diff --git a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/0PASS.org b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/0PASS.org
index c347be9..2a5629c 100644
--- a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/0PASS.org
+++ b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/0PASS.org
@@ -1,12 +1,18 @@
* Editorial Passes
-** DONE HIRED [/] -- Commissioning and contract
-** DONE STYLE [/] -- Editor and writer work together on style and structure.
-** TODO FACTS [/] -- Fact-checking
- - [ ] Links. Ensure we have links to as many places as possible, and that they work.
- - [ ] Check with third-parties. To the greatest extent, we should reach out to everyone mentioned or to relevant experts and confirm that factual statements are correct.
- - [ ] Terminology. Check that terminology is correct.
-** TODO SPELL [/] -- Grammar and spell checking
+** DONE HIRED [0/0] -- Commissioning and contract
+** DONE STYLE [0/0] -- Editor and writer work together on style and structure.
+** DONE FACTS [3/3] -- Fact-checking
+CLOSED: [2024-01-03 Wed 23:20]
+ - [X] Links. Ensure we have links to as many places as possible, and that they work.
+ - [X] Check with third-parties. To the greatest extent, we should reach out to everyone mentioned or to relevant experts and confirm that factual statements are correct.
+ - [X] Terminology. Check that terminology is correct.
+** TODO SPELL [1/2] -- Grammar and spell checking
+ - [X] Output as HTML, and run through Grammarly
+ - [ ] Do a quick ispell for barbarisms.
** TODO GRAPH [/] -- Graphics. Every piece needs a illustrated initial and at least one image.
+ - [ ] Build up an illustrated initial letter
+ - [ ] Create one, perhaps two dingbats
+ - [ ] See if these can be made into SVG
** TODO FINAL [/] -- Final look through before publication.
- [ ] Add any Almnck footnote references to the canonical [[../../../../doc/footnotes.org][footnotes]] list.
- [ ] Final check of all links.
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diff --git a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/FACT.md b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/FACTS.md
similarity index 99%
rename from assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/FACT.md
rename to assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/FACTS.md
index 4cb07be..3e2c633 100644
--- a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/FACT.md
+++ b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/FACTS.md
@@ -134,7 +134,7 @@ wobbled and then, like a plucky North Sea veteran, bobbed back up.
Testing your recovery plans during your own end-of-year downtime and recovery
gives you a moment to peer at what has been, and prepare for the ups and downs
of the coming year. What will be the same? What will change? What parts of your
-life can you simply hard link to the habits of the past? And what will you have
+life can you simply hard link to the habits of the past? And what[ will you have
to incrementally add and integrate into your ever-evolving life?
Until next time, I am,
diff --git a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/SPELL.html b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/SPELL.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2bc9964
--- /dev/null
+++ b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/SPELL.html
@@ -0,0 +1,190 @@
+
To Old Danny, greetings:
+
The year ends, the North pole tips its deepest bow to the darkness,
+and we see even large language models have been taking it easy for the
+winter1. But for the faithful maintainer of
+systems, there’s still work to be done, here in the cooling embers of
+the year.
+
Now is a fine time to dust off your backup scripts and see if they’re
+working as they should. An untested backup is no backup at all, said the
+wise elders of the Scary Devil
+Monastery2, and if we want to set the new year
+off to its best start, we should ensure we can pause, tear-down, and
+re-start the marching present even at its lowest points.
+
When examining my backup and restore process, I took the opportunity
+this year to test my backups and increase the size of my root partition
+on my server.
+
One last manual backup of the 256GiB SSD in my trusty server
+boat for the sake of the old, and then an attempted restore
+for the sake of the new: to a spare machine, tub,
+temporarily hosting a new, 1TiB SSD. If all goes well, the restored
+backup in tub would have new room to grow, and I could swap that drive
+into boat with minimal downtime.
+
That moment of hardware-swapping would mean that boat
+would have to be shutdown and then restarted anew. Humans need their
+respite over the holiday break: but should I have granted my server the
+same indulgence? My plan accepted that boat would be
+offline for, I hoped, a small slice of time.
+
There are more convoluted ways to ensure that none of my websites,
+file syncing, and miscellaneous tools did not flicker, even for a
+moment. I could have switched my DNS settings to the fresh clean
+tub, for instance, while overwriting boat. Or
+perhaps just repurposed boat for gentler, less demanding
+tasks, giving it the end-of-year gift of a well-deserved retirement, and
+switched to tub a new year’s responsibility of my hosting
+my main home processes.
+
At the scale of my own life, I do believe that uptime is overrated.
+We are surrounded by tools bent into the shapes demanded by large tech
+companies, for whom site reliability is their first commandment.
+
But we are humans, not corporations. We run at our own pace. If Homer
+nods, so can my home lab. Christmas has its own folklore of visitors rebuffed, but
+hopefully my friends have other things to do at this time than hit
+reload on my websites.
+
Yes, a personal webserver can go down for a few moments – as long as
+it bobs back up.
+
Which, with restored filing systems, is ever the question. Will the
+backup truly come back up? A reset and rebooted may also be a time for
+final exhaustion and death. Morbidly, we note that human deaths seem
+positively correlated with the change of pace of the holidays3, just as drives and computers will
+dutifully run for years, but expire after a moment’s rest.
+
I use “Relax-And-Recover” (REAR), a
+Linux disaster recovery system from when sysadmins wrote shell code and
+/liked it/. REAR is a sprawling set of shell scripts that runs your
+choice of backup code – from
+[rsync](https://jumpcloud.com/blog/how-to-backup-linux-system-rsync)
+to [borg](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/) – over your
+entire linux root, on a regular, cron-determined, basis. Having seen to
+that prosaic task, it will also create minimal,
+bootable blob. The blob, stuffed onto an USB drive, CD-ROM, or
+networked drive, will boot into a minimal Linux, and lead you through
+the reconstruction and re-partitioning of a drive that will emerge the
+same shape as your original machine. Then it will pull down your
+backups, and restore this drive to the precise state that your backups
+recalled it. A perfect, royal, restoration.
+
Readers born into our age of strong types and weak stomachs may be
+balking at the idea of entrusting their restoration to a bunch of stringly-typed
+Bash scripts. REAR’s 20K(!) lines of shellcode intimate that it has
+reached the edges of complexity beyond that you might think bashism can
+bear.
+
But this is sysadmin shell code. That terrifying KLOC is
+defensive, modular coding of the highest order. For the casual shell
+user, REAR’s operation is comprehensible, its failure modes anticipated
+and loudly-announced, and tweaks and mediations are semi-obvious. REAR’s
+authors emphasise “a relaxing recovery”, and ghosts of sysadminning past
+do not lightly emphasise relaxation.
+
While I was never /not/ relaxed during my holiday restoration. I did
+occasionally carol a high-pitched note or two of concern.
+
Two snowbanks stood between me and a perfectly clean restore. Since I
+first installed it, I have had REAR create ISO files for burning onto a
+CD-ROM that I could restore from. CD must now stand for “Cretaceous
+Disk”: I have not used those in anger for over a decade. Converting a
+bootable ISO into a bootable USB drive drive turns out to be
+surprisingly tricky, and I can never remember how to do it. In the end I
+was forced, humiliatingly, to read REAR’s FAQ,
+where they recommended a heavy utility, UnetBootin, for achieving this.
+In the future, I’ve set REAR to output those bootable blobs as RAWDISK,
+which can be burned (warmed?) onto a USB.
+
REAR’s ecumenical acceptance of multiple backup programs can
+introduce additional complexity into its scripts. My use of borg
+backup tripped up the restore. REAR scans
+executables that it plans to include on its rescue bootable blob to
+detect what libraries they require, so that it may copy those over.
+Sadly, the borg executable can be either a binary executable (for which
+this works), or just a Python script, whose demands REAR cannot fathom.
+This is undoubtedly a bug a future REAR will fix, but in the meantime I
+just copied over the binary
+borg into /usr/local/bin and used that instead of the
+Pythonic borg of the Debian repos.
+
After those tweaks, tub was filled with the form of
+boat’s Christmas past. I swapped over the two drives,
+holding my breath, and losing the little M.2 SSD screw as always (these
+plastic nubbin
+replacements tempted me in the fallout, though apparently a pencil
+sharpener will work in a pinch). Boat wobbled and then,
+like a lucky North
+Sea seafarer, bobbed back up from an early visit to “Fiddler’s
+Green”.
+
Testing your recovery plans during your own end-of-year downtime
+gives you a moment to look back at the record of what has been, and
+prepare for the ups and downs of the coming year. What will be the same?
+What will change? What parts of your life can you simply hard link to
+the habits of the past? And what will you have to incrementally add and
+integrate into your ever-evolving life?
+
Until next time, I am relaxed and restored,
+
~Integrity Mather
+
+
+
+
Are the rumors of an AI Winter true? Do LLMs get lazier
+during December? Ian Arawjo, author
+of ChainForge,
+spotted flaws
+in Rob Lynch’s significant result that GPT-4-Turbo produces fewer tokens
+when December is mentioned in its prompt, but https://twitter.com/messages/54913-1586500784514113536
+is continuing to investigate at press time. See our earlier memo on the
+phenomenon, “The True Meaning of Wintermute: Northern Hemisphere
+Seasonability in Tessier-Ashpool AIs”, Automatic Jack, Almnck. 1981.↩︎
+
Alt.sysadmin.recovery’s monastic wisdom, is only dimly
+remembered now that posting to Usenet and painting your nails black are
+no longer professional requirements for ops. The newsgroup provided
+several powerful and vile proverbs on the importance of backups, the
+foulest of which remain unrecorded in Heather Garvey’s extant
+quotes file. Garvey’s document was, you may note, updated mere hours
+before Y2K day. This lends some credence to the the theory that an
+eldritch rite committed by the Monks on that day led to the key events
+in the subsequent Rupture of the Nerds, including the abandonment of
+Usenet, ASR regulars Kirrily “Skud” Roberts’ co-founding of the Geek
+Feminism movement, and Charlie Stross being press-ganged into leaving
+system administraiton by mysterious backers in the Humanities Industrial
+Complex to become a prominent science fiction author. Thereafter,
+following the success of Accelerando, he was reputed to have been
+clumsily digitized into an AI corporate entity, programmed to deny that
+corporations could ever be people (and vice-versa) until the West
+Lothian and Turing police backed away. See, “Saint Charles of Stross: A
+Prohairetic Hagiography”, G. Vittoria, Almnck. 2006.↩︎
+
Most recently – but not that recently –
+examined in Phillips, D. P., Jarvinen, J. R., Abramson, I., &
+Phillips, R. R. (2004). Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and
+New Year’s Than at Any Other Time. Circulation, 110(25),
+3781–3788. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.cir.0000151424.02045.f7.
+
Later studies suggest that people don’t get any crazier or suicidal
+at Christmas (See Schneider, E., Liwinski, T., Imfeld, L., Lang, U. E.,
+& Brühl, A. B. (2023). Who is afraid of Christmas? The effect of
+Christmas and Easter holidays on psychiatric hospitalizations and
+emergencies—Systematic review and single center experience from 2012 to
+2021. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13.
+https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.1049935 ), and it may just be the
+same effect as more people dying in the medical system during weekends,
+See Castaño-Pérez, S., Medina García, J.A. & Cabrera de León, A. The
+dose–response effect of time between emergency admission and inpatient
+care on mortality. Sci Rep 13, 22244 (2023).
+https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-49090-5 .
+
For explorations of the theory that excess Winter deaths are caused
+by high-energy particle emissions from near-lightspeed Western
+gift-deliverers, see “Bremstrahlung und Blitzen!: Incidence Rates of
+Thyroid Cancer among Naughty, Nice, and Non-Believers”, Almnck. 1823.↩︎
diff --git a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/create.sh b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/create.sh
new file mode 100755
index 0000000..df8c347
--- /dev/null
+++ b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/create.sh
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+pandoc -i new-years-backups.md -B _header.html -c 'res/almanack.css' --standalone -o new-years-backups.html ; open new-years-backups.html
diff --git a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups-dingbat1.png b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups-dingbat1.png
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diff --git a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups-initial.png b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups-initial.png
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diff --git a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups.html b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d2a9cfb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups.html
@@ -0,0 +1,243 @@
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Look Back Up
+
+
+
+
+
+
Almanack
+
+
Look Back Up
+
Integrity Mather
+
January 1, 2024
+
+
+
he year ends, the North pole tips its deepest bow to the
+darkness, and we see even large language models have been taking
+it easy for the winter1. But for the faithful
+maintainer of systems, there’s still work to be done, here in the
+cooling embers of the year.
+
Now is a fine time to dust off your backup scripts and see if they’re
+working as they should. An untested backup is no backup at all, said the
+wise elders of the Scary Devil
+Monastery2 and if we want to set the new year
+off to its best start, we should ensure we can pause, tear down, and
+re-start its march, even at its lowest points.
+
When examining my backup and restore process, I took the opportunity
+this year to test my backups and increase the size of my root partition
+on my server.
+
One last manual backup of the 256GiB SSD in my trusty server
+boat for the sake of the old, and then an attempted restore
+for the sake of the new: to a spare machine, tub,
+temporarily hosting a new, 1TiB SSD. If all goes well, the restored
+backup in tub would have new room to grow, and I could swap that drive
+into boat with minimal downtime.
+
That moment of hardware-swapping would mean that boat
+would have to be shut down and then restarted anew. Humans need their
+respite over the holiday break: but should I have granted my server the
+same indulgence? My plan accepted that boat would be
+offline for, I hoped, a small slice of time.
+
There are more convoluted ways to ensure that none of my web sites,
+file syncing, and miscellaneous tools flickered, even for a moment. I
+could have temporarily switched my DNS settings to point at the fresh
+clean tub, for instance, while overwriting
+boat. Or perhaps just repurposed boat for
+gentler, less demanding tasks, giving it the end-of-year gift of a
+well-deserved retirement, and passing to tub a new year’s
+responsibility of hosting my server processes.
+
Within the scale of my own life, I do believe that uptime is
+overrated. We are surrounded by tools bent into the shapes demanded by
+large tech companies, for whom site reliability is their first
+commandment.
+
But we are humans, not corporations. We run at our own pace. If Homer
+nods, so can my home lab. Christmas has its folklore of visitors rebuffed, but
+hopefully, my friends have other pressing matters this time of year than
+hitting reload on my sites.
+
Yes, a personal web server can go down for a few moments – as long as
+it bobs back up.
+
Which, with restored filing systems, is ever the question. Will the
+backup truly come back up? A reset and reboot may also be a time for
+sinking exhaustion and death. Human deaths seem positively correlated
+with the change of pace of the holidays3,
+and so too, drives and computers will dutifully run for years, but
+expire after a moment’s rest.
+
+
+
+~~~
+
+
+
I use “Relax-And-Recover” (REAR), a
+Linux disaster recovery system from when sysadmins wrote shell code and
+liked it. REAR is a sprawling set of shell scripts that runs
+your choice of backup code – from rsync
+to borg –
+over your entire Linux filesystem, on a regular, cron-determined, basis.
+Having seen to that prosaic task, REAR will also create a minimal,
+bootable blob. The blob, stuffed onto a USB drive, CD-ROM, or
+networked drive, will boot into a rescue Linux, and lead you through the
+reconstruction and re-partitioning of a drive that will emerge the same
+shape as your original machine. Then it will pull down your backups, and
+restore this drive to the precise state that your backups recalled
+it.
+
Readers born into our age of strong types and weak stomachs may be
+balking at the idea of entrusting their restoration to a bunch of stringly-typed
+Bash scripts. REAR’s 20K(!) lines of shellcode intimate that it has
+reached levels of complexity, beyond that which bashism can safely
+grasp.
+
But this is sysadmin shell code. That terrifying KLOC is
+defensive, modular coding of the highest order. For the casual shell
+user, REAR’s operation is comprehensible, its failure modes anticipated
+and loudly announced, and tweaks and mediations are semi-obvious. REAR’s
+authors offer “a relaxing recovery”, and the ghosts of sysadminning past
+do not lightly emphasize relaxation.
+
While I was never not relaxed during my holiday restoration.
+I did occasionally carol a high-pitched note or two of concern.
+
Two hefty snowbanks stood between me and a perfectly clean restore.
+Since I first installed it, I have had REAR create ISO files for burning
+onto a CD-ROM that I could restore from. “CD’ stand now for”Cretaceous
+Disk”: I have not used one for over a decade. Pouring a bootable ISO
+into a contemporary USB drive drive turns out to be surprisingly tricky,
+and I can never remember how to do it. In the end, I was forced,
+humiliatingly, to read REAR’s FAQ,
+where they recommended a meatier graphical utility, UnetBootin, for achieving this.
+In the future, I’ve set REAR to output those bootable blobs as RAWDISK,
+which can be burned (warmed?) onto a USB drive.
+
REAR’s ecumenical acceptance of external backup programs can
+introduce a tremors into its solid scripts. My use of a distribution borg
+backup package broke the restore. REAR scans
+executables that it plans to include on its rescue bootable blob to
+detect what libraries they require, so that it may copy those over.
+Sadly, the borg executable can be either a binary executable – for which
+this suffices – or a Python script, whose demands REAR cannot fathom.
+This is undoubtedly a bug a future REAR will fix. In the meantime I
+copied over the binary
+borg into /usr/local/bin instead of the Pythonic borg
+of the Debian repos.
+
After those tweaks, tub was filled with the form of
+boat’s Christmas past. I swapped over the two drives,
+holding my breath, and losing the little M.2 SSD screw as always (these
+plastic nubbin
+replacements tempted me in the fallout, though apparently a pencil
+sharpener will work in a pinch). Boat wobbled and then,
+like a lucky North
+Sea seafarer, bobbed back up from an early visit to “Fiddler’s
+Green”.
+
Testing your recovery plans during your own end-of-year downtime
+gives you a moment to look back at the record of what has been, and
+prepare for the ups and downs of the coming year. What will be the same?
+What will change? What parts of your life can you simply hard link to
+the habits of the past? And what will you have to incrementally add and
+integrate into your ever-evolving life?
Are the rumors of an AI Winter true? Do LLMs get lazier
+during December? Ian Arawjo, author
+of ChainForge,
+spotted flaws
+in Rob Lynch’s significant result that GPT-4-Turbo produces fewer tokens
+when December is mentioned in its prompt, but Cousin
+Lynch is continuing to investigate at press time. See our earlier
+memo on the phenomenon, “The True Meaning of Wintermute: Northern
+Hemisphere Seasonability in Tessier-Ashpool AIs”, Automatic Jack,
+Almnck. 1981.↩︎
+
alt.sysadmin.recovery‘s monastic wisdom, is
+only dimly remembered now that posting to Usenet and painting your nails
+black are no longer professional requirements for ops. The newsgroup
+provided several powerful and vile proverbs on the importance of
+backups, the foulest of which remain unrecorded in Heather Garvey’s extant
+quotes file. Garvey’s document was, you may note, updated mere hours
+before Y2K day. This lends some credence to the theory that an eldritch
+rite committed by the Monks on that day led to the key events in the
+subsequent Rupture of the Nerds, including the abandonment of Usenet,
+ASR regulars Kirrily “Skud” Roberts’ co-founding of the Geek Feminism
+movement, and Charlie Stross being press-ganged into leaving system
+administration by mysterious backers in the Humanities Industrial
+Complex to become a prominent science fiction author. Thereafter,
+following the success of Accelerando, he was reputed to have been
+clumsily digitized into an AI corporate entity, programmed to deny that
+corporations could ever be people (and vice-versa) until the West
+Lothian and Turing police backed away. See, “Saint Charles of Stross: A
+Prohairetic Hagiography”, G. Vittoria, Almnck. 2006.↩︎
+
Most recently – but not that recently –
+examined in Phillips, D. P., Jarvinen, J. R., Abramson, I., &
+Phillips, R. R. (2004). Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and
+New Year’s Than at Any Other Time. Circulation, 110(25),
+3781–3788. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.cir.0000151424.02045.f7.
+
Later studies suggest that people do not grow crazier or more
+suicidal at Christmas (See Schneider, E., Liwinski, T., Imfeld, L.,
+Lang, U. E., & Brühl, A. B. (2023). Who is afraid of Christmas? The
+effect of Christmas and Easter holidays on psychiatric hospitalizations
+and emergencies—Systematic review and single center experience from 2012
+to 2021. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13.
+https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.1049935 ). Perhaps it could be simply
+the same effect as more people dying in the medical system during
+weekends, See Castaño-Pérez, S., Medina García, J.A. & Cabrera de
+León, A. The dose-response effect of time between emergency admission
+and inpatient care on mortality. Sci Rep 13, 22244 (2023).
+https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-49090-5 ?
+
For explorations of the theory that excess Winter deaths are caused
+by high-energy particle emissions from near-lightspeed Western gift
+despatch, see “Bremßtrahlung und Blitzen!: Incidence Rates of Thyroid
+Cancer among the Naughty, Nice, and Non-Believing”, Almnck. 1823.↩︎
+
+
+
+
diff --git a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups.md b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups.md
index 6586650..fd88cad 100644
--- a/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups.md
+++ b/assets/editorial/01edits/integrity-new-years-backups/new-years-backups.md
@@ -1,24 +1,25 @@
---
-Author: Integrity Mather
-Title: Looking Back Up
+author: Integrity Mather
+title: Look Back Up
+date: January 1, 2024
---
-
-To Old Danny, greetings:
-
-The nights have barely stopped closing in the Northern hemisphere, and we see
-even large language models have been taking it easy for the
+::: {.maintext}
+{ .initial }
+he year ends, the North pole tips its deepest bow to the darkness, and we see
+even large language models have been [taking it easy](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/is-chatgpt-becoming-lazier-because-its-december-people-run-tests-to-find-out/) for the
winter[^winterbreak]. But for the faithful maintainer of systems, there's still
work to be done, here in the cooling embers of the year.
Now is a fine time to dust off your backup scripts and see if they're working
as they should. An untested backup is no backup at all, said the wise elders of
-the [Scary Devil Monastery](http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sysadmin-recovery/)[^scarydevilmonastery], and if we want to set the new year off to its best
-start, we should ensure we can pause, tear-down, and re-start the marching
-present even at its lowest points.
+the [Scary Devil
+Monastery](http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sysadmin-recovery/)[^scarydevilmonastery]
+and if we want to set the new year off to its best start, we should ensure we
+can pause, tear down, and re-start its march, even at its lowest
+points.
When examining my backup and restore process, I took the opportunity this year
-to test my backups while quadrupling the size of my root partition on my
-server.
+to test my backups and increase the size of my root partition on my server.
One last manual backup of the 256GiB SSD in my trusty server `boat` for the
sake of the old, and then an attempted restore for the sake of the new: to a
@@ -27,120 +28,163 @@ the restored backup in tub would have new room to grow, and I could swap
that drive into `boat` with minimal downtime.
That moment of hardware-swapping would mean that `boat` would have to be
-shutdown and then restarted anew. Humans need their respite over the holiday break:
+shut down and then restarted anew. Humans need their respite over the holiday break:
but should I have granted my server the same indulgence? My plan accepted
that `boat` would be offline for, I hoped, a small slice of time.
-There are more convoluted ways to ensure that none of my websites, file
-syncing, and miscellaneous tools did not flicker, even for a moment. I could
-have switched my DNS settings to the fresh clean `tub`, for instance, while
-overwriting `boat`. Or perhaps just repurposed `boat` for gentler, less demanding
-tasks, giving it the end-of-year gift of a well-deserved retirement, and
-switched to `tub` a new year's responsibility of my hosting my main home
-processes.
+There are more convoluted ways to ensure that none of my web sites, file
+syncing, and miscellaneous tools flickered, even for a moment. I could have
+temporarily switched my DNS settings to point at the fresh clean `tub`, for
+instance, while overwriting `boat`. Or perhaps just repurposed `boat` for
+gentler, less demanding tasks, giving it the end-of-year gift of a well-deserved
+retirement, and passing to `tub` a new year's responsibility of hosting my
+server processes.
-At the scale of my own life, I do believe that uptime is overrated. We are
+Within the scale of my own life, I do believe that uptime is overrated. We are
surrounded by tools bent into the shapes demanded by large tech companies, for
whom site reliability is their first commandment.
-But we are humans, not corporations. If Homer nods, so can my home lab.
-Christmas has its own folklore of [visitors rebuffed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befana), but hopefully my friends
-have better things to do at this time than hit reload on my websites. Yes, a
-personal webserver can go down for a few moments -- as long as it comes back
-up.
+But we are humans, not corporations. We run at our own pace. If Homer nods, so
+can my home lab. Christmas has its folklore of [visitors
+rebuffed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befana), but hopefully, my friends have
+other pressing matters this time of year than hitting reload on my sites.
+
+Yes, a personal web server can go down for a few moments -- as long as it bobs
+back up.
Which, with restored filing systems, is ever the question. Will the backup
-truly come back up? A restored and rebooted machine may also be a time for
-failure and death, just as, morbidly, we should note that human deaths
-seem positively correlated with the change of pace of the holidays[^xmasdeaths].
+truly come back up? A reset and reboot may also be a time for sinking
+exhaustion and death. Human deaths seem positively correlated with the change
+of pace of the holidays[^xmasdeaths], and so too, drives and computers will
+dutifully run for years, but expire after a moment's rest.
-I use the more positively-framed ["Relax-And-Recover"](https://relax-and-recover.org/) (REAR), a disaster recovery system
-from when sysadmins wrote shell code and /liked it/. REAR is a sprawling bash
-scripts that runs your choice of backup code -- from `[rsync](https://jumpcloud.com/blog/how-to-backup-linux-system-rsync)` to `[borg](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/)` -- over your
-entire linux root, on a regular, cron-determined, basis. Having seen to that
-prosaic task, it will also create [minimal, bootable blob](https://relax-and-recover.org/usage/#recovery_from_usb). The blob, stuffed
-onto an USB drive, CD-ROM, or networked drive, will boot into a minimal Linux,
-and lead you through the reconstruction and re-partitioning of a drive
+
+
+I use ["Relax-And-Recover"](https://relax-and-recover.org/) (REAR), a Linux
+disaster recovery system from when sysadmins wrote shell code and *liked it*.
+REAR is a sprawling set of shell scripts that runs your choice of backup code
+-- from [`rsync`](https://jumpcloud.com/blog/how-to-backup-linux-system-rsync)
+to [`borg`](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/) -- over your entire Linux
+filesystem, on a regular, cron-determined, basis. Having seen to that prosaic
+task, REAR will also create a [minimal, bootable
+blob](https://relax-and-recover.org/usage/#recovery_from_usb). The blob,
+stuffed onto a USB drive, CD-ROM, or networked drive, will boot into a rescue
+Linux, and lead you through the reconstruction and re-partitioning of a drive
that will emerge the same shape as your original machine. Then it will pull
-down your backups, and restore this drive to the precise state
-that your backups recalled it. A perfect, royal, restoration.
+down your backups, and restore this drive to the precise state that your
+backups recalled it.
Readers born into our age of strong types and weak stomachs may be balking at
-the idea of entrusting restoration to a bunch of [stringly-typed](https://samgrayson.me/essays/stop-writing-shell-scripts/) Bash scripts.
-REAR's 20K(!) lines of shellcode intimate that it has reached the edges of
-complexity beyond that you might think bashism can bear.
+the idea of entrusting their restoration to a bunch of
+[stringly-typed](https://samgrayson.me/essays/stop-writing-shell-scripts/) Bash
+scripts. REAR's 20K(!) lines of shellcode intimate that it has reached levels
+of complexity, beyond that which bashism can safely grasp.
-But this is *sysadmin* shell code. That terrifying KLOC is
-defensive, modular coding of the highest order. For the casual shell user,
-REAR's operation is comprehensible, failure modes anticipated and loudly-announced, and
-tweaks and errors are semi-obvious. REAR's authors emphasise "a relaxing
-recovery", and ghosts of sysadminning past do not lightly emphasise enhancing your
-calm in those moments.
+But this is *sysadmin* shell code. That terrifying KLOC is defensive, modular
+coding of the highest order. For the casual shell user, REAR's operation is
+comprehensible, its failure modes anticipated and loudly announced, and tweaks
+and mediations are semi-obvious. REAR's authors offer "a relaxing
+recovery", and the ghosts of sysadminning past do not lightly emphasize relaxation.
-I was never /not/ relaxed during my holiday restoration. I did
-occasionally emit a high-pitched carol or two of concern. I have had REAR create ISO
-files for burning onto a CD-ROM that I could restore from. CD stands for
-"Cretaceous Disk" nowadays: Even I have not used them in anger for over a decade.
+While I was never *not* relaxed during my holiday restoration. I did
+occasionally carol a high-pitched note or two of concern.
-Converting a bootable ISO into a bootable USB drive drive turns out to be
-surprisingly tricky, and I can never remember how to do it. In the end I was
-forced, humiliatingly, to read [REAR's FAQ](https://relax-and-recover.org/documentation/faq), where they recommended a heavy
-utility, [UnetBootin](https://unetbootin.github.io/), for achieving this. In the future, I've
-set REAR to output those bootable blobs as [RAWDISK](https://relax-and-recover.org/rear-user-guide/basics/configuration.html), which can be burned
-(warmed?) onto a USB.
+Two hefty snowbanks stood between me and a perfectly clean restore. Since I
+first installed it, I have had REAR create ISO files for burning onto a CD-ROM
+that I could restore from. "CD' stand now for "Cretaceous Disk": I have not
+used one for over a decade. Pouring a bootable ISO into a contemporary USB
+drive drive turns out to be surprisingly tricky, and I can never remember how
+to do it. In the end, I was forced, humiliatingly, to read [REAR's
+FAQ](https://relax-and-recover.org/documentation/faq), where they recommended a
+meatier graphical utility, [UnetBootin](https://unetbootin.github.io/), for achieving this.
+In the future, I've set REAR to output those bootable blobs as
+[RAWDISK](https://relax-and-recover.org/rear-user-guide/basics/configuration.html),
+which can be burned (warmed?) onto a USB drive.
-REAR's ecumenical acceptance of multiple backup programs can introduce additional
-complexity into its scripts. My use of borg backup tripped up the restore. REAR
-[scans executables](https://github.com/rear/rear/blob/0bd84e259c7c61612a1d8eb296ee1e81a2cbc87b/usr/share/rear/build/default/990_verify_rootfs.sh#L51) that it plans to include on its rescue bootable blobto
-detect what libraries they require, so that it may copy those over. Sadly, the borg
-executable can be either a binary executable (for which this works), or just a
-Python script, whose demands REAR cannot fathom. This is undoubtedly a bug a
-future REAR will fix, but in the meantime I just copied over the [binary borg](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation.html#standalone-binary)
-into `/usr/local/bin` and used that instead of the Pythonic borg of the Debian
-repos.
+REAR's ecumenical acceptance of external backup programs can introduce
+a tremors into its solid scripts. My use of a distribution [borg
+backup](https://github.com/rear/rear/blob/master/usr/share/rear/conf/examples/borg-example.conf) package
+broke the restore. REAR [scans
+executables](https://github.com/rear/rear/blob/0bd84e259c7c61612a1d8eb296ee1e81a2cbc87b/usr/share/rear/build/default/990_verify_rootfs.sh#L51)
+that it plans to include on its rescue bootable blob to detect what libraries
+they require, so that it may copy those over. Sadly, the borg executable can be
+either a binary executable -- for which this suffices -- or a Python script,
+whose demands REAR cannot fathom. This is undoubtedly a bug a future
+REAR will fix. In the meantime I copied over the [binary
+borg](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation.html#standalone-binary)
+into `/usr/local/bin` instead of the Pythonic borg of the
+Debian repos.
-After those tweaks, `tub` was filled with the form of `boat`'s Christmas past. I swapped
-over the two drives, holding my breath, and losing the little M.2 SSD screw as
-always (these [plastic nubbin replacements](https://www.ebay.com/itm/275937873783) tempted me in the fallout, though apparently a [pencil sharpener](https://linustechtips.com/topic/1319971-missing-a-screw-for-your-m2-ssd-check-this-out/) also works in a pinch). `Boat`
+After those tweaks, `tub` was filled with the form of `boat`'s Christmas past.
+I swapped over the two drives, holding my breath, and losing the little M.2 SSD
+screw as
+always (these [plastic nubbin replacements](https://www.ebay.com/itm/275937873783) tempted me in the fallout, though apparently a [pencil sharpener](https://linustechtips.com/topic/1319971-missing-a-screw-for-your-m2-ssd-check-this-out/) will work in a pinch). `Boat`
wobbled and then, like a lucky [North Sea seafarer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlrvzLRgzdc), bobbed back up from an early visit to "[Fiddler's Green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler%27s_Green)".
-Testing your recovery plans during your own end-of-year
-downtime and recovery gives you a moment to peer at what has
-been, and prepare for the ups and downs of the coming year.
-What will be the same? What will change? What parts of your
-life can you simply hard link to the habits of the past? And
-what will you have to incrementally add and integrate into your
-ever-evolving life?
+Testing your recovery plans during your own end-of-year downtime gives you a
+moment to look back at the record of what has been, and prepare for the ups and
+downs of the coming year. What will be the same? What will change? What parts
+of your life can you simply hard link to the habits of the past? And what will
+you have to incrementally add and integrate into your ever-evolving life?
-Until next time, I am,
+:::
-~Integrity Mather
+::: {.signoff}
+[~Integrity Mather](/~integrity/)
+:::
-[^winterbreak]: Are the rumors of an AI Winter true? Do LLMs get lazier during December? [Ian Arawjo](https://ianarawjo.com/),
-author of [ChainForge](https://github.com/ianarawjo/ChainForge), spotted [flaws](https://twitter.com/IanArawjo/status/1734924051242484223) in Rob Lynch's significant result that
-GPT-4-Turbo produces fewer tokens when December is mentioned in its prompt, but [https://twitter.com/messages/54913-1586500784514113536](Cousin Lynch) is continuing to investigate at press time. See our earlier memo on the phenomenon, "The True Meaning of Wintermute: Northern Hemisphere Seasonability in Tessier-Ashpool AIs", Automatic Jack, Almnck. 1981.
+[^winterbreak]: Are the rumors of an AI Winter true? Do LLMs get lazier during
+ December? [Ian Arawjo](https://ianarawjo.com/), author of
+ [ChainForge](https://github.com/ianarawjo/ChainForge), spotted
+ [flaws](https://twitter.com/IanArawjo/status/1734924051242484223) in Rob
+ Lynch's significant result that GPT-4-Turbo produces fewer tokens when
+ December is mentioned in its prompt, but
+ [Cousin Lynch](https://twitter.com/messages/54913-1586500784514113536) is
+ continuing to investigate at press time. See our earlier memo on the
+ phenomenon, "The True Meaning of Wintermute: Northern Hemisphere
+ Seasonability in Tessier-Ashpool AIs", Automatic Jack, Almnck. 1981.
-[^scarydevilmonastery]: Alt.sysadmin.recovery's monastic wisdom, is only dimly remembered
- now that posting to Usenet and painting your nails black are
-no longer professional requirements for network engineers. Nonetheless the newsgroup provided several powerful and vile proverbs on the importance of
-backups, the foulest of which remain unrecorded in Heather Garvey's [extant
-quotes
-file](https://web.archive.org/web/20060423055444/http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.html),
-Garvey's document was, you may note, updated mere hours before Y2K day.
-This lends some credence to the the theory that an eldritch rite committed by
-the Monks on that day led to the key events in the subsequent Rupture of the
-Nerds, including the abandonment of Usenet, ASR regulars Kirrily "Skud" Roberts' co-founding of the Geek
-Feminism movement, and Charlie Stross being press-ganged into leaving system administraiton and forced by mysterious VC backers to become
-prominent science fiction author, thereafter, following the success of Accelerando,
-to be clumsily digitized into an AI corporate entity, programmed to
-repeatedly deny that corporations were people until the West Lothian and Turing police backed away
-from looking more any closely into his corporate structure. See, "Saint Charles of Stross: A Prohairetic Hagiography", G. Vittoria, Almnck. 2006.
+[^scarydevilmonastery]: `alt.sysadmin.recovery`'s monastic wisdom, is only dimly
+ remembered now that posting to Usenet and painting your nails black are no
+ longer professional requirements for ops. The newsgroup provided several
+ powerful and vile proverbs on the importance of backups, the foulest of
+ which remain unrecorded in Heather Garvey's [extant quotes
+ file](https://web.archive.org/web/20060423055444/http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.html).
+ Garvey's document was, you may note, updated mere hours before Y2K day.
+ This lends some credence to the theory that an eldritch rite committed
+ by the Monks on that day led to the key events in the subsequent Rupture of
+ the Nerds, including the abandonment of Usenet, ASR regulars Kirrily "Skud"
+ Roberts' co-founding of the Geek Feminism movement, and Charlie Stross
+ being press-ganged into leaving system administration by mysterious backers
+ in the Humanities Industrial Complex to become a prominent science fiction
+ author. Thereafter, following the success of Accelerando, he was reputed to
+ have been clumsily digitized into an AI corporate entity, programmed to
+ deny that corporations could ever be people (and vice-versa) until the West
+ Lothian and Turing police backed away. See, "Saint Charles of Stross: A
+ Prohairetic Hagiography", G. Vittoria, Almnck. 2006.
-[^xmasdeaths]: Most recently -- but not *that* recently -- examined in
-Phillips, D. P., Jarvinen, J. R., Abramson, I., & Phillips, R. R. (2004). Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and New Year’s Than at Any Other Time. *Circulation*, 110(25), 3781–3788. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.cir.0000151424.02045.f7.
+[^xmasdeaths]: Most recently -- but not *that* recently -- examined in
+ Phillips, D. P., Jarvinen, J. R., Abramson, I., & Phillips, R. R. (2004).
+ Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and New Year’s Than at Any
+ Other Time. *Circulation*, 110(25), 3781–3788.
+ https://doi.org/10.1161/01.cir.0000151424.02045.f7.
-Later studies suggest that people don't get any crazier or suicidal at Christmas (See
-Schneider, E., Liwinski, T., Imfeld, L., Lang, U. E., & Brühl, A. B. (2023). Who is afraid of Christmas? The effect of Christmas and Easter holidays on psychiatric hospitalizations and emergencies—Systematic review and single center experience from 2012 to 2021. *Frontiers in Psychiatry*, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.1049935 ), and it may just be the same effect as more people dying in the medical system during weekends, See
-Castaño-Pérez, S., Medina García, J.A. & Cabrera de León, A. The dose–response effect of time between emergency admission and inpatient care on mortality. Sci Rep 13, 22244 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-49090-5 .
+ Later studies suggest that people do not grow crazier or more suicidal at
+ Christmas (See Schneider, E., Liwinski, T., Imfeld, L., Lang, U. E., &
+ Brühl, A. B. (2023). Who is afraid of Christmas? The effect of Christmas
+ and Easter holidays on psychiatric hospitalizations and
+ emergencies—Systematic review and single center experience from 2012 to
+ 2021. *Frontiers in Psychiatry*, 13.
+ https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.1049935 ). Perhaps it could be simply the same
+ effect as more people dying in the medical system during weekends, See
+ Castaño-Pérez, S., Medina García, J.A. & Cabrera de León, A. The
+ dose-response effect of time between emergency admission and inpatient care
+ on mortality. Sci Rep 13, 22244 (2023).
+ https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-49090-5 ?
-For explorations of the theory that excess Winter deaths are caused by high-energy particle emissions from near-lightspeed Western gift-deliverers, see "Bremstrahlung und Blitzen!: A Comparison of Incidence Rates of Thyroid Cancer among the Naughty, Nice, and Non-Believers", Almnck. 1823.
+ For explorations of the theory that excess Winter deaths are caused by
+ high-energy particle emissions from near-lightspeed Western
+ gift despatch, see "Bremßtrahlung und Blitzen!: Incidence Rates of
+ Thyroid Cancer among the Naughty, Nice, and Non-Believing", Almnck. 1823.
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diff --git a/assets/fonts/OFL.txt b/assets/fonts/OFL.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4ee7581
--- /dev/null
+++ b/assets/fonts/OFL.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@
+Copyright 2015 the Cormorant Project Authors (github.com/CatharsisFonts/Cormorant)
+
+This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
+This license is copied below, and is also available with a FAQ at:
+http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
+
+
+-----------------------------------------------------------
+SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1 - 26 February 2007
+-----------------------------------------------------------
+
+PREAMBLE
+The goals of the Open Font License (OFL) are to stimulate worldwide
+development of collaborative font projects, to support the font creation
+efforts of academic and linguistic communities, and to provide a free and
+open framework in which fonts may be shared and improved in partnership
+with others.
+
+The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and
+redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The
+fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded,
+redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved
+names are not used by derivative works. The fonts and derivatives,
+however, cannot be released under any other type of license. The
+requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply
+to any document created using the fonts or their derivatives.
+
+DEFINITIONS
+"Font Software" refers to the set of files released by the Copyright
+Holder(s) under this license and clearly marked as such. This may
+include source files, build scripts and documentation.
+
+"Reserved Font Name" refers to any names specified as such after the
+copyright statement(s).
+
+"Original Version" refers to the collection of Font Software components as
+distributed by the Copyright Holder(s).
+
+"Modified Version" refers to any derivative made by adding to, deleting,
+or substituting -- in part or in whole -- any of the components of the
+Original Version, by changing formats or by porting the Font Software to a
+new environment.
+
+"Author" refers to any designer, engineer, programmer, technical
+writer or other person who contributed to the Font Software.
+
+PERMISSION & CONDITIONS
+Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
+a copy of the Font Software, to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify,
+redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies of the Font
+Software, subject to the following conditions:
+
+1) Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components,
+in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself.
+
+2) Original or Modified Versions of the Font Software may be bundled,
+redistributed and/or sold with any software, provided that each copy
+contains the above copyright notice and this license. These can be
+included either as stand-alone text files, human-readable headers or
+in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or
+binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user.
+
+3) No Modified Version of the Font Software may use the Reserved Font
+Name(s) unless explicit written permission is granted by the corresponding
+Copyright Holder. This restriction only applies to the primary font name as
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+
+4) The name(s) of the Copyright Holder(s) or the Author(s) of the Font
+Software shall not be used to promote, endorse or advertise any
+Modified Version, except to acknowledge the contribution(s) of the
+Copyright Holder(s) and the Author(s) or with their explicit written
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+
+5) The Font Software, modified or unmodified, in part or in whole,
+must be distributed entirely under this license, and must not be
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+This license becomes null and void if any of the above conditions are
+not met.
+
+DISCLAIMER
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diff --git a/assets/fonts/OldNewspaperTypes.ttf b/assets/fonts/OldNewspaperTypes.ttf
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diff --git a/web/Caddyfile b/web/Caddyfile
index 10545a7..879e071 100644
--- a/web/Caddyfile
+++ b/web/Caddyfile
@@ -5,4 +5,8 @@ almnck.com:80 {
www.almnck.com:80 {
root * /usr/share/caddy/static
file_server
+
+ basicauth /* {
+ cafe $2a$14$rPSXYCQEcEFhqSDvZpL0IePA4GlVivkk0hVw5ZdsMVCEaeO26u/EO
+ }
}
diff --git a/web/static/index.html b/web/static/index.html
index d8e99f0..d2a9cfb 100644
--- a/web/static/index.html
+++ b/web/static/index.html
@@ -1,8 +1,243 @@
-
-
-
-
-
Old Danny's Almanack
-
Technological culture since 1724
-
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Look Back Up
+
+
+
+
+
+
Almanack
+
+
Look Back Up
+
Integrity Mather
+
January 1, 2024
+
+
+
he year ends, the North pole tips its deepest bow to the
+darkness, and we see even large language models have been taking
+it easy for the winter1. But for the faithful
+maintainer of systems, there’s still work to be done, here in the
+cooling embers of the year.
+
Now is a fine time to dust off your backup scripts and see if they’re
+working as they should. An untested backup is no backup at all, said the
+wise elders of the Scary Devil
+Monastery2 and if we want to set the new year
+off to its best start, we should ensure we can pause, tear down, and
+re-start its march, even at its lowest points.
+
When examining my backup and restore process, I took the opportunity
+this year to test my backups and increase the size of my root partition
+on my server.
+
One last manual backup of the 256GiB SSD in my trusty server
+boat for the sake of the old, and then an attempted restore
+for the sake of the new: to a spare machine, tub,
+temporarily hosting a new, 1TiB SSD. If all goes well, the restored
+backup in tub would have new room to grow, and I could swap that drive
+into boat with minimal downtime.
+
That moment of hardware-swapping would mean that boat
+would have to be shut down and then restarted anew. Humans need their
+respite over the holiday break: but should I have granted my server the
+same indulgence? My plan accepted that boat would be
+offline for, I hoped, a small slice of time.
+
There are more convoluted ways to ensure that none of my web sites,
+file syncing, and miscellaneous tools flickered, even for a moment. I
+could have temporarily switched my DNS settings to point at the fresh
+clean tub, for instance, while overwriting
+boat. Or perhaps just repurposed boat for
+gentler, less demanding tasks, giving it the end-of-year gift of a
+well-deserved retirement, and passing to tub a new year’s
+responsibility of hosting my server processes.
+
Within the scale of my own life, I do believe that uptime is
+overrated. We are surrounded by tools bent into the shapes demanded by
+large tech companies, for whom site reliability is their first
+commandment.
+
But we are humans, not corporations. We run at our own pace. If Homer
+nods, so can my home lab. Christmas has its folklore of visitors rebuffed, but
+hopefully, my friends have other pressing matters this time of year than
+hitting reload on my sites.
+
Yes, a personal web server can go down for a few moments – as long as
+it bobs back up.
+
Which, with restored filing systems, is ever the question. Will the
+backup truly come back up? A reset and reboot may also be a time for
+sinking exhaustion and death. Human deaths seem positively correlated
+with the change of pace of the holidays3,
+and so too, drives and computers will dutifully run for years, but
+expire after a moment’s rest.
+
+
+
+~~~
+
+
+
I use “Relax-And-Recover” (REAR), a
+Linux disaster recovery system from when sysadmins wrote shell code and
+liked it. REAR is a sprawling set of shell scripts that runs
+your choice of backup code – from rsync
+to borg –
+over your entire Linux filesystem, on a regular, cron-determined, basis.
+Having seen to that prosaic task, REAR will also create a minimal,
+bootable blob. The blob, stuffed onto a USB drive, CD-ROM, or
+networked drive, will boot into a rescue Linux, and lead you through the
+reconstruction and re-partitioning of a drive that will emerge the same
+shape as your original machine. Then it will pull down your backups, and
+restore this drive to the precise state that your backups recalled
+it.
+
Readers born into our age of strong types and weak stomachs may be
+balking at the idea of entrusting their restoration to a bunch of stringly-typed
+Bash scripts. REAR’s 20K(!) lines of shellcode intimate that it has
+reached levels of complexity, beyond that which bashism can safely
+grasp.
+
But this is sysadmin shell code. That terrifying KLOC is
+defensive, modular coding of the highest order. For the casual shell
+user, REAR’s operation is comprehensible, its failure modes anticipated
+and loudly announced, and tweaks and mediations are semi-obvious. REAR’s
+authors offer “a relaxing recovery”, and the ghosts of sysadminning past
+do not lightly emphasize relaxation.
+
While I was never not relaxed during my holiday restoration.
+I did occasionally carol a high-pitched note or two of concern.
+
Two hefty snowbanks stood between me and a perfectly clean restore.
+Since I first installed it, I have had REAR create ISO files for burning
+onto a CD-ROM that I could restore from. “CD’ stand now for”Cretaceous
+Disk”: I have not used one for over a decade. Pouring a bootable ISO
+into a contemporary USB drive drive turns out to be surprisingly tricky,
+and I can never remember how to do it. In the end, I was forced,
+humiliatingly, to read REAR’s FAQ,
+where they recommended a meatier graphical utility, UnetBootin, for achieving this.
+In the future, I’ve set REAR to output those bootable blobs as RAWDISK,
+which can be burned (warmed?) onto a USB drive.
+
REAR’s ecumenical acceptance of external backup programs can
+introduce a tremors into its solid scripts. My use of a distribution borg
+backup package broke the restore. REAR scans
+executables that it plans to include on its rescue bootable blob to
+detect what libraries they require, so that it may copy those over.
+Sadly, the borg executable can be either a binary executable – for which
+this suffices – or a Python script, whose demands REAR cannot fathom.
+This is undoubtedly a bug a future REAR will fix. In the meantime I
+copied over the binary
+borg into /usr/local/bin instead of the Pythonic borg
+of the Debian repos.
+
After those tweaks, tub was filled with the form of
+boat’s Christmas past. I swapped over the two drives,
+holding my breath, and losing the little M.2 SSD screw as always (these
+plastic nubbin
+replacements tempted me in the fallout, though apparently a pencil
+sharpener will work in a pinch). Boat wobbled and then,
+like a lucky North
+Sea seafarer, bobbed back up from an early visit to “Fiddler’s
+Green”.
+
Testing your recovery plans during your own end-of-year downtime
+gives you a moment to look back at the record of what has been, and
+prepare for the ups and downs of the coming year. What will be the same?
+What will change? What parts of your life can you simply hard link to
+the habits of the past? And what will you have to incrementally add and
+integrate into your ever-evolving life?
Are the rumors of an AI Winter true? Do LLMs get lazier
+during December? Ian Arawjo, author
+of ChainForge,
+spotted flaws
+in Rob Lynch’s significant result that GPT-4-Turbo produces fewer tokens
+when December is mentioned in its prompt, but Cousin
+Lynch is continuing to investigate at press time. See our earlier
+memo on the phenomenon, “The True Meaning of Wintermute: Northern
+Hemisphere Seasonability in Tessier-Ashpool AIs”, Automatic Jack,
+Almnck. 1981.↩︎
+
alt.sysadmin.recovery‘s monastic wisdom, is
+only dimly remembered now that posting to Usenet and painting your nails
+black are no longer professional requirements for ops. The newsgroup
+provided several powerful and vile proverbs on the importance of
+backups, the foulest of which remain unrecorded in Heather Garvey’s extant
+quotes file. Garvey’s document was, you may note, updated mere hours
+before Y2K day. This lends some credence to the theory that an eldritch
+rite committed by the Monks on that day led to the key events in the
+subsequent Rupture of the Nerds, including the abandonment of Usenet,
+ASR regulars Kirrily “Skud” Roberts’ co-founding of the Geek Feminism
+movement, and Charlie Stross being press-ganged into leaving system
+administration by mysterious backers in the Humanities Industrial
+Complex to become a prominent science fiction author. Thereafter,
+following the success of Accelerando, he was reputed to have been
+clumsily digitized into an AI corporate entity, programmed to deny that
+corporations could ever be people (and vice-versa) until the West
+Lothian and Turing police backed away. See, “Saint Charles of Stross: A
+Prohairetic Hagiography”, G. Vittoria, Almnck. 2006.↩︎
+
Most recently – but not that recently –
+examined in Phillips, D. P., Jarvinen, J. R., Abramson, I., &
+Phillips, R. R. (2004). Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and
+New Year’s Than at Any Other Time. Circulation, 110(25),
+3781–3788. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.cir.0000151424.02045.f7.
+
Later studies suggest that people do not grow crazier or more
+suicidal at Christmas (See Schneider, E., Liwinski, T., Imfeld, L.,
+Lang, U. E., & Brühl, A. B. (2023). Who is afraid of Christmas? The
+effect of Christmas and Easter holidays on psychiatric hospitalizations
+and emergencies—Systematic review and single center experience from 2012
+to 2021. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13.
+https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.1049935 ). Perhaps it could be simply
+the same effect as more people dying in the medical system during
+weekends, See Castaño-Pérez, S., Medina García, J.A. & Cabrera de
+León, A. The dose-response effect of time between emergency admission
+and inpatient care on mortality. Sci Rep 13, 22244 (2023).
+https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-49090-5 ?
+
For explorations of the theory that excess Winter deaths are caused
+by high-energy particle emissions from near-lightspeed Western gift
+despatch, see “Bremßtrahlung und Blitzen!: Incidence Rates of Thyroid
+Cancer among the Naughty, Nice, and Non-Believing”, Almnck. 1823.↩︎
he year ends, the North pole tips its deepest bow to the
+darkness, and we see even large language models have been taking
+it easy for the winter1. But for the faithful
+maintainer of systems, there’s still work to be done, here in the
+cooling embers of the year.
+
+