This Is Just a Test.

On all of our servers we use telegraf to collect telemetry (CPU, RAM, disk, I/O, network). Most of them just have the system input plugin configured, but some dedicated monitoring hosts have many more input plugins, to collect metrics from PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Logstash, etc. etc. With this week’s update to telegraf 1.26, the telegraf agent on these hosts started throwing errors, and no metrics were saved to the InfluxDB: [outputs.influxdb] When writing to [https://localhost:8086]: failed making write req: getting password failed: cannot allocate memory [agent] ["outputs.influxdb"] did not complete within its flush interval I downgraded to 1.25.3 and the processes worked again as before, so it had to be some regression with 1.26. ...

I was on call this weekend, and on Sunday morning I received some reports that one of our PostgreSQL clusters was acting up. Since our regular server monitoring hadn’t notified me of anything I was expecting that this would be some temporary connection problems or something like that. Oh boy, was I wrong. I logged into the offending machine and checked the PostgreSQL logs, and I was flooded with error messages: ...

I declare defeat. I bought a Bialetti coffee maker, because a) I love coffee and b) I thought it would be more sustainable and environmentally friendly than the dreaded capsules I currently use. While the principle of the Bialetti is simple, the execution is not, and so the coffee I manage to produce is, quite frankly, just blargh. Turns out there’s a real nerd culture around making a good coffee with this kind of machine, and I simply don’t have the time nor the patience to experiment with different coffee brands, coarseness settings, taking the machine off the stove at the right moment etc. etc. ...

Today, via Hacker News, I came across a Wired article about why the floppy disk just won’t die. It’s fascinating that in 2023 so many businesses and industries still seem to be dependent on an anachronistic storage medium, which not only isn’t really known to be robust, but also offers, by today’s standards, ridiculous little actual space. But, you know, if it works, it works. Apparently the disks become less and less available, and those that you can get ahold of are of poor quality: ...

Last week I happened to visit the Morawa bookshop in Vienna’s 1st District - something I haven’t done in a very long time. Besides shelves and shelves of books of all genres they also stock a nice assortment of comics and graphic novels. Among the Mangas and Donald Ducks I discovered a comic that I loved as a young boy, but haven’t seen since then - Prince Valiant, or “Prinz Eisenherz” as it is called in German. ...

Testing, testing, onetwo… Welcome! So, looks like I’m dipping my toes into the blogosphere again, like it’s 2006 all over. Life was easier back then, some might even say better, but times were certainly interesting, especially for a passionate OpenSource/Linux nerd like me. Twitter was still in its infancy, Facebook was on the rise, Google wasn’t evil, and noone tried to shove their algorithm-created crap down your throat. I remember that Google had a fantastic service called Reader, which unfortunately ended on the cemetery like so many other Google offerings, but as long as it was available it was awesome. ...