System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.
Jouke Waleson points out to an interesting fact about UUIDs in MySQL, which you might have missed in the documentation:
Warning: Although UUID() values are intended to be unique, they are not necessarily unguessable or unpredictable. If unpredictability is required, UUID values should be generated some other way.
Make a note!
“Dotfile madness” is an excellent look at the problem of hidden data and configuration files that seem to be multiplying lately in the users’ home directories:
We are no longer in control of our home directories.
My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn’t belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can’t place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear again if I try to delete them. All I can do is sit here knowing that in the darkness, behind the scenes, they are there. Waiting in silence. Some of those programmers decided to additionally place some normal files and directories in the same place. Those are clearly visible every time I executeÂls in my home directory.Â
While there is no easy centralized solution to this problem, as each application’s developer decides for himself, the article proposes a better way of doing things, reminding us about the XDG Base Directory Specification. This spec allows for a much finer control of where things go via the XDG_* environment variables.
Nice one!
gita is a command line tool to manage multiple git repositories in parallel. You can easily check the status of several repositories, pull, push, commit, and so on.
This is a nice alternative to how we are handling things at work, with hundreds of repositories all around, but with a lot of overlap between them too. For us, a custom set of scripts works pretty well, with a combination of a powerful terminal emulator. Terminator, for example, provides handy functionality of split screen view, with grouped terminals, where multiple screens can be easily updated with a single command input.
At work, we are using Redmine for all our project management needs. It is a flexible and powerful system that allows flexible configuration for the processes of most companies.
Recently, we have decided to make the Estimated Time field mandatory for all the tickets. Configuring this turned out to be trickier than I thought initially. I couldn’t find the option to do so on the first go.
Some Googling around suggested that Redmine’s source code needs to be modified for that. Not something that I wanted to do. And the tip is also from 8 years ago, so it’s probably quite outdated.
After digging deeper, I found a way, that doesn’t require source code changes. This can be accomplished via editing the Field Permissions in the Workflow. Here’s the process (for Redmine 3.3.0 stable, that we run currently):
You are all done. Now all tickets of the above selected trackers will require the input of the Estimated Time for all above selected statuses and roles.
Similarly, you can make other fields required or read-only, as per your company or team needs.
In the ever changing world of technology, people often rush to get the latest. Hype for new features, improved performance and security is everywhere, and anybody rarely stops to think about things in depth.
Use the best tool for the job, they say. And the latest is always the best.
In that, I found it surprising that APT (advanced packaging tool) used for a variety of popular Linux distributions, such as Debian, does not use HTTPS, no matter how much people push for it. For all the arguments of HTTP/2 performance and Let’s Encrypt free certificates, APT developers have their own counterarguments.
“Why does APT not use HTTPS?” is a simple website that explains the reasons behind that decision. And they kind of make a lot of sense for their particular use case.