A key part of operating any safe and reliable system is ensuring that there is a way to recover deleted or lost data in a prompt and consistent way. One key part of that is to maintain automatic backups that are recoverable and verifiable. This is a quick and easy way to accomplish that goal, by using existing pieces of infrastructure that are common in production networks. There are countless ways to perform a backup, this is simply one of the “easiest” given these ingredients are available.

Like anybody, I’ve made my fair share of spelling mistakes in my life. It was never something I had a particular talent in, having never gotten a spelling bee medal myself. Red underlines have always been a simple fact of life for me. But fortunately, I’ve never made a spelling mistake so consequential that it’s been broadcast at least 200 billion times every day! This is the story of the referer HTTP header, a part of every single web request, and why it’s spelled incorrectly.

In an absolutely perfect world, we’d never have to restart our server software ever, because it would be flawless. There would be no bugs, memory leaks, state locks, and we’d all get along with each other! Unfortunately, we live in a much crappier world where our software is imperfect, and we don’t have enough time or resources to fix it properly. In the olden days, we’d just put a one-liner in root’s crontab, and be done with it:

You’ve got a new idea for a product, or a store, or maybe just a neat pun. So it’s time to buy a domain, isn’t it? That’s the easy part. Put in your credit card info, add a reminder for next year so you remember to renew it, and you’re set. But that’s far from the end! There’s a lot of work to make sure everything is set up correctly, and the best time to do it is right now, before it becomes “scary” to tweak the DNS config.

It was a cold, rainy November night in 2013, and I was hunched up over my desk trying to get my sound card working. In my teenage years, I had taken on a keen interest in “Hackintoshing”, that is, installing Apple’s Mac OS (then OSX) on regular non-Apple PC hardware. While my box was fairly well behaved, it had two quirks that were eluding me. My sound card didn’t work properly, and the graphics driver for my video card didn’t really work correctly until the system got all the way to the login screen.