I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts on vibecoding and agents and LLMs - some sad about the future, some even keeled and measured, some breathlessly optimistic, some trying to rage bait you into engaging so they’re in your head longer (and then think of them when you want to buy something). I also keep thinking what dumb thing I might read next or might hear about from the world of LLMs/agents/vibecoding. Read more ...

So we’re trying to support Podman on the HPC systems and one of the things it needs is entries for each user in /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid. Filling those files out is not exactly easy when you thousands of nodes and you need to update those files on each node every time a new user joins. An idea one of the folks here had was to instead put those files in the shared NFS that is mounted on all the nodes, and then simply create a symlink to those files. Read more ...

Greetings from the HPC Support trenches! Here’s your standard issue ssh credentials to various clusters, your How To Interact With Users Without Strangling Them Handbook, and your radio should you need to call for backup from the admin mages. Don’t worry, they’ll answer you. Sometimes. Till then, buck up, and start debugging! So we had an old cluster that underwent some major upgrades. It was major enough that it warranted a full rebuild and update of all the modules we had installed. Read more ...