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* 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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@ -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,

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<p>To Old Danny, greetings:</p>
<p>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
winter<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1"
role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a>. But for the faithful maintainer of
systems, there’s still work to be done, here in the cooling embers of
the year.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sysadmin-recovery/">Scary Devil
Monastery</a><a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2"
role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>One last manual backup of the 256GiB SSD in my trusty server
<code>boat</code> for the sake of the old, and then an attempted restore
for the sake of the new: to a spare machine, <code>tub</code>,
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 <code>boat</code> with minimal downtime.</p>
<p>That moment of hardware-swapping would mean that <code>boat</code>
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 <code>boat</code> would be
offline for, I hoped, a small slice of time.</p>
<p>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
<code>tub</code>, for instance, while overwriting <code>boat</code>. Or
perhaps just repurposed <code>boat</code> for gentler, less demanding
tasks, giving it the end-of-year gift of a well-deserved retirement, and
switched to <code>tub</code> a new year’s responsibility of my hosting
my main home processes.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befana">visitors rebuffed</a>, but
hopefully my friends have other things to do at this time than hit
reload on my websites.</p>
<p>Yes, a personal webserver can go down for a few moments – as long as
it bobs back up.</p>
<p>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 holidays<a
href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3"
role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a>, just as drives and computers will
dutifully run for years, but expire after a moment’s rest.</p>
<p>I use <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/">“Relax-And-Recover”</a> (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
<code>[rsync](https://jumpcloud.com/blog/how-to-backup-linux-system-rsync)</code>
to <code>[borg](https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/)</code> – over your
entire linux root, on a regular, cron-determined, basis. Having seen to
that prosaic task, it will also create <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/usage/#recovery_from_usb">minimal,
bootable blob</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://samgrayson.me/essays/stop-writing-shell-scripts/">stringly-typed</a>
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.</p>
<p>But this is <em>sysadmin</em> 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.</p>
<p>While I was never /not/ relaxed during my holiday restoration. I did
occasionally carol a high-pitched note or two of concern.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/documentation/faq">REAR’s FAQ</a>,
where they recommended a heavy utility, <a
href="https://unetbootin.github.io/">UnetBootin</a>, for achieving this.
In the future, I’ve set REAR to output those bootable blobs as <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/rear-user-guide/basics/configuration.html">RAWDISK</a>,
which can be burned (warmed?) onto a USB.</p>
<p>REAR’s ecumenical acceptance of multiple backup programs can
introduce additional complexity into its scripts. My use of <a
href="https://github.com/rear/rear/blob/master/usr/share/rear/conf/examples/borg-example.conf">borg
backup</a> tripped up the restore. REAR <a
href="https://github.com/rear/rear/blob/0bd84e259c7c61612a1d8eb296ee1e81a2cbc87b/usr/share/rear/build/default/990_verify_rootfs.sh#L51">scans
executables</a> 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 <a
href="https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation.html#standalone-binary">binary
borg</a> into <code>/usr/local/bin</code> and used that instead of the
Pythonic borg of the Debian repos.</p>
<p>After those tweaks, <code>tub</code> was filled with the form of
<code>boat</code>’s Christmas past. I swapped over the two drives,
holding my breath, and losing the little M.2 SSD screw as always (these
<a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/275937873783">plastic nubbin
replacements</a> tempted me in the fallout, though apparently a <a
href="https://linustechtips.com/topic/1319971-missing-a-screw-for-your-m2-ssd-check-this-out/">pencil
sharpener</a> will work in a pinch). <code>Boat</code> wobbled and then,
like a lucky <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlrvzLRgzdc">North
Sea seafarer</a>, bobbed back up from an early visit to “<a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler%27s_Green">Fiddler’s
Green</a>”.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>Until next time, I am relaxed and restored,</p>
<p>~Integrity Mather</p>
<section id="footnotes" class="footnotes footnotes-end-of-document"
role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1"><p>Are the rumors of an AI Winter true? Do LLMs get lazier
during December? <a href="https://ianarawjo.com/">Ian Arawjo</a>, author
of <a href="https://github.com/ianarawjo/ChainForge">ChainForge</a>,
spotted <a
href="https://twitter.com/IanArawjo/status/1734924051242484223">flaws</a>
in Rob Lynch’s significant result that GPT-4-Turbo produces fewer tokens
when December is mentioned in its prompt, but <a
href="Cousin%20Lynch">https://twitter.com/messages/54913-1586500784514113536</a>
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.<a
href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2"><p>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 <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20060423055444/http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.html">extant
quotes file</a>. 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.<a href="#fnref2"
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3"><p>Most recently – but not <em>that</em> recently –
examined in Phillips, D. P., Jarvinen, J. R., Abramson, I., &amp;
Phillips, R. R. (2004). Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and
New Year’s Than at Any Other Time. <em>Circulation</em>, 110(25),
3781–3788. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.cir.0000151424.02045.f7.</p>
<p>Later studies suggest that people don’t get any crazier or suicidal
at Christmas (See Schneider, E., Liwinski, T., Imfeld, L., Lang, U. E.,
&amp; 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. <em>Frontiers in Psychiatry</em>, 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. &amp; 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 .</p>
<p>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.<a
href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>

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<center><h1 class="frontispiece">Almanack</h1></center>

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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="" xml:lang="">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta name="generator" content="pandoc" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes" />
<meta name="author" content="Integrity Mather" />
<meta name="dcterms.date" content="2024-01-01" />
<title>Look Back Up</title>
<style>
code{white-space: pre-wrap;}
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div.columns{display: flex; gap: min(4vw, 1.5em);}
div.column{flex: auto; overflow-x: auto;}
div.hanging-indent{margin-left: 1.5em; text-indent: -1.5em;}
/* The extra [class] is a hack that increases specificity enough to
override a similar rule in reveal.js */
ul.task-list[class]{list-style: none;}
ul.task-list li input[type="checkbox"] {
font-size: inherit;
width: 0.8em;
margin: 0 0.8em 0.2em -1.6em;
vertical-align: middle;
}
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="res/almanack.css" />
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<![endif]-->
</head>
<body>
<center><h1 class="frontispiece">Almanack</h1></center>
<header id="title-block-header">
<h1 class="title">Look Back Up</h1>
<p class="author">Integrity Mather</p>
<p class="date">January 1, 2024</p>
</header>
<div class="maintext">
<p><img src="res/new-years-backups-initial.png" class="initial"
alt="T" /> he year ends, the North pole tips its deepest bow to the
darkness, and we see even large language models have been <a
href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/is-chatgpt-becoming-lazier-because-its-december-people-run-tests-to-find-out/">taking
it easy</a> for the winter<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref"
id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a>. But for the faithful
maintainer of systems, there’s still work to be done, here in the
cooling embers of the year.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sysadmin-recovery/">Scary Devil
Monastery</a><a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2"
role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>One last manual backup of the 256GiB SSD in my trusty server
<code>boat</code> for the sake of the old, and then an attempted restore
for the sake of the new: to a spare machine, <code>tub</code>,
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 <code>boat</code> with minimal downtime.</p>
<p>That moment of hardware-swapping would mean that <code>boat</code>
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 <code>boat</code> would be
offline for, I hoped, a small slice of time.</p>
<p>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 <code>tub</code>, for instance, while overwriting
<code>boat</code>. Or perhaps just repurposed <code>boat</code> for
gentler, less demanding tasks, giving it the end-of-year gift of a
well-deserved retirement, and passing to <code>tub</code> a new year’s
responsibility of hosting my server processes.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befana">visitors rebuffed</a>, but
hopefully, my friends have other pressing matters this time of year than
hitting reload on my sites.</p>
<p>Yes, a personal web server can go down for a few moments – as long as
it bobs back up.</p>
<p>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 holidays<a href="#fn3"
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a>,
and so too, drives and computers will dutifully run for years, but
expire after a moment’s rest.</p>
<center>
<figure>
<img src="res/new-years-backups-dingbat1.png" style="width:50.0%"
alt="~~~" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">~~~</figcaption>
</figure>
</center>
<p>I use <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/">“Relax-And-Recover”</a> (REAR), a
Linux disaster recovery system from when sysadmins wrote shell code and
<em>liked it</em>. REAR is a sprawling set of shell scripts that runs
your choice of backup code – from <a
href="https://jumpcloud.com/blog/how-to-backup-linux-system-rsync"><code>rsync</code></a>
to <a href="https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/"><code>borg</code></a> –
over your entire Linux filesystem, on a regular, cron-determined, basis.
Having seen to that prosaic task, REAR will also create a <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/usage/#recovery_from_usb">minimal,
bootable blob</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://samgrayson.me/essays/stop-writing-shell-scripts/">stringly-typed</a>
Bash scripts. REAR’s 20K(!) lines of shellcode intimate that it has
reached levels of complexity, beyond that which bashism can safely
grasp.</p>
<p>But this is <em>sysadmin</em> 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.</p>
<p>While I was never <em>not</em> relaxed during my holiday restoration.
I did occasionally carol a high-pitched note or two of concern.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/documentation/faq">REAR’s FAQ</a>,
where they recommended a meatier graphical utility, <a
href="https://unetbootin.github.io/">UnetBootin</a>, for achieving this.
In the future, I’ve set REAR to output those bootable blobs as <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/rear-user-guide/basics/configuration.html">RAWDISK</a>,
which can be burned (warmed?) onto a USB drive.</p>
<p>REAR’s ecumenical acceptance of external backup programs can
introduce a tremors into its solid scripts. My use of a distribution <a
href="https://github.com/rear/rear/blob/master/usr/share/rear/conf/examples/borg-example.conf">borg
backup</a> package broke the restore. REAR <a
href="https://github.com/rear/rear/blob/0bd84e259c7c61612a1d8eb296ee1e81a2cbc87b/usr/share/rear/build/default/990_verify_rootfs.sh#L51">scans
executables</a> 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 <a
href="https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation.html#standalone-binary">binary
borg</a> into <code>/usr/local/bin</code> instead of the Pythonic borg
of the Debian repos.</p>
<p>After those tweaks, <code>tub</code> was filled with the form of
<code>boat</code>’s Christmas past. I swapped over the two drives,
holding my breath, and losing the little M.2 SSD screw as always (these
<a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/275937873783">plastic nubbin
replacements</a> tempted me in the fallout, though apparently a <a
href="https://linustechtips.com/topic/1319971-missing-a-screw-for-your-m2-ssd-check-this-out/">pencil
sharpener</a> will work in a pinch). <code>Boat</code> wobbled and then,
like a lucky <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlrvzLRgzdc">North
Sea seafarer</a>, bobbed back up from an early visit to “<a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler%27s_Green">Fiddler’s
Green</a>”.</p>
<p>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?</p>
</div>
<div class="signoff">
<p><a href="/~integrity/">~Integrity Mather</a></p>
</div>
<section id="footnotes" class="footnotes footnotes-end-of-document"
role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1"><p>Are the rumors of an AI Winter true? Do LLMs get lazier
during December? <a href="https://ianarawjo.com/">Ian Arawjo</a>, author
of <a href="https://github.com/ianarawjo/ChainForge">ChainForge</a>,
spotted <a
href="https://twitter.com/IanArawjo/status/1734924051242484223">flaws</a>
in Rob Lynch’s significant result that GPT-4-Turbo produces fewer tokens
when December is mentioned in its prompt, but <a
href="https://twitter.com/messages/54913-1586500784514113536">Cousin
Lynch</a> 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.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back"
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2"><p><code>alt.sysadmin.recovery</code>‘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 <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20060423055444/http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.html">extant
quotes file</a>. 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.<a href="#fnref2"
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3"><p>Most recently – but not <em>that</em> recently –
examined in Phillips, D. P., Jarvinen, J. R., Abramson, I., &amp;
Phillips, R. R. (2004). Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and
New Year’s Than at Any Other Time. <em>Circulation</em>, 110(25),
3781–3788. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.cir.0000151424.02045.f7.</p>
<p>Later studies suggest that people do not grow crazier or more
suicidal at Christmas (See Schneider, E., Liwinski, T., Imfeld, L.,
Lang, U. E., &amp; 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. <em>Frontiers in Psychiatry</em>, 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. &amp; 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 ?</p>
<p>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.<a
href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
</body>
</html>

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---
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}
![T](res/new-years-backups-initial.png){ .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
@ -32,115 +33,158 @@ 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 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.
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
<center>
![~~~](res/new-years-backups-dingbat1.png){width=50%}
</center>
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),
[^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 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.
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.
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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-----------------------------------------------------------
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-----------------------------------------------------------
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<title>Look Back Up</title>
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<h1>Old Danny's Almanack</h1>
<p>Technological culture since 1724</p>
<center><h1 class="frontispiece">Almanack</h1></center>
<header id="title-block-header">
<h1 class="title">Look Back Up</h1>
<p class="author">Integrity Mather</p>
<p class="date">January 1, 2024</p>
</header>
<div class="maintext">
<p><img src="res/new-years-backups-initial.png" class="initial"
alt="T" /> he year ends, the North pole tips its deepest bow to the
darkness, and we see even large language models have been <a
href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/is-chatgpt-becoming-lazier-because-its-december-people-run-tests-to-find-out/">taking
it easy</a> for the winter<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref"
id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a>. But for the faithful
maintainer of systems, there’s still work to be done, here in the
cooling embers of the year.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sysadmin-recovery/">Scary Devil
Monastery</a><a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2"
role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>One last manual backup of the 256GiB SSD in my trusty server
<code>boat</code> for the sake of the old, and then an attempted restore
for the sake of the new: to a spare machine, <code>tub</code>,
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 <code>boat</code> with minimal downtime.</p>
<p>That moment of hardware-swapping would mean that <code>boat</code>
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 <code>boat</code> would be
offline for, I hoped, a small slice of time.</p>
<p>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 <code>tub</code>, for instance, while overwriting
<code>boat</code>. Or perhaps just repurposed <code>boat</code> for
gentler, less demanding tasks, giving it the end-of-year gift of a
well-deserved retirement, and passing to <code>tub</code> a new year’s
responsibility of hosting my server processes.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befana">visitors rebuffed</a>, but
hopefully, my friends have other pressing matters this time of year than
hitting reload on my sites.</p>
<p>Yes, a personal web server can go down for a few moments – as long as
it bobs back up.</p>
<p>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 holidays<a href="#fn3"
class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a>,
and so too, drives and computers will dutifully run for years, but
expire after a moment’s rest.</p>
<center>
<figure>
<img src="res/new-years-backups-dingbat1.png" style="width:50.0%"
alt="~~~" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">~~~</figcaption>
</figure>
</center>
<p>I use <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/">“Relax-And-Recover”</a> (REAR), a
Linux disaster recovery system from when sysadmins wrote shell code and
<em>liked it</em>. REAR is a sprawling set of shell scripts that runs
your choice of backup code – from <a
href="https://jumpcloud.com/blog/how-to-backup-linux-system-rsync"><code>rsync</code></a>
to <a href="https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/"><code>borg</code></a> –
over your entire Linux filesystem, on a regular, cron-determined, basis.
Having seen to that prosaic task, REAR will also create a <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/usage/#recovery_from_usb">minimal,
bootable blob</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://samgrayson.me/essays/stop-writing-shell-scripts/">stringly-typed</a>
Bash scripts. REAR’s 20K(!) lines of shellcode intimate that it has
reached levels of complexity, beyond that which bashism can safely
grasp.</p>
<p>But this is <em>sysadmin</em> 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.</p>
<p>While I was never <em>not</em> relaxed during my holiday restoration.
I did occasionally carol a high-pitched note or two of concern.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/documentation/faq">REAR’s FAQ</a>,
where they recommended a meatier graphical utility, <a
href="https://unetbootin.github.io/">UnetBootin</a>, for achieving this.
In the future, I’ve set REAR to output those bootable blobs as <a
href="https://relax-and-recover.org/rear-user-guide/basics/configuration.html">RAWDISK</a>,
which can be burned (warmed?) onto a USB drive.</p>
<p>REAR’s ecumenical acceptance of external backup programs can
introduce a tremors into its solid scripts. My use of a distribution <a
href="https://github.com/rear/rear/blob/master/usr/share/rear/conf/examples/borg-example.conf">borg
backup</a> package broke the restore. REAR <a
href="https://github.com/rear/rear/blob/0bd84e259c7c61612a1d8eb296ee1e81a2cbc87b/usr/share/rear/build/default/990_verify_rootfs.sh#L51">scans
executables</a> 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 <a
href="https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation.html#standalone-binary">binary
borg</a> into <code>/usr/local/bin</code> instead of the Pythonic borg
of the Debian repos.</p>
<p>After those tweaks, <code>tub</code> was filled with the form of
<code>boat</code>’s Christmas past. I swapped over the two drives,
holding my breath, and losing the little M.2 SSD screw as always (these
<a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/275937873783">plastic nubbin
replacements</a> tempted me in the fallout, though apparently a <a
href="https://linustechtips.com/topic/1319971-missing-a-screw-for-your-m2-ssd-check-this-out/">pencil
sharpener</a> will work in a pinch). <code>Boat</code> wobbled and then,
like a lucky <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlrvzLRgzdc">North
Sea seafarer</a>, bobbed back up from an early visit to “<a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler%27s_Green">Fiddler’s
Green</a>”.</p>
<p>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?</p>
</div>
<div class="signoff">
<p><a href="/~integrity/">~Integrity Mather</a></p>
</div>
<section id="footnotes" class="footnotes footnotes-end-of-document"
role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1"><p>Are the rumors of an AI Winter true? Do LLMs get lazier
during December? <a href="https://ianarawjo.com/">Ian Arawjo</a>, author
of <a href="https://github.com/ianarawjo/ChainForge">ChainForge</a>,
spotted <a
href="https://twitter.com/IanArawjo/status/1734924051242484223">flaws</a>
in Rob Lynch’s significant result that GPT-4-Turbo produces fewer tokens
when December is mentioned in its prompt, but <a
href="https://twitter.com/messages/54913-1586500784514113536">Cousin
Lynch</a> 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.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back"
role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2"><p><code>alt.sysadmin.recovery</code>‘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 <a
href="https://web.archive.org/web/20060423055444/http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.html">extant
quotes file</a>. 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.<a href="#fnref2"
class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3"><p>Most recently – but not <em>that</em> recently –
examined in Phillips, D. P., Jarvinen, J. R., Abramson, I., &amp;
Phillips, R. R. (2004). Cardiac Mortality Is Higher Around Christmas and
New Year’s Than at Any Other Time. <em>Circulation</em>, 110(25),
3781–3788. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.cir.0000151424.02045.f7.</p>
<p>Later studies suggest that people do not grow crazier or more
suicidal at Christmas (See Schneider, E., Liwinski, T., Imfeld, L.,
Lang, U. E., &amp; 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. <em>Frontiers in Psychiatry</em>, 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. &amp; 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 ?</p>
<p>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.<a
href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
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