petnames and Zooko's fan

D’oh, I lost track of a bug report that should have been fixed in nsnotifyd-2.2. Thus, hot on the heels of [the previous release][prev], here’s nsnotifyd-2.3. Sorry for causing extra work to my uncountably many users! The nsnotifyd daemon monitors a set of DNS zones and runs a command when any of them change. It listens for DNS NOTIFY messages so...

I have made a new release of nsnotifyd, a tiny DNS server that just listens for NOTIFY messages and runs a script when one of your zones changes. This nsnotifyd-2.2 release includes a new feature: nsnotify can now send NOTIFY messages from a specific source address Thanks to Adam Augustine for the suggestion. I like receiving messages that say...

The other day I learned about the Rust crate lexopt which describes itself as, A pathologically simple command line argument parser. Most argument parsers are declarative: you tell them what to parse, and they do it. This one provides you with a stream of options and values and lets you figure out the rest. For “pathologically simple” I still...

I commented on Lobsters that /tmp is usually a bad idea, which caused some surprise. I suppose /tmp security bugs were common in the 1990s when I was learning Unix, but they are pretty rare now so I can see why less grizzled hackers might not be familiar with the problems. I guess that’s some kind of success, but sadly the fixes have left behind...

A couple of notable things have happened in recent months: There is a new edition of POSIX for 2024. There’s lots of good stuff in it, but today I am writing about getentropy() which is the first officially standardized POSIX API for getting cryptographically secure random numbers. On Linux the getentropy(3) function is based on the getrandom(2)...