Systemd

What’s the best way to get a job? Show someone with a job to do that you can do the job within their iron triangle. What’s the best way you can show someone you can handle a complicated k8s deployment, with 7 different CNCF-approved add-ons, zero-downtime rollouts and a whole bunch of YAML files? Probably by competently and publicly running your own complicated k8s infrastructure. Self-hosters remind me a lot of the sysadmins of yore, who mostly ended up in the profession because they just couldn’t help but mess around with their underlying computing machine until they knew all kinds of weird nooks and crannies within it....

I’ve discovered one big downside of [putting systemd times into ~/.config/systemd/user/][1]: They stop running when you log out. Two ways around this problem: Bite the bullet, and install the timers into /etc/systemd/. This means giving up chezmoi version control, making the overall system more snowflake-y. I’m not crazy about it. Remote in with tmux, instead of ever logging out, just use C-b d to detach from the session. I’m going with #2....

TL;DR systemd timers are a serious upgrade from cron. Accept no substitutes. ~/.config/systemd/user lets you run user-scoped timers and services, in a place where you can version control them with Git easily, and even keep a handy backup with chezmoi! Story We had the great honor of having our friend Tri Phung (LinkedIn, GitHub) over for dinner yesterday. As is often the case the conversation turned to work. I’ve been on a kick of using Github Actions remotely and shell scripts + systemd services/timers locally to sketch out some ideas for new websites in Hugo....