DNS, OG OF HIGH AVAILABILITY
At May First, we recently received (all within a single week) three different complaints about domain names that previously worked fine suddenly not resolving to our servers.
AI HACKING THE PLANET
A colleague asked me if we should move all our money to our pillow cases after reading the latest AI editorial from Thomas Friedman. The article reads like a press release from Anthropic, repeating the claim that their latest AI model is so good at finding software vulnerabilities that it is a danger to the world.
MAILMAN3 HAS 2 DATABASES. WHOOPS.
At May First we have been carefully planning our migration of about 1200 lists from mailman2 to mailman3 for almost six months now. We did a lot of user communications, had several months of beta testing with a handful of lists ported over, and everything was looking good. So we kicked off the migration!
AVOIDING APACHE MAX REQUEST WORKERS ERRORS
[Update 2025-10-09… turns out my first great solution doesn’t work after all, updated to reflect new options.]
AI'S ACTUAL IMPACT
Two years after OpenAI launched ChatGPT 3.5, humanity is not on the cusp of extinction and Elon Musk seems more responsible for job loss than any AI agent.
HOW DO I WARM UP AN IP ADDRESS?
After years on the waiting list, May First was just given a /24 block of IP addresses. Excellent.
GMAIL VS TOR VS PRIVACY
A legit email went to spam. Here are the redacted, relevant headers:
MARIADB MYSTERY
I keep getting an error in our backup logs: Sep 11 05:08:03 Warning: mysqldump: Error 2013: Lost connection to server during query when dumping table `1C4Uonkwhe_options` at row: 1402 Sep 11 05:08:03 Warning: Failed to dump mysql databases ic_wp It’s a WordPress database having trouble dumping the options table.
WHO ATE MY RAM?
One of our newest servers, with a hefty 256GB of RAM, recently began killing processes via the oomkiller.
USERS WITHOUT PASSWORDS
About fifteen years ago, while debugging a database probem, I was horrified to discover that we had two root users - one with the password I had been using and one without a password. Nooo!