davidg | David's Blog

April 2020 “May you live in interesting times”

Apocryphally there is an ancient Chinese curse that says “May you live in interesting times”. The idea is that it’s a curse (thus bad for you), and that the bad thing that is happening is that everything around you is uncertain, in turmoil, rapidly changing, and otherwise so off-balancing that one must pay close attention to avoid a fall into danger.

Well, April of 2020 is definitely interesting times. Reality is that much of commerce is shut down due to shelter-in-place orders by government. There is zero chance that many of people will be unhurt.

A few questions that surround the COVID-19 pandemic are:

Is it a real danger, or exaggerated for particular gain?
Is it both?
If it’s exaggerated for particular gain, what are those gains?
What evidence contradicts the real danger argument?

The first question, “Is it real?” Well, yes, 23,000+ dead in Italy seems like an obvious problem. Spain and France death totals are climbing, and New York City is up to 14,000+ dead. But is that more than the normal count of dead who expire during flu season? And here we have uncertain / in turmoil data.

Certainly, I don’t want my mom to die; and she is in her early 80’s. If the influenza virus, or the COVID-19 virus were to kill her, and I didn’t do all I could to reduce it’s spread, I would feel remorse.

But if the flu kills one half of a million people every year: is the 2020 death-by-influenza-like-virus count really going to be all that greater than the 2019 count? That count could be lower, actually; which would be due to the shut down of commerce.

But the second second part of the first question is perhaps re-written as “Is the declared pandemic due to COVID-19 exaggerated for particular gain?”

It’s not obvious to me that the the answer is no. I would like to be able to say that “The declared pandemic due to COVID-19 is not exaggerated by the media and government bureaucrats who use the media for manipulation.” I do not think that’s true, though.

The second question, “Is it both?” I’m inclined to say yes.

The third question, “If it’s exaggerated for particular gain, what are those gains?” Well wow, there are a lot.

Old school mass media is dying; good riddance. But the Oh-My-God-A-Pandemic!!! keeps the mass media on life support for a little bit longer.
There is a bureaucratic axiom: Never let a good crisis go to waste. Certainly this pandemic has given bureaucratic bullies ample opportunity to exert additional authority.
Social / technological progress: companies which would never before have considered a remote workforce are implementing it. And the air is cleaner for it.
A majority of old school mass media is still butt-hurt that Donald Trump got elected President. He’s going to win again, unless something can be created to discredit him. A ruined economy might do the trick.
Other topics that the mass media should be focusing on go by the wayside while the Oh-My-God-A-Pandemic!!! story stays top center. By the way, Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself.
- Joe Biden is running for President, which is an automatic loss unless the plan is to use him as a false front. If the plan is that Joe will die / be medically retired shortly after election, then the selection of Vice President becomes crucial. I’ve heard Kamala Harris floated as the candidate. I think it would be very difficult to find a candidate with worse “insider” attributes. She is a protege of Willie Brown, and Willie Brown’s picture ought to be in the dictionary next to the phrase Corrupt Politician. The point is: it’s to the Democratic National Committee’s benefit for people to not be looking at their candidate for VP too closely or for very long. The more time spent looking at their candidate, the more time to find something wrong. If they had a good candidate, we would have seen it by now.
- Senators saw the pandemic coming, and profited: Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, Dianne Feinstein, and Jim Inhofe. These people should be prosecuted and jailed.
- The EARN-IT Act, designed to break privacy of all Internet users.
- The Hong Kong protests, as people there want independence from communist China, and Hong Kong is a bright jewel of capitalism. Just how much force should governments use against their citizens?
- Brexit / no- Brexit – the saga of a government doing stupid things continues.
- Equifax breach. Not only did they fuck up their data security, they made a profit off it. And government prosecuted no-one (really).
- A local issue for me is the California High Speed Rail debacle; $77 billion of waste and no politician with the integrity to kill it. $2,000 per man, woman, and child in California (tax dollars) right into the shitter. Stop it!
The point of all the above sub-bullet points is that government at the grand scale is often incompetent or malevolent (perhaps accidentally, but not always), and if we weren’t looking at the pandemic, the media couldn’t help but look at government. But the mass media likes government; it holds their leash, and they provide content to wrap the ads around.
Government spending: every politician loves to be the hero, spending your money to rescue somebody from a problem. A pandemic is a wonderful excuse to spend money with little or no oversight. All these government workers working from home: you didn’t expect them to use their personal cell phones, did you? And from a legal discovery point of view: you don’t want personal and government business mixed on the same device. That wasn’t a concern when their contact phone number was the office phone number; but now we need call-back numbers and they sure as heck should not be the personal home phone number of the case worker. Other spending opportunities: schools with Chromebooks, Zoom teleconferencing, webcams, SAAS in The Cloud. All of these are excuses to buy stuff we could have done without (and kept expenses lower) but; now is a great excuse to spend, spend, spend. We’re stimulating the economy!
Congressional spending: the funding bills had all sorts of pork / unrelated administrative bullshit attached. Many of the ideas would never have flown, had they been reviewed on their own merits alone. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Putting people in their place, by removing the government service of the public school system. Some of you did not appreciate what a little rat-asshole your little angel is, until the little angel was sent home to live with you for a couple months. You should fix your kid. Fixing your kid has always been your job; never the teacher’s. Long term, it would be best for your kid, too. Sending your kid home to you confronts the issue in a way your kid’s teacher (or even school district) never could.
Conditioning people to be even more dependent on government services. If you understand that every dollar the government spends comes out of your wallet, you’d rather they spend less. But if the government bails you out, you are the welfare recipient now. It will be that much more difficult for you to complain about excessive government spending when you were one of the recipients. Hypocrisy much? No – you have more integrity than that; unless (pandemix).
Unifying disaster: the pandemic. It’s no secret that there has been an increasing divide between people who earn their self-worth, and people who feel entitled. This divide became wider during the Donald Trump versus Hilary Clinton presidential campaign. The pandemic resets expectations. Trivial childishness is seen for what it is. What about the barber, shut down, who can no longer feed his family of four? That’s important.

The fourth question is “What evidence contradicts the real danger argument?”

I think another way of asking this is “If this danger is so real, what orders are examples of actual safety, and what orders are bullshit to make the bureaucrats feel powerful?” The orders are Shelter In Place also known as Stay Home and Keep Socially Distant.

I see the value in keeping everyone separate. If the transmission process is an infected person exhales, and a non-infected person inhales (which is the typical infection path for influenza-like viruses), then Shelter In Place / Stay Home and Keep Socially Distant makes a lot of sense. And in the first week, a ton of people did it.

We’re putting up with the destruction of commerce for the little guy because it’s all about keeping people from an early death. Right?

And then a week later, the ice cream shops were suddenly essential services and open for take-out. What the hell?

I’m still getting junk mail. A printer at the junk mail printer could be coughing all sorts of germs all over the crap that gets delivered to me. What is so essential about me getting sales crap to tell me to buy shit I don’t need, and which is obviously immediately going into the trash.

Are the politicians going to barbers / hair dressers? Is a barber / hair dresser suddenly an essential service when it’s a bureaucrat who needs a hair cut?

Let’s cut to the chase: is looking good an essential service?

Are politicians and/or bureaucrats to be excused from breaking Shelter In Place / Stay Home and Keep Socially Distant if they get that essential service of looking good? Because it’s all about keeping people looking good on TV, right?

Your grandparent or parent or cousin may have died, and you are prevented from going to the funeral because a large gathering of people might increase the pandemic; but Gavin Newsom needs to look good, right? He needs to be able to go onsite for the television appearance, because his speech means more, if the background is out in public, right? You have to Shelter In Place, but the governor, well he’s not a peon that ought to follow the peon rules.

Which makes me wonder about the validity of the rules at all.

Perhaps the rules are good, and good decent people are doing Shelter In Place. Maybe it’s only the politicians and bureaucrats holding press conferences who aren’t many weeks past that last haircut who are the hypocrites. But nothing about that causes me to gain respect for them. And if I don’t respect them, then I do question their motives.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

COVID-19, new water heater, WordPress annoyances, Zoom meetings, oh my

Wow a lot of stuff has happened since my last post. I’m still catching up; but, I didn’t want to go too long without pointing out I’m still alive.

COVID-19: John Hopkins University has some computer science students who are doing data gathering and mapping that on to ArcGIS. The web page works as a status report of where we are today. Thanks to Ars Technica for the original article.

Today, Italy went over the 10,000 dead mark.

New Water Heater: I went two weeks without hot water. I am grateful this was before COVID-19, because I used my gym membership for my daily hot shower. In fact, a friend of mine, way back when, pointed out that if you ever go homeless, a gym membership is a way to stay human for around $20 per month.

And now the gyms are closed due to COVID-19. Well that hurts the homeless even more.

The whole water heater debacle deserves a post of it’s own, so I will do that, later.

WordPress Annoyances: there are things that don’t work, and, the WordPress Support Forums are a mass of dead and empty posts of people asking for help. Other forms of help don’t seem to be, either.

I want to migrate between sites, and from single-site to multisite, but man this stuff just does not work.

Zoom Meetings: Man oh man, I wish I had listened to my stock picking guys when they said Zoom was the new hotness in video conferencing over the Internet. Zoom stock price has nearly doubled since then. And now, even I use Zoom, and I know of three people who signed up to pay a monthly subscription. By the way, Discord is pretty cool, too.

Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves that they couldn’t leverage their leadership with Skype and Teams into being the industry leader. Of course Google had a shot way back when with Hangouts, too. Google though is just kind of a big failure to get anything done since merging with Doubleclick and abandoning the whole “Don’t be evil” motto.

New site steps

Note this is for a new WordPress Multisite

Log into AWS Management Console
Lightsail → Create a new instance (Linux, WordPress Multisite)
Create a new static IP address
Assign the static IP address to the new instance.
Buy a new domain name (if I don’t have one available) – in this case, gerisch.org
Update DNS with the new static IP address
ssh – i path-to-pem-file-for-AWS-instances bitnami@gerisch.org
Make Ubuntu like OpenSUSE
Log out, and log back in (get the benefits of pageup for history search, and .. as the cd .. alias)
cd /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress
sudo ./bnconfig --machine_hostname gerisch.org
sudo mv bnconfig bnconfig.disabled
sudo apt upgrade
sudo init 6
wait for reboot to finish
ssh – i path-to-pem-file-for-AWS-instances bitnami@gerisch.org
sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool

At this point, I get a warning:

Warning: Custom redirections are not supported in the Bitnami WordPress Multisite Stack. This tool will not be able to enable/disable redirections.
Press [Enter] to continue:

An updated version is available. Would you like to download it? You would need to run it manually later. [Y/n]:

sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool

Welcome to the Bitnami HTTPS Configuration tool.

Domains

Please provide a valid space-separated list of domains for which you wish to configure your web server.

Domain list []:

gerisch.org

The following domains were not included: www.gerisch.org. Do you want to add them? [Y/n]:

The interesting thing here is that (if I’m interpreting things correctly) that WordPress Multisite really does not want one of the subdomains to be www.gerisch.org – yet here, Bitnami, through the Let’s Encrypt really does want one of the domains to be www

I hit <Enter> which signifies yes

Changes to perform

The following changes will be performed to your Bitnami installation:

Stop web server
Configure web server to use a free Let’s Encrypt certificate for the domains:
gerisch.org www.gerisch.org
Configure a cron job to automatically renew the certificate each month
Configure web server name to: gerisch.org
Start web server once all changes have been performed

Do you agree to these changes? [Y/n]:

I hit <Enter> which signifies yes

Create a free HTTPS certificate with Let’s Encrypt

Please provide a valid e-mail address for which to associate your Let’s Encrypt certificate.

Domain list: gerisch.org www.gerisch.org

Server name: gerisch.org

E-mail address []:

I put in my personal email address

The Let’s Encrypt Subscriber Agreement can be found at:

https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.2-November-15-2017.pdf

Do you agree to the Let’s Encrypt Subscriber Agreement? [Y/n]:

I hit <Enter> which signifies yes

And after a bit of work, the configuration of my new web site to be SSL protected is complete.

More power sleep Linux stuff – or how to set permissions to make a keystroke out of it

This command does successfully put the computer to sleep (and thus the screens eventually go dark and no longer light up the room like stadium lighting):

echo freeze > /sys/power/state

But mere mortals don’t have permission to do that.

I added a script in /etc/init.d which does a chmod 666 /sys/power/state on startup (see the previous post about editing /etc/init.d/after.local)

Credit where credit is due: a gentleman named Aaron Ball posted this at his web site oper.io – clever logo, too, to combine the power switch icon as “.io” – but I digress.

Then another tiny script that simply does the echo command for me:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/echo freeze > /sys/power/state

I had started to go down the road of a sudoers file entry, which would give anyone permission to run this script; but the problem isn’t who runs the command. The problem is that the target of the echo command, /sys/power/state, isn’t going to allow writing by a script (even if run by sudo).

Last step was to add a keystroke to my KDE shortcuts. System Settings –> Custom Shortcuts –> Edit –> New –> Global Shortcuts

Name the action, assign the keystrokes to invoke it, and make the action the tiny script above. Works like a charm. 🙂

AMD Ryzen 1700 and power sleep failure

I had bought all the parts for a new system at the end of 2017, and was mostly happy with it. The motherboard was an AS Rock Taichi and the CPU was an AMD Ryzen 1700. I bought the highest MHz AMD Ryzen I could get except I avoided the 220 Watts TDP; power draw on this chip is about 65 Watts TDP.

Certainly, I was thrilled with system performance, and very reasonable price. But sleep states were a problem. The system would go so deep into sleep, it would never wake up. I would have to press and hold the power switch to get it back: not good. Once in a while, the box would freeze hard too; usually while scrolling a Facebook page. So I had this sense of unease that I’d made a mistake buying the AS Rock Taichi X370 and trying to run Linux on it.

This last birthday, I bought myself a replacement motherboard: an MSI X470 Gaming Plus. I spent my birthday pulling out the Taichi motherboard and putting in the 470GP.

And my ACPI sleep problems did not go away. Rats!

I’ve taken some vacation time, and looking through the log files, I did find an error message that lead me to some vital information. The AMD Ryzen 1700 has an ACPI sleep state – C6 – which Linux doesn’t play nice with. A patch was offered to the Linux maintainers, but not accepted. I don’t know why, and I’m not sure it matters, either.

But what someone did, is make a Python script that pokes and prods the correct bits in the Ryzen 1700 to have it declare that ACPI sleep state C6 is not available / should not be used.

I haven’t had a sleep state problem with this rig since. 😀

First, I needed this: Github ZenStates. I saved this script as /home/myhomelocation/zenstates.py

Then I needed two bash scripts to run it after system startup:

/etc/init.d/after.local

which contains (and is executable):

#!/bin/sh
/etc/init.d/set_c6_acpi_state_disabled.sh

/etc/init.d/set_c6_acpi_state_disabled.sh

which contains (and is executable):

#!/bin/sh
# ScriptName=set_c6_acpi_state_disabled
/usr/bin/python /home/myhomelocation/zenstates.py --c6-disable

In theory, this could be a single script: after.local could be the script to run the Python script zenstates.py. But what if I find I want more than one script to run after system startup? This way, I just add another line to after.local

This week I talked with my brother, who found a relevant piece of information (while researching something else). Apparently AMD will give me a new CPU that doesn’t have this problem, as a warranty repair. So I guess this is AMD being honorable enough to admit they made a mistake here; that is nice. The caveat is, they cannot trust people to not fry their CPU and use this as an excuse to get a replacement under warranty. So the drill becomes: get an RMA from AMD, remove the Ryzen 1700, ship it (at my cost) to them, they test the CPU to make sure it’s not fried (is otherwise good except for the C6 power state problem), and then they ship a replacement. Total turnaround time is probably one month.

Do I want this, my main system, to be down for a month until the AMD CPU RMA SOP EOP FTW? The warranty on the CPU is three years, and I bought it two and a quarter ago.

I think I’m good, with just a software patch. I’m just happy that r4m0n found and supplied a patch.

Thank you r4m0n. 🙂

AT&T bill – something that (seems to me) should be illegal

I received my bill in the mail on Friday, February 7th, 2020. The bill says it should be paid by February 15, 2020. Trying to squeeze people into late charges much?

The bill says it’s Issue Date is January 25, 2020 – two weeks prior to delivery. Of course, it’s prepaid bulk mail, so there is no actual postmark.

I remember the Post Office doing some new initiative where they get mail to us in 24 hours (although I assume that applies to local delivery only). I don’t think this is a post office problem. My guess is that AT&T is just being a shitty company. Hard to prove, though.

Way back when, I remember a consultant telling us of a mainframe that printed checks on the other side of the country. ZIP code starts with 9? Print it on the East Coast and mail it from there. ZIP code starts with 0 (zero)? Print it on the West Coast and mail it from there.

This could be something similar. Or, it could actually be that they just put a pallet full of paper bills on a storage rack for two weeks, and then sent them out.

New OpenSuSE installation – Facebook videos / GIFs don't play

This is just a reminder to myself that when I install fresh OpenSuSE, that when Facebook videos don’t play (but Youtube does), the solution is to go into software management, and to add libxmp4 and MP4Tools. I think that was it. It was important to allow vendor change, and I had to do a lot of acknowledgments for that.

I see that I changed:

libxmp4
libwx lots of stuff
bento4
MP4Tools
ffmpeg-4

Previously, I had added the Adobe Flash stuff, and that had fixed some of the trouble, but not all of it.

New motherboard

For my birthday, I bought myself a new motherboard. The previous motherboard was speedy; but, not stable. I pulled out an ASRock X370 Taichi and put in an MSI X470 Gaming Plus.

I kept everything else the same: RAM, video card, storage. So far, the MSI motherboard is performing admirably.

Three little snags I ran into:

Backups were a pain.
Sound card appeared to not work (but probably did).
Btrfs is not reconfiguration friendly.

I never did get Clonezilla to work as a backup. I’d bought an external USB hard drive from Costco last year I think. No matter how many times I tried to put a partition on it, it would err out. I think this was because the drive had an MBR (Master Boot Record) config on it instead of GPT (GUID Partition Table). Ultimately, I booted off of a GParted live DVD, and wiped the external USB that way. Then created an ext4 partition for the whole 5 terabytes. From there, rebooted back into OpenSuSE and used rsync. Specifically:

su -
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt
rsync -aAXv /home /mnt

That took a while. But after I got a backup of my home directory, I was free to start taking apart hardware. 🙂

But yeah, I started around 9:00 AM, and only got the good backup going by 11:30 AM. Cryptic error messages are cryptic.

The Taichi motherboard removal actually went reasonably easy.

What did delay me a little bit was that when I first installed the Noctua NF-S12A PWM system fan, I installed it 90° off; the cable from the fan was about a finger’s width too far away from the motherboard connector. Although it was super easy to remove the Noctua – it has rubber posts and grommets instead of screws (which make it super quiet) – putting it back in to the case was slightly difficult. During the initial build, the fan went in first, so using the needle nose pliers to pull on the stretchy polymer posts was easy. But this time, the power supply and motherboard are already in there, and I don’t really want to have to pull all that out for one corner of the fan mounting. Eventually I got it, but it wasn’t easy.

Boot the machine up, and things are looking pretty good. But I have this fear that sound and Linux are enemies, so I go in to YaST and test the sound. The sound tests fail. Following instructions though, SDB:Audio troubleshooting specifically this test:

speaker-test -c2 -l5 -twav

did produce sound! So sound is working after all. It’s just something in YaST the fails to to produce the test sound. Apparently.

All I really know is that I got to the point where I disabled the second sound card (it’s built into the video card), rebooted, and decided to just try Youtube. Youtube worked. I had sound and everything. I’ll call that a win.

HOWEVER, now it’s time to bring in my files for my home directory, from my backup. And I had forgotten to do some manual partition work during the initial install. I had wanted to wipe both /dev/sda and /dev/sdb so that during the initial install, hardware detection would find what is in the MSI X470, with no previous crud from the Taichi motherboard be hanging around.

But I had not bothered to manually change the partitioner to make /dev/sdb the /home directory. I figured I could do that later. I figured wrong.

Under previous systems, it was pretty easy to delete /home on /dev/sda3 and then configure Linux to mount /home on /dev/sdb1 instead.

Btrfs was having none of that. And if I thought the gparted errors about the external USB partitions were cryptic – this took obfuscation a whole new level.

The good news is that I’d already done all the copies to /dev/sdb1 (from the external USB backup on /dev/sdc1 ), so that work wasn’t wasted.

And indeed, it was easier to just wipe /dev/sda and install all over again. This time, during partitioning, I specified the existing /dev/sdb1 to be mounted as /home and Btrfs left it’s grubby mitts off my home directory disk.

Finished the reinstall, deleted the second audio, and et voila – my machine seems almost exactly like it was this morning when I woke up. I almost can’t tell I did a whole motherboard swap out underneath; except so far no spontaneous reboots. 🙂

Some more audio books I have listened to

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. I love this book; but, do not listen to the forward. Some people who didn’t get the ending, complained to the author about that, so Mr. Pirsig added a major spoiler to the forward. In my opinion, the book is much more powerful as it dawns on you what is happening.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I listened to this one because it’s a classic, and Jordan B. Peterson seemed to like it. It was Dostoyevsky’s final work; so in theory he’s gotten good at it by now. On the one hand, it was interesting pretty much the whole way through. On the other hand, some of the writing, where characters describe themselves and what they are thinking and thinking about doing and how they are and I’m going to kiss you now and you will forgive me and I am such a wretch and – oof, it was annoying to me. I can’t imagine people actually talking like that.

After On by Rob Reid. This is great. I both liked the main story, and the little side stories of the Amazon reviewer, the character stories, and the cheesiest hero story ever written. I also liked that it opened up to exploration some thinking about what Super A.I. could mean, and that private reputation services will be super valuable in the future. Number two in the list of “most enjoyable books I’ve listened to this year.”

Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It was okay. I suppose it was better than okay; I don’t think I ever found myself bored with it. However, I don’t find that I can identify much with a friar of supertech trying to save the world while running from the Inquisition. Oh, and there were space aliens, too. One thing I did like about the story was the idea that one might get inured to how magical supertech might be, if one grew up with it and it seemed ordinary. (Which reminds me of an old joke from Saturday Night Live: (Jack Handy) “We would cut down less trees, if every time we cut a tree down, it screamed; unless trees screamed most of the time and at random.”

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I liked this book. It was quite interesting, and never boring. The writing is good in that I bought in to the main character’s well being and growth. However, there was at least one gratuitous sex scene in there (which set up an ending scene) which I severely disliked. The technology aspects were intriguing. Early on, there is some dystopia which it seems the first victim would have of course seen coming. So that rang flat.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Meh. I liked the idea that each passenger on the journey would get to tell their own story. Most of the stories were interesting. The one character, though, was every bit as awful as I feared it would be. Any time a writer gets to write a self-described “poet”, your ears will be subjected to a string of epithets-as-art as if that were a thing. Reminds me of a story a friend of mine told, who at age 4, snuck into a closet with a Fisher-Price Tape Recorder, and recorded in a whisper “shit caca caca caca shit caca shit.” Four year old him was all super impressed with his own power to use foul words. This book has that.

Artemis by Andy Weir. I very much liked this book. I liked the main character, I liked the setting, I liked the skulking around and dangers of getting caught. This book was fun. Number three in the list of “most enjoyable books I’ve listened to this year.”

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Man, what a powerful book. I was on an airplane, and sitting next to me was a psychiatrist; we got to talking. He told me this was his favorite book, so I listened to it. I think part of what makes it so good is that the author lived through some of the environment and transitions he writes his characters in to; this makes everything seem authentic. The book also is interesting because the setting is so foreign, there isn’t anything (for me at least) to dismiss. It’s all novel to me. The one thing I didn’t like about the book was near the end, where the main character does the most despicable thing. I suppose it’s needed to move the story toward it’s sad end. I was not wanting to finish listening to the book after that. But I thought I ought to give him a chance to somehow redeem himself, so I kept listening.

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. This book isn’t really aimed at me; so I didn’t enjoy it as much as people in it’s target audience would.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. This has been my favorite book this year. The characters, the settings, the corporate cultures that become environments and families, the technologies; man this book has it all: and a smart villain and a robot hero and main characters that you really do want to see succeed. Just lots of fun.

Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson. I liked this book. Most of the rules are common sense; but Professor Peterson likes to delve a little deeper into the “why” of each rule. One of the rules, “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them” is probably the biggest failing of most parents. I don’t think it’s useful to point at parents today and say “You fouled up”; but, if you are a new parent (or not yet a parent), it is probably super important to hear (and understand why) you should not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. When I was growing up, there was a whole lot of propaganda masquerading as education about how children should not be made to feel bad; children that are made to feel bad now, act bad later. This completely ignored the reality all children push the boundaries of what is acceptable because they need to know what the boundaries are. Anyway, I read several books in my formative years: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was in my early 20’s. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and Games People Play by Eric Berne in my early teens. I wish I had read Twelve Rules for Life then, too (although it wouldn’t be published for another 35 years).

How to use Lightsail snapshots to revert to a previous version

I have the new Bitnami WordPress multisite web server up and running. I’d like to make a backup of it, prior to mucking with it, so that I can revert back if needed.

Schrodinger’s Backups: The condition of any backup is unknown until a restore is attempted.

Murphy’s take on Schrodinger’s Backups: You’re fucked. The backup is dead.

Well, that is often the case when you just lost the computer, and you now need to restore from your “backups”.

Let’s see what it takes to successfully take a Lightsail snapshot and restore to it.

Technically, you spin up a new instance, move the IP address, and delete the old instance. So you will be incurring a little bit more extra charges with Lightsail, because for a little while, you had two instances. Snapshots cost money, too.

Step the first: shut down your instance.

In theory, this step should not be necessary. The snapshot process should work on the running image. It probably will.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

Although it is a remote chance, there is a problem of database coherency. What if, at the exact moment you take a snapshot, some database transaction is only half-posted? What if one half of the transaction is written to disk, then the snapshot happens, then the other half of the transaction gets written to disk? When you restore, the database is going to no longer be coherent.

For some databases, there are a whole subset of features and work done to ensure atomic transactions that prevent any piece of the transaction of being committed until all of it can be verified to be done. That’s all nice and everything, but what’s wrong with just shutting down the server? If your server is so mission critical that you cannot have a minute or two of downtime, you should be working on clusters of machines that can announce themselves into the cluster, and announce themselves out of the cluster and gracefully transition between states.

Power down the server, and the server is quiescent with the world.

Step the second: take the snapshot.

A picture being worth a thousand words, here’s thirteen thousand words: