous choice for distros like Debian to choose it. They did so eventually mostly, as far as I can see, because it would theoretically make packaging easier. Fortunately they still support sysvinit, so all is not lost for those of us who want a mainstream distro without systemd bloat.

Shifting stuff to kube is definitely goot for making things more robust, so long as you’ve got the underlying clustering working, and I quite like working with it too. Once you realise it’s basically just a database and message queue with a bunch of controllers for managing storage, networking, containers and the like, and the ability to extend that, you can do all sorts of fun things with it.

Anyway, I’ve gone on for long enough. If you’re a sysadmin and the number of trouble calls is going down, then you probably don’t hear this often enough: well done, you’re doing a great job.

Ok, fair point on the capital D, I must have read it like that years ago and it stuck. I shall have to make an effort to unlearn it.

As to the rest, systemd has been a constant thorn in my side ever since L. Pottering published “Rethinking PID 1” back in 2010 or so. I found, and still find, that most of the assertions and actions in that document either don’t really hold, or just aren’t really relevant. Basically it’s trying to solve a problem that really wasn’t an issue in the real world, and does so in such a massively overbearing way that everything actually becomes more laborious than it otherwise would be. From my perspective it’s an unnecessarily complex and poorly architected attempt to answer a need that was better served in different ways. That it’s become a near mono-culture is deeply concerning.

I’ve also run into all sorts of awkward edge cases and misfeatures over the years, from the automounter that occasionally didn’t to race conditions that only manifest at the worst moments, none of which would have occured had the basic tenet of “do one thing and do it well” been followed. The extreme verbosity of the configuration, and unnecessarily large number of places it can be spread just serve to make it even more unpleasant to deal with compared to the simplicity of init scripts, crontabs and the like.

The sad thing is, there’s undoubtedly some good ideas buried in it, but they could all have been implemented much more lightly and in a way that worked with the rest of the ecosystem rather than fighting it. Things like starting daemons in what is essentially a repeatable sandbox, or being able to isolate logging per service. They could, and had both been implemented already, but systemd has a real “not invented here” problem, so everything was built again, with all the attendant bugs, and design issues that inevitably brings.

Ultimately clients pay good money for me to look after their systems, systemd or not, so I probably shouldn’t grumble, but I miss the days when Linux was a clean and elegant system, without this multi-tentacled thing sitting on top of it.

SystemD is far too much of a poorly thought through mess to have anything like a sane GUI configuration, it doesn’t even have a sane textfile based configuration. We’re going to have to wait fir SystemD to crumble under it’s own weight and be replaced with multiple, simple, cleanly designed components before we have any hope of a sane config again. Sort of like we used to have before a certain someone/some company (depending on how conspiratorial you’re feeling) decided to come along and muck it all up.

/rant

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk Rant. You may gather I dislike SystemD quite a lot.

You challenged Grandma. Grandma doesn’t fight fair, and she’s heard about packing heat and made it her own. You have to see it through now. Eat enough of her food and you’ll be inducted into a secret order of endorphin lovers.

A dinosaur skeleton in a spacesuit.

Vim is running as you, rather than root, so you wont be able to edit other files as root, and any rogue plugins wont be able to either, which is good.

Sudoedit has various guards around what it’ll let you edit, in particular, you can’t edit a file in a directory you already have write permission on as doing so allows the user to bypass restrictions in the sudoers setup (there’s more detail in their issue tracker. If the directory is already writable though, you don’t need sudoedit anyway.

Be cautious of doing this with security sensitive files. When it copies the file and gives you ownership, any sensitive data in it is exposed to any process running as your user id, and and temporary fil£s the editor creates may also contain the sensitive content and be owned by you.

Be careful, that much antihol in one go won’t just get you sober, it’ll send you right out the other side. Few can deal with that clear a view of reality.

Pre-ordering something would usually cause a $0.00 transaction to confirm the card details are valid. It would be a ‘pre-auth’ transaction where the merchant reserves an amount on the card for payment at a later date, when they ship the item. If a fraudster makes a pre-order they xan validate that the card details are valid, then cancel the order, usually leaving the victim none-the-wiser. In your case, the bank noticed the transaction and notified you, but that seems to be rare. Once the fraudster knows the details are valid, they can sell them on.

It’s just a theory, and unless your bank and Blizzard work together to track the transaction, why it happened, and who instigated it, its going to be difficult to get to the bottom of it.

Is there any chance your new card details got leaked from somewhere you used them? Using stolen details to sign up to something like that and, say, making a pre-order, would be a good way for a crook to validate them without a transaction appearing on your statement.

If it’s not that, then Blizzard definitely have some awkward questions to answer. Good luck!

Whilst it’s quite possible they’re up to no good, it’s also possible that someone is fraudulently using your payment details in Irvine to create a new Blizzard account. It sounds like your bank already blocked your card, which is good, but they may also be able to block payments to Blizzard when the card is unblocked.