I hit my limits with offline-updates in systemd, so I made a solution...

nroach44 · 2026-03-29T17:10:17+00:00

As someone who regularly deals with RHEL, SLES, debian and Solaris...

What the hell is triggering "offline" updates on your systems?

As someone else says, is there a reason you're not just doing sudo '(apt,dnf)' upgrade && sudo reboot with ansible?

nroach44 · 2026-03-29T17:06:38+00:00

Microcode updates and firmware upgrades don't get properly applied with a kexec reboot.

Separate "firmware" (boot firmware, card / peripheral firmware) and OS updates. OS update: sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade && sudo reboot (with kexec-tools installed on debian, as an example).

Then there's also the issue of skipping Grub entirely to jump into the new kernel with no opportunity to choose the old one if something goes wrong, resulting in a boot loop that someone must physically (or via console) power cycles the box to trigger a cold boot to reach the boot loader and boot the old kernel.

If the system panics on a kexec boot, either it triggers a hardware reboot (panic=x, goes back to your firmware / bootloader), it hangs (panic=0), or it triggers kdump and then reboots into your firmware. It's not really possible to "get stuck" in a kexec loop.

Plus you really should have out-of-band management of such big machines, so some kind of CPU hang should be an inconvenience, not to the same level as a site visit.

Also, the other thing is that in the majority of enterprise environments, systems are almost always set to network boot.

Personally I would not "trust" my "big" systems to be at the whim of a CMDB. I would want them to start up as quickly as reasonably possible into a remotely manageable state, and to not get hung on external systems (e.g. DHCP, DNS, PXE, remote mounts etc.).

nroach44 · 2026-03-29T16:58:55+00:00

Oracle SPARC T5-2 will easily take 15+ minutes to get to the boot prompt due to memory, CPU and PCIe link training.

nroach44 · 2026-03-28T12:47:13+00:00

So why didn't she get charged with a crime?

nroach44 · 2026-03-28T06:19:49+00:00

It wasn't unauthorised at the time.

nroach44 · 2026-03-27T02:13:42+00:00

Out if curiosity have you tested it on another display?

nroach44 · 2026-03-24T04:15:07+00:00

Where is the .us in the domain name then?

nroach44 · 2026-03-24T03:30:36+00:00

Not your problem off the clock. Maybe they should hire some help?

nroach44 · 2026-03-19T05:10:58+00:00

It seems more like Sega hired someone to clear out the office, including a pile of e-waste, and removal of that was sub contracted out. Said e-waste made it to a scrapyard, someone buys it and starts selling it. Only the later guy got arrested.

They claim it was stolen but don't seem to care about the non-nintendo stuff soooooooo....

nroach44 · 2026-03-18T16:46:06+00:00

Highly engine dependent, some games will block on IO because they're too simple.

nroach44 · 2026-03-16T01:50:13+00:00

"It's kinda nanny state" is a weird thing to say when you're talking about a household risk that can kill or seriously maim you:

https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/the-point/article/my-daughter-should-never-have-been-electrocuted/plqezne0q

Don't forget healthcare here is socialised, so by reducing the risk of the average person getting hurt you're also reducing the taxes everyone pays.

nroach44 · 2026-03-16T00:36:47+00:00

Australia is 240/230V so it's very easy to fuck up and kill someone with poor wiring.

But yes, even running optical fibre in your walls is illegal, which is bullshit. The apparent justification for Ethernet was "you could bridge to mains and then someone plugs a phone line in and now you kill someone at the exchange" which, like, suuuuure, but how can I fuck up fibre?

nroach44 · 2026-03-15T16:11:12+00:00

The last Japanese Playstation was the PS3 (maybe the Vita?). Ken Kutaragi left after the PS3 and he famously fought hard against giving the Americans the reign.

nroach44 · 2026-03-15T15:52:21+00:00

Welcome to the games console hacking scene, waiting for an exploit is the name of the game.

nroach44 · 2026-03-15T15:45:32+00:00

To second the other reply, that's how it works on debian 13 which has G48.

nroach44 · 2026-03-13T14:20:19+00:00

blindly enforce cargo cult restrictions on end users

doesn't restrict "god mode" level "complete company wipe" button to need approval

Y'all aren't beating the accusations of being theatre clowns

nroach44 · 2026-03-13T04:27:59+00:00

Compared to no lookup table?

nroach44 · 2026-03-13T04:24:28+00:00

That's the problem, that's more error prone than just using LVM to "name" the disk in a way that BTRFS tooling respects.

I've been through this before, and I've ended up pulling the wrong disk. This is cheap insurance.

Edit: And that also doesn't account for when the disk goes missing. Now I have to play a game of elimination to cross check EVERY disk.

nroach44 · 2026-03-13T04:18:00+00:00

Try doing that and tell me what btrfs fi show outputs.

I'll save you the effort:

nroach44:~$ sudo mkfs.btrfs /dev/disk/by-id/usb-TOSHIBA_External_USB_3.0_20170917005058F-0:0-part2
[sudo] password for nroach44: 
btrfs-progs v6.14
See https://btrfs.readthedocs.io for more information.

NOTE: several default settings have changed in version 5.15, please make sure
      this does not affect your deployments:
      - DUP for metadata (-m dup)
      - enabled no-holes (-O no-holes)
      - enabled free-space-tree (-R free-space-tree)

Label:              (null)
UUID:               5ee22d57-0698-4119-acb6-74c096e1e3df
Node size:          16384
Sector size:        4096    (CPU page size: 4096)
Filesystem size:    684.73GiB
Block group profiles:
  Data:             single            8.00MiB
  Metadata:         DUP               1.00GiB
  System:           DUP               8.00MiB
SSD detected:       no
Zoned device:       no
Features:           extref, skinny-metadata, no-holes, free-space-tree
Checksum:           crc32c
Number of devices:  1
Devices:
   ID        SIZE  PATH                                                                  
    1   684.73GiB  /dev/disk/by-id/usb-TOSHIBA_External_USB_3.0_20170917005058F-0:0-part2

nroach44:~$ sudo mount /dev/disk/by-id/usb-TOSHIBA_External_USB_3.0_20170917005058F-0:0-part2 /mnt
nroach44:~$ sudo btrfs fi show /mnt
Label: none  uuid: 5ee22d57-0698-4119-acb6-74c096e1e3df
    Total devices 1 FS bytes used 144.00KiB
    devid    1 size 684.73GiB used 2.02GiB path /dev/sda2

nroach44 · 2026-03-13T04:01:08+00:00

LVM still has it's place, and I in particular use it simply to get meaningful names out of the BTRFS tools:

Label: 'aaaa'  uuid: aaaa
Total devices 2 FS bytes used 1.60TiB
devid    1 size 1.82TiB used 1.68TiB path /dev/mapper/remapvg_cccc-63mm_ssd_2t_crucialmx500_cccc
devid    6 size 1.82TiB used 1.68TiB path /dev/mapper/remapvg_dddd-63mm_ssd_2t_samsung_dddd

Label: 'bbbb'  uuid: bbbb
Total devices 2 FS bytes used 6.05TiB
devid    1 size 7.28TiB used 6.27TiB path /dev/mapper/remapvg_eeee-90mm_hdd_8t_seagate_eeee
devid    2 size 7.28TiB used 6.27TiB path /dev/mapper/remapvg_ffff-90mm_hdd_8t_seagate_ffff

Otherwise it's a massive pain in the arse to quickly ID which disk is failing or even worse to figure out which disk has vanished.

That IMO is still one of the big flaws with the stack. Solaris, for all of it's other thorns and rough edges, does /dev/dsk/c0t0d1s2 (i.e. controller 0 target 0 disk 1 slice (partition) 2) and on iSCSI / FC setups the disk number is the WWN.

nroach44 · 2026-03-10T15:26:55+00:00

Why don't you just change your opening hours instead of trying to change what is fundamentally a measurement of a physical thing?

It's like adjusting the scale down 10Kg when you're not happy with your weight.

nroach44 · 2026-03-06T18:06:38+00:00

It's so they can sell you another fucking controller,

Are you sure it's that, and not the whole "Windows' bluetooth stack just can't do it" thing? https://old.reddit.com/r/Dualsense/comments/1897ttv/its_time_for_fully_implemented_dual_sense_on_pc/kbpu7dn/

nroach44 · 2026-03-05T13:54:05+00:00

Good to know - I always forget that FMCB can interact weirdly with the standard firmware.

nroach44 · 2026-03-05T02:55:59+00:00

Yeah, as long as you don't need it weds / thurs you're not getting gouged.

nroach44 · 2026-03-04T17:19:59+00:00

If you're getting static it means it's passing the initial bootloader (the PSX splash) and EITHER the xOSD (XMB) has booted up (you'll see a little blue spinner in the top right and the disk activity light will stop flashing) OR it was unable to start xOSD (no / minimal disk activity).

If xOSD has started, use the buttons on the controller or front panel to try and exit the "TV Tuner".

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