I have a squid proxy server that uses a long list of authenticated cache peers in a round-robin configuration. The process looks something like this:

This is mostly just a note to self. As I mentioned previously (probably more than once), I very much dislike systemd and will stick with CentOS 6 for as long as possible. Having said that, WordPress dashboard has been nagging me about having to update PHP. So here we go.

In July, some friends and I went on an 8,000-mile overlanding trip to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and South Dakota. One of the first stops was the Alpine Loop in Colorado's San Juan mountains. Here are some photos from there and other nearby areas we visited on our first week of…Read More

Have you noticed how the letters "e" and "r" are neighbors on your keyboard? And an unrelated question: do you know the difference between crontab -e and crontab -r commands? Look it up if you don't. Honestly, I've never used the crontab -r command in my many years as a…Read More

GitHub Desktop is one of those terrible applications that I still have to use occasionally, much to my regret. I can't tell you if a five-year-old or a cat coded it, but this application with relatively straightforward functionality has more bugs than Florida.

A couple of years ago I wrote an article about selecting specific time ranges from log files. I proposed two options: either convert all timestamps to epoch format (a CPU-intensive process) or rely on regex (limited to specific date/time periods). Here's a followup with a couple more methods. Perhaps a…Read More

Usually I try to keep politics out of my blog, but this time I just can't resist. A few days after Trump fires Bolton for being too tough on Iran (among other reasons), the supposedly Iranian-backed somebodies launched a daring and devastating attack, crippling Saudi Arabia's oil production.

I did the only sensible thing and disabled automatic updates on my two Windows 10 laptops. Microsoft's belated foray into the world of CI/CD for releasing Windows patches suffers from limited automated testing.

Here's a typical scenario: I go to a birthday party where everyone knows I'm a shutterbug, so I have to bring my camera. As time goes by and blood alcohol concentration rises and attention to detail declines, the photos become increasingly blurry. The trick is to take a lot of…Read More

To make long story short, had to fix someone's chmod -R 777 /. A late-night copy-paste fail, it would seem. Needless to say, console access is required, as SSH will not work with permissions on keys wide open. A prerequisite for the process below is to have a similar server…Read More

Longwood Gardens is an American botanical garden. It consists of over 1,077 acres of gardens, woodlands, and meadows in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, United States in the Brandywine Creek Valley. It is one of the premier horticultural display gardens in the United States and is open to visitors year-round.

I've recently dragged all of my DNS records from Site5. It only took me six years to finally get off that godawful hosting service. In retrospect, keeping a better track of all DNS records would not have wasted time. Then again, I would not be a sysadmin if I wasn't…Read More

I suppose you may say all of this can be just as easily be done via systemd service config files. Well, yes and no. Yes, it can be done. And, no, not as easily. Not even close. Because systemd sucks by design. But this is a subject for another post.…Read More