cybercyber

The purpose of this web-page (blog?) in its conception was to have a place on the internet where we could store our collected “wisdom” and experience to help others.

That is the whole idea, and it would make for a very short article. But the title has a second half.

Why another?

There is no shortage of people writing about git, about ZFS, about linux. Search for any error message you like and you get a dozen results: three scraped copies of the same stackoverflow answer, two pages that are mostly cookie banner, and one forum thread from 2009 that ends with “nevermind, solved it” and no further explanation.

Because the pages that actually got me unstuck were almost never the big ones. They were somebody’s small page with one command on it, written by a person who had had my exact problem a few months earlier and who did not bother with an introduction. No SEO, no newsletter, frequently no CSS. Those pages saved me hours, and somebody had to sit down and write them.

That is the whole ambition here: be that page for somebody. Most of what we put up is tagged scriptshare, and that is not false modesty — one of those articles is a single zfs list invocation with a paragraph of context around it. It is not really an article. But it is the thing I would have wanted to find, and looking it up took me longer than writing it down did.

The part I had wrong

I always found the idea laughable that some bloggers put onto their site, that they only did it to store information that they themselves would want to access later — I always thought it was better to have that information in ones mind.

Now that I have this collection of articles, I will often think while hacking “hey, this is neat, let’s put it on cybercyber!” and copy a snippet into the drafts-directory¹; the last months I have more than once used one of those “stashed” snippets to re-use it.

So, all the bloggers are right: It is nice to have a place to store snippets of code and thought.

What I had not understood is that “having it in your mind” and “having it written down” are not two ways of storing the same thing. Six months later, the version in my mind is “there is a way to do this with zfs list, something with -s used I think”. The version on the web-page is the command.

And here is the part that surprised me: it is the writing for someone else that makes it work for me. If I kept these notes only for myself, the ZFS article would read zfs list -t snapshot and nothing else, and future-me would be exactly as stuck as past-me was, only more annoyed. Because I wrote it as if explaining it to a stranger, it still makes sense to the stranger that I will be in half a year.

The two purposes in the first paragraph — helping others, and hoarding for myself — turn out to be the same purpose. I needed a few months of articles to notice that, and a few years to see how far it goes.

For a long time I had no honest answer to that. Now I do, and it comes from the least likely article on this page.

The m-net DS-Lite post is written in German, about one German ISP, about persuading a pfSense to tunnel IPv4 over an IPv6-only connection. It opens by apologising to everybody who does not live in Germany. The addressable audience is roughly: people with that provider, that problem and that router.

It is also, by a wide margin, the article that has produced the most mail.

Some of it was people saying thank you. The rest was people telling me things I did not know:

• that it works with an “EchoLife HG8012H” too, where you cannot set the VLAN in the modem at all and have to do it on the switch or on the pfSense instead
• that creating the gif0 interface is not sufficient — you also have to assign it under “Interface Assignments” before the gateway even appears under System->Routing (thanks, Marc)
• that on a Deutsche Giganetz line you additionally need the MSS of the GIF interface at 1492, or you get fragmentation problems (thanks, Sebastian)

Note that the last one is not even the provider the article is about.

I had ended that post with “I hope somebody finds this before as much time is wasted as I had to waste”. Three of the people who found it wrote back with corrections, the last one more than two years after it went up. That article is now better than the one I was capable of writing.

And I already knew it works in the other direction, because I have been the other person a hundred times. Every awk incantation I have ever pasted came from somebody who wrote it down instead of closing the terminal. Paying some of that back seemed like the decent thing to do. What I had not expected is that the page pays back.

So: why another?

Because the alternative is that the snippet lives in my shell history until the laptop gets reinstalled.

If you have a directory of notes somewhere — and you do, everybody does — put it on a web page. It does not have to be good. It has to be findable.

Have fun.

1. Which is not a separate directory at all: it is the same content/ as everything else, with Status: draft in the header. The site generator renders them for me locally and leaves them out of what gets published. ↩︎