Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

And _without_ a pressing or terrifying need to make a backup before anything crashed for the final time.

Over the last few days, I used FreeBSD dump(8) & restore(8) to back up a live system onto a USB spinning platter (once fully & twice differentially), restore it onto a new system for testing, and completed basic self-training today by plucking a single file from the backup I had originally intended to scp over to a third system.

It was quicker than rsync & more reliable than tar (which doesn't like files changing content from underneath it).

From `man 8 restore`:

-v Normally restore does its work silently. The -v (verbose) flag causes it to type the name of each file it treats preceded by its file type.

Whoops, that would be why.

I'm practicing a backup using dump(8) & restore(8). dump gave me progress reports including eta, but after an hour restore is giving nothing.

My home's 'Net service is randomly disconnecting again, and now Mastodon is freezing & crashing. I guess I should be thankful it isn't eating enough load to overheat my CPU like TweetDeck does.

I've been irritable all day, & I have no idea why. It wasn't just programmer news, but that didn't help. I think most of it was seeing a brand new error during a support call, on site in a hot room. It was so hot that stepping outside into the Summer sun actually cooled me down.

BRB, making illegal copies of the software sheriff. (wrt lb)

...And it's official. GitHub sold out to Microsoft: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github-empowering-developers/

Apparently, it happened: GitHub sold itself to Microsoft. We'll know for certain tomorrow, I guess. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/3/17422752/microsoft-github-acquisition-rumors

This won't shake the programming world to its very core at all, no-sir-ee! Microsoft and GitHub are talking about selling GitHub to Microsoft. http://www.businessinsider.com/2-billion-startup-github-could-be-for-sale-microsoft-2018-5

Facebook is killing the controversial 'trending' news section: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removes-trending-news-section-from-homepage-2018-6

Good riddance to bad rubbish! :3

Hmmm. This is a shortcoming of Mastodon: If a profile spammer follows you from another instance, then when the other instance's admin deletes the account, no unfollow propagates. I have a spammer ghost following me.

How? Well, FreeBSD's chown(8) manpage says this about -R:

Change the user ID and/or the group ID of the file hierarchies rooted in the files, instead of just the files themselves. Beware of unintentionally matching the ``..'' hard link to the parent directory when using wildcards like ``.*''.

Guess what matched & why it took so long.

Remembering that time I discovered an upward directory traversal bug in a NextStep version of the chown command & wound up owning several dozen user accounts without ever touching a keyboard.

Somehow, my home dir wasn't owned by me anymore, so a sysadmin got root & ran `chown -R arielmt *` in my home dir, but the other user still owned dotfiles, so the sysadmin ran `chown -R arielmt .*` & took a long time to notice it was taking too long to run.

LB reminds me of the customers who wanted me to repair their desktop PC after they pulled straight out on the CPU heat sink with so much force that, when the CPU pins finally gave, the still-locked ZIF socket came part-way off the motherboard.