This blog is a collection of thoughts, experiences, and technical insights from a sysadmin’s perspective. Here you’ll find posts about system administration, infrastructure challenges, troubleshooting adventures, and the occasional philosophical rambling about technology and its role in our daily work.
Whether you’re a fellow sysadmin looking for solutions, someone curious about the behind-the-scenes work that keeps systems running, or just stumbled upon this corner of the internet – welcome! Feel free to explore, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or want to share your own experiences.
Follow me through my journey through life with all it’s neat little tricks, caveats and side-quests.
Last updated: January 2026
Wow, it has been quite a year, this year. Christmas Eve was over pretty fast, we had a nice (smallish) lunch and in the evening we had meat fondue (which was really tasty). Today is Christmas Day, we had lunch earlier (a nice duck with Spätzle of course - to get my weekly dose) and I’m sitting now upstairs in front of my Notebook, listening to some tunes (to keep myself calm). ...
OK, you probably remember Seemant telling me I should take the weekend off. I had a nice day so far, didn’t do anything work or Gentoo related (which is a bit of a shame), had a small battle with my younger brother about him arguing with my father while having lunch, but afterwards I headed into town ( Stralsund that is), did a bit of window shopping; spotted a nice watch (which is for sale for only ~ 300 €), even tried to get into a movie, but it seems CineStar (that’s a local chain of cinema’s) is trying to boycott me. ...
OK, Seemant just started our little Bloggo-war he promised me yesterday (don’t even think about it, I just applied for protection of trademarks), I guess I need to address his questions. #1: Holiday vs. Time-out Holiday ain’t exactly what I refer to as time-out. Holiday is something for old and lazy people or those that got taken into holiday with their parents (hah, always wanted to say that 😛 haven’t had real holidays since, err, I was 10 or so). Time-out is something that I refer to when I need some time off my irssi/mail. Usually I hang out with the irssi session attached, watching my mails. Probably that’s also the reason, why I can’t take a real break along with my brain that seems to think about random stuff that happened in the last few months all day long. ...
Hrm, Seemant … were did I mention something about holidays / vacation ? 🤷 I remember that I told you (and also in my previous blog post); its even in my .away file feeding the devaway; that I’m taking a break due to increased real-time work load. 😄 I never ever said something about going on vacation or being on holiday. That would actually be great (and I could use the break from everything, even the distance to some very people) but is currently virtually impossible. Basically it’s because of an HBFG (that’s something like " University building assistance law" translated - for the Germans it’s " Hochschulbauförderungsgesetz") application that has been recommended for implementation. Now I’m stuck in the middle of an tendering procedure that has to be announced all over Germany. ...
Today (OK, it’s yesterday now, it’s again after 12:00) I had a little fun with pappy (Alexander Gabert) preparing 2.6.18 for prime time 😀 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 $ ls -AGg 2.6.18 -rw-r--r-- 1 1593 Jan 25 23:25 1500_cvs-2007-1000.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 797 Jan 25 23:25 4000_deprecate-sk98lin.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 32192 Jan 25 23:25 4105_dm-bbr.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 125781 Jan 25 23:25 4300_squashfs-3.1.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 5710 Jan 25 23:25 4405_alpha-sysctl-uac.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 864955 Jan 25 23:25 4450_grsec-2.1.9-2.6.18.6-200611100917.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 910 Jan 25 23:25 4451_grsec-2.1.9-2.6.18.2-mute-warnings.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 1034 Jan 25 23:25 4452_selinux-avc_audit-log-curr_ip-grsec.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 2097 Jan 25 23:25 4453_pax_curr_ip-fixes.patch So far all patches are applying fine and according to Alexander it even works on his workstation. But I’ll wait for Steve/Ned to get back to me telling me if this release works for them or not (as they had serious issues with their hardened desktops - something about the cursor being stuck in the corners). ...
OK, today I finally took the steps of adding Hans (that’s Hans de Graaf), and just after I kicked him from #gentoo-dev so he gets his +o and suddenly Astinus took over .. but see for yourself 😀 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 (15:28) < @Astinus> graaff: So graaff, what'd they con^H^H^persuade you into doing? (15:29) < @phreak``> Astinus: xemacs ;-) (15:29) < @Astinus> phreak``: hah! (15:31) < @graaff> Astinus: yes, xemacs, and when all of that is in order I'll see if I can help out with ruby and/or gnome (15:32) < @Astinus> graaff: to the former, good luck ;) to the latter, are you suicidal? ;-P (15:32) < @phreak``> Astinus: actually it seem like he is :D (15:32) < @Astinus> phreak``: Excellent, I see you went through the recruiting checklist thoroughly (15:32) < @phreak``> Astinus: lol (15:32) * graaff thinks better than to engage in a troll-fest about gnome on his first day (15:32) < @Astinus> (a) Should be suicidal to a degree less than ciaranm (15:32) < @Astinus> (b) should have a passion for Gentoo, but not the stalking developer kind (15:33) < @Astinus> graaff: ;-P (15:33) < @Astinus> graaff: *bait*
O boy, have I had a wonderful evening. I was watching We were heroes (after the eponymous book " We were heroes … and young"), while I took a peak at #gentoo-dev and look what I found: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 (19:24) will be masked, resistance is futile (19:24) hehe (19:24) lol (19:24) Flameeyes: you're definitely watching waaay to much star trek (including Borg involvement :P) (19:24) *plop* (19:25) phreak``, watching voyager right now :P ... (19:25) phreak``, how do you know that Diego is not a borg? (19:25) bonsaikitten, I'd like to be one (19:25) who has met him? who has seen him sleep, eat or do anything else besides commiting stuff? (19:26) bonsaikitten: a human couldn't take all that crap happening to him ;) (19:26) * phreak`` runs ... (19:26) Flameeyes, let me guess, suppress emotions, optimize language, work work work? (19:26) what? Flameeyes is human? I thought he was one of vapiers scripts...
As you may now (or not), I haven’t been pretty active in the last couple of days (OK, I admit it has been the last two weeks). Work is currently being a bitch (I have a 6,36 h day normally, but lately that evolved into a 8+ h day which I’m not even payed for), personal life is also a bit frustrating (yeah you know those people-people relations called friendship and stuff). ...
Okay, I admit I might be a bit stupid. After my previous rant about gcc-config and eselect-compiler, it turns out that my CHOST was somehow b0rked. Just removing the -pc from CHOST=“i686-pc-linux-gnu” fixed the issues.
We just received the long awaited shipment of sixteen 300GB FC-HDD’s (2Gbps with 10000rpm) for our SAN (a pretty old DS4500/FaStT 900). But there’s still the software option missing we ordered within the same breath. So I called our trustworthy IBM distributor (hah!) and asked the guy responsible for sales, what the ETA on this software option is (if someone is interested its VolumeCopy/FlashCopy). He told me, that we’ll receive a letter with the license key about 4 weeks after commission !!!!!! ...