Jim Salter

I don't know why I'm noticing this more lately, but all the memes about "white man energy" confidence/perceived-importance really are on point. I keep finding myself in situations where women are in charge, I really could not *possibly* be authoritative, and yet--without me saying a word, and despite nobody present knowing who I am--my mere white, male, and grey-bearded presence pulls focus from the women it should rightfully be on. Pay more attention to women, y'all. Please.

This is an extremely well written essay, and I endorse its position. Strongly. If all you ever do in life is "the easiest way to get by," are you really, truly, *living*? Or are you just existing? https://po-ru.com/2026/07/28/you-dont-just-have-to-give-in

The guy behind me at a red light today thought it was hilarious to creep up inches behind me on my motorcycle and lay into his horn EXACTLY as I began cracking the throttle, as the guy ahead of me started moving. He thought it was so funny, he crept up and did it again at the next light. He seemed less amused about being stuck behind me, turned 180 degrees in the saddle to stare at him like an owl with an iridium visor, while two blocks of traffic zoomed by on the right. Don't be that guy.

@adelie@darkpenguin.social @joeress@mastodon.social in the immortal words of Dr. Sam Beckett: "oh, boy..."

I cannot believe it is the year of our noodly lord two thousand and twenty-six and yet I STILL have to do shit like:

• run Notepad as Administrator
• open C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\HOSTS
• tell fucking Notepad to show me all files
• add an entry for the AD domain that points directly to the LOCAL DC only
• save

... just to keep a member server from constantly trying to jump across VPN links every time it needs an AD token.

WHY the hell does AD not already prioritize subnet-local DCs?!

Each and every one of those is an Apple Mobile device which refused to disassociate from one AP and associate with another, closer AP when its user walked from one room to another. TX is low on all APs. All APs have a very robust minRSSI set. iDevices are the *only* devices I've ever seen refusing to roam like this. Everything else on site, from IoT garbage through Android phones to laptops and more, roams freely and easily as their users do.

@feoh@oldbytes.space yeah. I attended a presentation ceremony for the college level research project my seventeen year old daughter just finished, this morning. Everybody kept looking at me instead of at her. And it's like, these are PRE UNDERGRAD collegiate research projects, why are you focusing on a 54 year old dude instead of the bright, animated, better dressed seventeen year old who is actively and intelligently presenting her marine biology project, which I am not even qualified to understand?

Ohmygod. THE CHAIR KNOWS.

@sarvo@novoa.nagoya @nixCraft@mastodon.social "besides, you just explained why they keep pouring money into it, so we're no closer to understanding why they keep pouring money into it." Dude, are you okay? And while you yammer about "when real fascism shows up" I live in a country where masked goons abduct people off the street (when they don't murder them outright) in broad daylight. So, you know, you can fuck right off with that one.

@JamesPadraicR@mastodon.social @cstross@wandering.shop @DJGummikuh@mastodon.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange because US courts are hopelessly corrupt? Those suits wouldn't stand a gnat's chance in a hurricane here in the USA, unfortunately.

praxis

I had a particularly frustrating issue caused by a WAN failure in a multi-WAN, multi-site AD this week, and time drift turned out to be the culprit. Although the member server that kept losing trust could reach all DCs, its *nearest* DC could not reach the PDC emulator DC in another site. This caused resync to fail on both the nearby DC and the affected member server. A direct VPN link from the nearby DC to the PDC emulator solved it for the DC, after which recycling w32time fixed the member.

Somebody please ELI5 to me why Ubuntu's systemd refuses to boot a system if ANY network interface is not currently connected to a network, with an UNLIMITED timeout. It's not (just) that I still have to remember to systemctl mask systemd-networkd-online-wait. I want to know what the hell was this idea about in the FIRST place--and why, after *years* of this idiocy, is it still in place? Who wanted this? And why? What "problem" was it meant to solve? Who wants their system to NOT BOOT?

Twinless is a 2025 movie in which a man who lost his twin brother in a car accident learns how to live without him. You will notice I did not say that's what this movie is "about" because, well... it isn't. What this movie is actually about is fascinatingly broken people, and it is one of the most intricately layered, thoughtfully constructed mindfucks I've ever watched. HIGHLY recommended. This is now one of my all time favorite movies. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31322753/

And incidentally, I feel pretty damn confident that I'm walking the same walk as the talk I talk. I used rsync HEAVILY in production backup routines from 1998 through the early 2010s. Eventually, I outgrew rsync--I had much bigger and nastier backup jobs to run, and I needed something block-based, and there was ZFS replication. But working with ZFS replication raw really really sucked. So I wrote my own thing to BEHAVE like rsync while USING ZFS replication. THAT's how open source works.

Similarly, if you have your own open source project, you get to control who contributes code and how... to *your* fork of your project. If somebody else disagrees, that's cool: they can start their own fork, and you're free not to pay any attention to it. Or to pilfer interesting bits from it. They're also free to pilfer interesting bits from yours. (Yes, there are fine licensing details. But this is HOW IT WORKS.)

@feoh@oldbytes.space @fedops@fosstodon.org @shom@gts.shom.dev which means a lot of my frustration is really with Canonical for clearly not testing their bullshit. And I mean... that's also been a *very* common theme for me in recent years. The old grey mare is *not* what she used to be. I "enjoy" snaps about as much as I enjoy systemd, and for essentially the same damn reasons.

@feoh@oldbytes.space no argument with any of this--though I will note that currently, the "easy way" IS a sword of Damocles attempting to arbitrate *away* my ability to make a decent living.

Nobody OWES you their labor on a community project. Demanding that developers quit working on a project you don't like, and work on a project you do like, is batshit insanity: open source is about VOLUNTARY labor, on things you're INTERESTED in. It's a big ol' community, and you're being offered the opportunity to both use and contribute to the software. OFFERED. OPPORTUNITY. Either take it, or don't. Talk about what you do or don't like, but NOT about how other people have to kowtow.

@jbouter@fosstodon.org @nivex@tenforward.social and I would like to repeat, again, that the necessity of ANY additional argument is because: systemctl reboot fails BECAUSE OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE VERY TTY THAT THE COMMAND IS BEING ISSUED FROM. Jesus, fucking, CHRIST.

@davidgerard@circumstances.run @MismanagedTalent@mastodon.world does Kramering into a place generate the funky bassline, or does the funky bassline summon a Kramer?

@davidgerard@circumstances.run @mawhrin@circumstances.run the Kent breakdown is painful for me. Twenty years or so ago, when he was Punk Walrus on the Ars Technica forums, he was somebody I considered an "Internet friend" even though we didn't know each other all THAT well. Today's Kent does not remind me much of the person I used to interact with on the Linux Kung Fu and NT Mojo forums at Ars.

@threedaymonk@sonomu.club I *really* enjoyed this piece. Thank you.

@feoh@oldbytes.space @fedops@fosstodon.org @shom@gts.shom.dev a friend in this thread pretty convincingly declared this to be the result of poorly thought out polkit policies implemented by Canonical for 26.04 specifically.

@jbouter@fosstodon.org @nivex@tenforward.social Well, let's find out... and as it turns out, NOPE! jimbo@elden:~$ sudo systemctl reboot -i --when=+600min [sudo: authenticate] Password: Failed to schedule shutdown: Operation denied due to active block inhibitor jimbo@elden:~$ sudo -s root@elden:/home/jimbo# systemctl reboot -i --when=+600min Failed to schedule shutdown: Operation denied due to active block inhibitor Pack. Of. Fucking. CLOWNS.

@rl_dane@polymaths.social there are a lot of things--especially things desktop users really like to have--that aren't possible without either systemd, or something rather like systemd in scope. BUT IT WOULD BE NICE IF THE SHIT WORKED PROPERLY. It would be nice if these terminally dev-ass developers at least TALKED to some actual sysadmins before trying to play sysadmins on television, because they absolutely fucking suck at it. And I might be kinder about THIS if I hadn't read how they respond to bug reports.

@jannem@fosstodon.org @shom@gts.shom.dev @fedops@fosstodon.org it does *not* "work fine from within the system itself." I demonstrated that it still doesn't work on a local terminal run on my own workstation.

@rl_dane@polymaths.social honestly I have TRIED to be positive about systemd. I really have. Despite it being a flagrant violation of the Unix philosophy, despite it introducing a mountain of difficult-to-work-around bugs in very basic and very necessary sysadmin level things (like getting your goddamn DHCP server started regardless of the current condition of a network on the other side of a NIC, what the absolute fuck).

@harmoniousanger@zeroes.ca @jwz@mastodon.social @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer this is in a lot of ways similar to the "was this actually written to BE open source software, or did you just throw a bunch of shit over the wall?" dialogues that we had endlessly in the '90s. There's a LOT of software people use that does not meet the standards we SHOULD expect from widely distributed software. And honestly... that's exactly the kind of shit that vibe coding makes "sense" for. The stuff that nobody was ever going to do RIGHT in the first place.

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @lina@vt.social so, you had better things to do. Okay. Where's the part in this where Tridge needed to quit in order for somebody else to do the work that you demand that somebody else do for you, since you don't want to do it yourself? For fucks sake. I despise vibe coding, but this kind of bullshit ENTITLEMENT isn't any better, and unlike the vibe coding, it's a decades-old community cancer that everyone ought to know better than to boost by now.

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @lina@vt.social it's open source software. Tridge doesn't have to "quit," somebody just needs to step up and do the work. So, given your stance on this, why haven't you fixed rsync yet? It certainly isn't because Tridge hasn't "quit."

@0x0@hachyderm.io @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt @jannem@fosstodon.org yes; I'm actually running Ubuntu Server, not Ubuntu Desktop, even on my desktop systems.

@0x0@hachyderm.io @piggz@fosstodon.org @jbouter@fosstodon.org @nivex@tenforward.social Jim's first decade plus in the open source world was as a FreeBSD guy. It's not like it's impossible to go back. I don't particularly want to, but it's always there, and there's a REASON I have always argued that FreeBSD is a very important project, despite my own move to Linux.

@becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt jimbo@elden:~$ gnome-session-inhibit -l : A foreground process is running (logout) With that said, the first time I encountered this issue, I DIDN'T have Gnome or any other DE installed--it was when I tried to shutdown -r now immediately after doing my first 26.04 installation. I didn't apt install ubuntu-desktop until AFTER the reboot that I had to learn the special idiot arguments for! :)

@jannem@fosstodon.org @shom@gts.shom.dev @fedops@fosstodon.org it fails on every 26.04 system I have available to check it on. I don't think I've tested it on one with no desktop environment installed, though.

@becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt yep. See below for even better detail: root@elden:/home/jimbo# systemd-inhibit | grep shutdown | grep block jimbo 1000 jimbo 5571 gnome-session-s shutdown user session inhibited block root@elden:/home/jimbo# ps wwaux | grep 5571 | grep -v grep jimbo 5571 0.0 0.0 465888 11580 ? Ssl 13:46 0:00 /usr/libexec/gnome-session-service --session=ubuntu

@jbouter@fosstodon.org @nivex@tenforward.social system. fucking. d.

@harmoniousanger@zeroes.ca @jwz@mastodon.social @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer thanks; I appreciate the direct link!

@jannem@fosstodon.org @shom@gts.shom.dev @fedops@fosstodon.org unattended-upgrades is delay, not block, and only triggers when dpkg is actually running.

@sarvo@novoa.nagoya @nixCraft@mastodon.social the sponsors are putting money into fascist pockets, and they like doing that. Fascism is a very popular idea. Particularly among those who think they'll be on top when the idea comes to fruition. Always has been, likely always will be.

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @lina@vt.social actually--and this is the fun part--if I don't like it I'll do what I damn well please, as will Tridge, because neither I nor he nor anybody else *owe* you work. Similarly, you get to go do whatever you'd like--including spouting entitled nonsense in public--because nobody owes *you* jack shit either. This is pretty extreme open source 101 kind of stuff, here. If you want somebody to owe you their work, PAY. THEM. Otherwise, either do it yourself or find another way.

@doskel@masto.doskel.net yes, except you still need a Microsoft signed shim key. That's why Linux distributions are just as affected as Windows is by the vulnerability we covered in that episode. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceblog/what-it-teams-need-to-know-about-linux-secure-boot-certificates-expiring-in-2026/4530725 The Microsoft shim is both necessary AND is where the vuln came from. Without that, Linux secure booting would not have been affected by Microsoft's fsckup.

@harmoniousanger@zeroes.ca @jwz@mastodon.social @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer hmmm. I see why one might be upset about it, but I don't agree that's evidence that Cory has lost the plot. He's basically arguing that it's okay to create crappy software that meets your own personal standards, and that that is a very DIFFERENT problem space from creating software for wide use, as a gift to the world. It's like the difference between "making" Hamburger Helper at home when you're tired, vs passing it off as a culinary delight at a restaurant.

I have difficulty imagining the kind of dead-between-the-ears dumbfuckery that leads to designing a wireless device, let alone protocol, in such a way that this kind of thing ROUTINELY happens (and it's not just this one Anker device), but here we fucking are, with a widespread mainstream protocol that can allow any random jerk to hijack your device and render it unusable until you can get to THEIR device and get THEM to change THEIR settings. GAH.

@nivex@tenforward.social oh God. "It's just a joke bro it doesn't mean anything jeez" distilled into its "purest" form.

@harmoniousanger@zeroes.ca @jwz@mastodon.social @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer would you mind linking to what you're talking about, please? I went searching for what this might refer to, but I came up empty. (Thanks in hopeful advance!)