I learned something new today—you can use an app called qrencode to create plain-ASCII QR codes on Ubuntu. This comes in super handy if you need to set up WireGuard tunnels on an Android phone or tablet, which otherwise tends to be a giant pain in the ass.
If you haven’t already, you’ll need to install qrencode itself; on Ubuntu that’s simply apt install qrencode and you’re ready. After that, just feed a tunnel config into the app, and it’ll display the QR code in the terminal. Your WireGuard mobile app has “from QR code” as an option in the tunnel import section; pick that, allow it to use the camera, and you’re off to the races!
Just like that, your WireGuard tunnel is ready to import into your phone or tablet.
While benchmarking the Ars Technica Hot Rod server build tonight, I decided to empirically demonstrate the effects of zfs set sync=disabled on a dataset.
In technical terms, sync=disabled tells ZFS “when an application requests that you sync() before returning, lie to it.” If you don’t have applications explicitly calling sync(), this doesn’t result in any difference at all. If you do, it tremendously increases write performance… but, remember, it does so by lying to applications that specifically request that a set of data be safely committed to disk before they do anything else. TL;DR: don’t do this unless you’re absolutely sure you don’t give a crap about your applications’ data consistency safeguards!
In the below screenshot, we see ATTO Disk Benchmark run across a gigabit LAN to a Samba share on a RAIDz2 pool of eight Seagate Ironwolf 12TB disks. On the left: write cache is enabled (meaning, no sync() calls). In the center: write cache is disabled (meaning, a sync() call after each block written). On the right: write cache is disabled, but zfs set sync=disabled has been set on the underlying dataset.
L-R: no sync(), sync(), lying in response to sync().
The effect is clear and obvious: zfs set sync=disabled lies to applications that request sync() calls, resulting in the exact same performance as if they’d never called sync() at all.
