Category: Computing

  • The Modern Arp table: ip -s neighbor show

    While trying to see if my kindle was in the house or not, I got to looking at the arp table, and specifically: Which prints out the table along with some info about the entry being stale or reachable and a few numbers. The man page says nothing, but luckily stackexchange came to the rescue:…

  • Bootstrapping Infrastructure for Server Recovery

    A common approach in IT is to take a backup or clone of a server and put it somewhere ‘safe’ for later use in the event of disaster. I’ve seen this waved around as a viable option many a time, the idea being that if something happens to the live system, then the clone can…

  • How C came about

    Little bit of abridged history in this article from Arstechnica (https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/12/a-damn-stupid-thing-to-do-the-origins-of-c/). It’s interesting in that you can see why so many common technical aphorisms exist, like the principle of least astonishment Only two years after EDSAC 2 came online, the university realized that a far more powerful machine would be required soon, and in order…

  • Programming Error

    Programming Error
  • Ansible – dump your vars

    This blog contains some handy var dumping tips. For example, to dump the setup facts: # Dump facts for domain example.com ansible -i inventory_file some_host -m setup Another one is to dump all the vars for everything for some serious debugging. Save this to it’s own yml file. — – name: dump all hosts: all…

  • Load “”

    “Hello, World!” has become the canonical first post, message or first test program. I get the feeling it’s largely an invention of the Silicon Valley set. I learned to program thanks to Clive Sinclair, so my learning took a European bent from the start. We left out the ‘World’ bit for starters, being far more…