@cks @0x0ddc0ffee @drscriptt

In theory I guess you could have the (soft) power switch wired to the BMC as basically a GPIO pin and then the BMC controlling the 'power switch' wired to the PCH or wherever it would go

On the platforms I've developed BMC firmware for that's pretty much exactly how it's arranged. Yes, it's more moving parts between the physical button and actually powering on the host, though often mitigated somewhat by a "GPIO pass-through" feature of popular BMC SoCs (Aspeed parts, at least), wherein you can configure the GPIO controller to basically just bridge two pins together in hardware so there's no software in between and it acts like a direct connection, which can be useful for times when the software that usually manages those GPIOs isn't able to do so for whatever reason (like during the BMC's boot sequence).

Some rocks just don't want to split even after extensive sledgehammering. Fortunately with the right blade a circular saw can make it a little easier.

Also, wow that's by a wide margin the fastest I've ever drained a 4Ah battery (and given that I guess the thermal self-protection shutoff shouldn't have been a surprise).

The verdict: very effective, would rent again (and probably will for the other half of the yard).

@kwf These pictures made me sort of curious about that tool and so I watched a brief video review of it, which happened to mention that the blades are reversible -- perhaps you're already aware, but might they still be intact enough to flip around and keep going?

@dannyjpalmer Oh wow, I hadn't thought about that game in a very long time! And I don't recall ever noticing the tagline on the paper, which is quite excellent.

@mxshift @danderson Can I ask what you used them for? "GHz-capable discrete logic gates" sounds like an interesting space to be in.

@cks @mhoye ...except that's still prone to race conditions, because there's a non-zero (brief, but not entirely negligible) window of time between passing the point of no return on deciding to press a key or click a button and actually doing so, and if the focus-theft happens within that window you're still screwed.

I think what I want is "no program can steal input focus ever, period".

@regehr ...and indeed, after a quick check so do both Seattle & King County public libraries -- DVD and streaming options, even! Nice, libraries for the win.

@regehr @aleksorsist Oh man, I've been wanting to see that for many years, but never have -- and as far as I can tell none of the major streaming services have it available. Maybe I should check the local libraries...

@david_chisnall Twist my arm...

Mine seems to somewhat regularly misplace his skeletal structure.

@rk @sj Except rmdir(2) is going to fail with ENOTEMPTY, no? You can hold an open fd for an empty directory, but then creating a new file inside it via openat on the directory fd still fails with ENOENT (and similarly if you hold on to it by chdir-ing into it instead of opening it and then creating things in ".").

You could also put secrets in anonyous tempfiles, but at least on Linux other processes could still access it via /proc/$PID/fd.

@tedu spits drink

What on earth is that from?

The fact that timingsafe_bcmp(a, b, n) != timingsafe_bcmp(b, a, n) is a nice touch too.

@rk @mos_8502 In my experience AFS is mostly reasonable to use (modulo Kerberos complications and learning a new permissions system) and from an abstract design standpoint definitely the "nicest", but having once years ago briefly looked into what would be involved in setting up and running it myself I decided it made NFS look comparatively trivial and did not pursue it further.

Realistically, for the kinds of usage I'm picturing from @mos_8502's post, I'd reach for sshfs -- the setup process is basically "run sshd on server, run sshfs on client" and you're done.

@cliffle The RFC3514 approach to LLM reliability.

@rk That's like...2/3 of business web sites I've seen in the last 5 years, I think. Perhaps there's some actual nugget of real utility buried somewhere in something they provide, but discerning what it might be is utterly beyond me.

...and finally (since Sunday afternoon) in Wisconsin.

And yesterday (since I've been remiss in posting), a visit to Arches.

@domi @voltagex @th For the in-band firmware update mechanism (i.e. through the BMC's web interface), the *.ima files ASRock uses are yes, a raw flash image, but typically with a footer appended with some additional little bits (checksums of some sort, perhaps?) that I think its update machinery may actually verify, though I'm not certain.

However, you can probably bypass that by blasting new firmware in from the host via @arj's nifty tool culvert.

@voltagex @th @domi Having worked with a decent number of ASRock Rack boards, I've yet to encounter one that uses secure boot -- a handful of recent-ish ones are also now supported (to varying degrees) in mainline OpenBMC, FWIW. (I've never dealt with any Asus systems.)

@th @domi In my experience with Supermicros (at least on earlier ones without BMC secure boot), without even opening up the chassis it's also pretty easy to unpack a firmware image, replace the useless SMASH CLP shell with a symlink to a real shell, re-pack/install/boot, and then just ssh into it.

@arj @voltagex @directhex I haven't actually worked with any ASRock systems with an on-board discrete power supply (only externally-supplied 12VDC), so unfortunately I'm wholly unfamiliar with the workings of their BMC<->PSU machinery.

@rk Depending on your window manager, couldn't a modal dialog also pop up out of nowhere with a button of its own in the same spot?

@regehr Same thing happened here (Seattle) last week -- shortly before the and-then-it-was-hailing stage it exceeded the flow capacity of our gutter->rain-chain outlet so we just had a waterfall over the edge of the gutter. Probably the hardest I've seen it rain since moving here 3 years ago?

@tedu So polite of the heat to respect the state line like that!

@arj Less than I'd like, but I still do from time to time...

@arj Oh neat! I'm pretty sure one of their other trombonists (not the one in that particular video) was in the jazz band at my high school, though we weren't quite in the same band at the same time.