Blog/June 2026/Jun 5th

Jun 5th

I was quite the busy boy this week. Strap in for a longish technical journey!

As you‘re likely aware by now, I run a few different “servers”; among them, the one which served-up the words you‘re currently reading. Besides being a web-server, it‘s also a mail-server. I‘ve got a couple other servers as well, one of which is dedicated to my “8th” programming language. Mostly, these things “just work”.

But given the way the world is, it seems prudent to have serious disaster planning in place. If a server dies — whether because of ordinary hardware failure, or some catastrophic event — I need to be able to resurrect the services it provides as quickly as possible.

So I asked ChatGPT to recommend a methodology, and it obligingly came up with a pretty good one very quickly. The tool it recommended, “restic” (of which I‘d never heard), is a quite nice backup program which has many useful features and is also fast. So, I put together the scripts ChatGPT had suggested, with tweaks, and set off backing-up to my pCloud “cloud” backup. Since, after all, if my house collapsed (without me in it, of course), it would be necessary to have an external backup.

Of course, a backup is all fine and dandy, but it‘s the restoring that‘s the truly important part. Since I want to back-up from one machine, and restore onto a different one that is most likely not the same exact kind of hardware, some care needs to be taken. So I did a restore onto some spare hardware I have, and soon discovered that while ChatGPT‘s script was mostly OK, it restored things which were very machine-specific and so, the target machine didn‘t work correctly afterwards.

A few iterations of refining the backup and restore scripts, and I now have a plausible disaster recovery for my main server. Next week, B“H, I‘ll take what I‘ve learned to the other servers I want to be able to resurrect

Various:

Thomas “The Masshole” Massie lost, and it wasn‘t Israel‘s fault.
Israel‘s opposition parties face a “math problem”.
Uri: it didn‘t start in 1982. The five worst massacres from S. Lebanon in Israel, before the invasion.
Lisa: Donald Trump and the Middle East.
Kisin on the Great British Delusion.
A Japanese prose-master wields his words to great effect.

Apart from the server nonsense, I did a lot of work implementing an “HTML control” for 8th. That something that lets you display HTML — the stuff your web-browser makes all pretty — so that you can have easily modified, but nicely displayed text and graphics. It‘s still a work in progress, but by next week‘s release of 8th I‘ll have it 90% of where it should ultimately be.

And we did some shopping in preparation for our upcoming trip to visit our South American family. Lots of stuff going on!

The weather for shabbat will be quite warm, AC indicated…

This shabbat we‘re going for:
pita, Aunt Nancy‘s chicken, roasty toasty potatoes, various salatim, and ḥawayij cookies.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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Blog/June 2026/Jun 5th

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