grawity

hobbyist sysadmin and tech support person, still occasionally seen on IRC

interests: windows 98, macos 9/8, plan9, systemd, athena, x.25, all kinds of 80s-00s "retro" computing & networking

✨︎ no, I really don't have a good profile picture ✨︎

Public Key

npub1a8e0nqsgnztx5n8jt5kpy20efakfllwxulh3r5adhg6uv2mjel5sfrq8r7

NIP-05 Address

grawity@social-treehouse-systems.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswnuhesgyf39n2fne96tqj98u57myllhrw0mc36wkm5dwx9devl6gpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43q9kta3g

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

Author Public Key

npub1a8e0nqsgnztx5n8jt5kpy20efakfllwxulh3r5adhg6uv2mjel5sfrq8r7

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Last Notes

2026-10-21 20:15:17 UTC

How did we get to this. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/576544

2026-09-29 06:15:34 UTC

having an SNMP-based UPS means I'm now implementing SNMP from first principles in my little "network UPS monitor widget" project
(hacking on this at work, so it's the entirely un-fancy GNOME laptop, today)
https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/117/352/857/656/010/801/original/bd884971170dc598.png

2026-08-28 09:30:24 UTC

It turns out that you can just compile the PciSioSerialDxe.efi from EDK2 and load it via your fs0:\startup.nsh to make the EFI Shell show up on a generic PC's serial port
https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/117/172/396/845/554/196/original/102bf8bcba950dad.png
https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/117/172/397/873/071/566/original/8b39a3a9d54edc5d.png
https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/117/172/398/686/606/258/original/c1c12da6be4ea801.png
https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/117/172/422/419/692/444/original/fb709213bce30610.png

2026-08-18 15:20:23 UTC

openssh.git is down, glibc.git is down, gnupg.git is down, libssh.git is down... I don't like the world where I have to fall back to Github mirrors. especially if github also keeps going down

2026-07-13 08:38:12 UTC

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@nprofile…jsss I mean it's still dynamically linked to external libraries in general, just the *Haskell* parts are statically-linked (like aur/git-annex-standalone), without the libHSxxx.so stuff
so using the distro packages, the Debian build "time /usr/bin/git-annex version" takes 0.014s on a i5-650 from 2010 – while the Arch build takes 0.35s on i5-10210U set to performance mode (which is the fastest Arch system I've got; in practice it was around 0.5s-0.6s on both my usual KabyLake laptop and the IvyBridge servers that I was working on)
I was doing a migration of several repos which involved scripting things like $(git-annex examinekey) and similar, for each of 2000-3000 files on each of the hosts, and was really surprised that on the ancient machine (and via USB2 at that) everything went much faster

2026-07-13 04:39:02 UTC

huh, turns out /usr/bin/git-annex on Arch takes over half a second just to *load all of the libraries* since it's built dynamically-linked (while on Debian it's statically linked and the same invocation takes 0.015s instead of 0.6s)
that's why all of my scripts were so slow!

2026-06-28 16:09:54 UTC

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@nprofile…h6ty @nprofile…j9hp tbh those two could be one and the same - I can imagine something like logging in to a walled BBS that happens to also gateway to a dozen other walled BBSes, like FidoNet or FirstClass or Hotline or something such... (and meanwhile, most Git repositories and platforms are rather walled nowadays. Like all the gitlabs with "signup disabled due to spam, sorry" or the single-user forgejos without any signup at all.)
At the same time... I'm reminded of several posts by people hosting Git repos, and in one case scientific data sets, that even these days, CI systems just clone the same repository whole on each and every build, even though it'd be really easy to cache and reuse. So I doubt that a poorly written crawler would actually bother caching even Git-style replicated documents, unless somehow forced to do so

2026-06-21 10:01:53 UTC

would be neat if youtube allowed you to search by transcript
I mean it has the auto-generated subtitles and transcripts *anyway*, why are they not searchable
(well, probably because of a bunch of negative consequences I guess that I'm not accounting for...)

2026-06-05 08:51:00 UTC

In theory I like using Harica as our CA, especially given that it's run out of a university, but they definitely need to find someone to re-do their whole frontend...
Like what do you mean there's no way to list *admin accounts* except by downloading a CSV? (Or searching by some field, and no, you can't search by "email contains @" anymore.)

2026-05-15 15:11:52 UTC

valid Bash syntax (to confuse C programmers with):
function main(int argc, char *argv[])

2026-04-07 08:51:54 UTC

I discovered https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/

2026-03-22 09:05:02 UTC

bit late to post a Friday screenshot but I thought it was funny
https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/116/272/018/071/146/131/original/be01ea346c5db5b8.png

2026-02-09 20:25:01 UTC

had a thought: what happens to the kernel when the *major* version number gets too big for Linus?
...though at current rates, I suppose that'll only happen well after Linus's own version number has already reached 3 digits anyway

2025-12-12 12:27:50 UTC

...on the topic of argv[0] being mutable https://social.treehouse.systems/@grawity/114910244850655560

2025-12-10 16:30:05 UTC

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@nprofile…duyn To be fair. My boss (head of IT) did once discover that his computer got turned into an FTP server. ("I need a public IP because I want to RDP from anywhere" ended real fast that day.)

2025-11-28 06:49:18 UTC

Every time I turn on one of the PCs at work with GIGABYTE mainboards, I keep thinking:
could they really not afford a few more kilobytes for *their own logo* without JPEG compression artifacts?

2025-11-10 07:26:57 UTC

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@nprofile…f4xf unfortunately, the way Audacity's autosaving works, I recall 1-2 years ago it led to a bug where merely opening an old project with new Audacity would immediately corrupt the project... and looking at their GitHub, they now just recently had a similar bug *again*

2025-11-07 11:27:46 UTC

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@nprofile…84gr make sure to run termshark under systemd-run -p MemoryMax=1G or something such, before it accidentally OOMs your whole server. termshark does that sometimes

2025-10-03 13:52:32 UTC

1) this is the first time I've seen a pull request attributed *entirely* to an 'AI' account, with its driver's name only found partially hidden in commit metadata, 2) on the positive side, the response by Oracle employee was surprisingly direct
https://github.com/VirtualBox/virtualbox/pull/50

2025-07-24 21:06:27 UTC

here's another htop at 10 fps, and here's some of the worst C code I've written (also I got all the raw frames off someone else's Github)
https://git.nullroute.lt/hacks/htopchat.git/tree/badapple
https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/114/910/225/014/112/119/original/9a5b1e5a313e4f86.mp4

2025-05-13 17:10:15 UTC

well this is an Ethernet connector I've not seen before https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/745922/identify-4-pair-krone-plug
it seems mildly cursed, like something between the Token Ring connector and a "20 Cigarette Adapter"
(also: '[...] and had to "accidentally" knock someone offline to get these photos')

2024-12-17 08:39:44 UTC

systemctl migrate @nprofile…xc3l to an instance that supports longer posts

2024-12-12 06:21:49 UTC

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@nprofile…cgs9 on that thought, I keep trying to figure out the right ffmpeg or vlc incantation to re-stream a YouTube livestream as someting that could be watched through the actual RealPlayer on Win98... (Not much luck so far, although RealEncoder can convert static .mp4's fine.)

2024-12-03 12:40:10 UTC

so Mikrotik now explicitly states their update policy in their docs:
"Even devices that are no longer manufactured for 20 years, will still receive software updates, as long as they have enough RAM and are not based on a MIPS-LE CPU"
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/19136707/Software+Specifications

2024-09-09 16:48:12 UTC

my archlinuxing is going well
https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/113/108/605/045/166/001/original/2605ea160f41694e.png

2024-08-30 16:38:07 UTC

I might have found the earliest instance of curl|bash (it predates curl by a year)
https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/113/051/905/322/401/393/original/339a21c33d192a1f.png

2024-06-10 15:23:34 UTC

everyone else: the class constructor is called initialize() or construct()
perl: ADJUST{}

2024-05-24 06:49:01 UTC

salt.exceptions.SaltClientError: Got a bad pillar from master, type str, expecting dict:
Salt-minion 3007 cannot talk to Salt-master 3006. You'd think an Enterprise Infrastructure Management system would have better backwards compatibility than *literally none whatsoever*

2024-05-22 15:49:47 UTC

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@npub1pxy…htpa in that case, wasn't this once the purpose of extra/jshon?