From time to time our laptops receive firmware updates, by using the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (short: fwupd). This worked fine for a long time, until it didn’t. One day I was facing the following error message:
From time to time our laptops receive firmware updates, by using the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (short: fwupd). This worked fine for a long time, until it didn’t. One day I was facing the following error message:
Someone at FOSDEM 2023 asked the question: “What happens when PostgreSQL rolls over the version number to 95? Will this cause problems like back then in Windows?”
What does that even mean? When Microsoft released the version after Windows 98, they opted for naming it Windows 10, not Windows 9. Because apparently a lot of code out there checks if the string starts with “Windows 9” and then assumes that the OS is one of the very old ones. This might not be the only such problem, as another blog article by Microsoft shows. Apparently they used “3.95” for the Windows 95 internal version, because lazy programmers.
If you use GitHub Actions to run Workflows and tests, you might have spotted this warning recently:
If you use GitHub Actions to run Workflows and tests, you might have spotted this warning recently:
In September 2021, a patch for the upcoming PostgreSQL version 15 was committed which introduces a visible change for users: the CREATE privilege for the public schema is no longer set by default. This is a recommendation from CVE-2018-1058.
What does that mean for the average (non-superuser) user?
Together with Lætitia Avrot and Nikolay Samokhvalov I was invited to participate in a Community Panel (YouTube video) about PostgreSQL Upgradability at Postgres Vision 2022. The panel was moderated by Bruce Momjian and initiated and organized by Jimmy Angelakos. Bruce did talk with each of us before, which helped a lot to guide the discussion in the right direction. The recording of the panel discussion is available on the Postgres Vision website.
During this panel each of us provided examples for how easy or complicated PostgreSQL upgrades still are.
A while ago I upgraded openHAB from version 2.4 to 2.5. That comes with the usual share of problems, but eventually I got it working.
A while ago I switched backups from Duplicity to Restic. About time: I was using Duplicity for many years (I think I started using it around 2010, long before Restic became available) and it served me well. But recently I ran into more and more issues, especially with archives getting larger and larger. There is an 11 years old open bug in the Duplicity bugtracker, which describes a showstopper for backing up larger archives. And it doesn’t look like this will be solved anytime soon. Therefore it was time for something new.
Since I’m rolling out my backups with Ansible, it was relatively easy to create a set of scripts for Restic which use almost the same infrastructure as the old Duplicity backups. That works as expected on all our laptops. But the Raspberry Pi, which does the fileserver backups, seem to had a problem. Backups took way longer than before, jumped from 30-60 minutes (depending on the amount of changes) to constantly around 10 hours.
Sometimes old computers are not updated quickly enough, or just kept running …
Now that the shiny new Ubuntu 9.04 is available, the servers with packages for 7.10 are closed down. Ok, how to upgrade a server, if you can’t even install the update-manager-core package - because of the missing repositories?