Code cleanup is hard. I’ve been trying to make Jailer’s code simpler, more modular for hours now, and the more I try to simplify it, the harder it is.
My biggest issue right now is this massive complex code that does image management. The end goal is to make it so simple, that anyone with basic knowledge if shell can understand it.
I’m sure at this point everyone heard that GitHub updated their RSA SSH host key.
This is a common issue, say you re-installed a server at the same IP/hostname. No problem, you remove a line and put in another one.
But honestly, I thought that GitHub had SSHFP records in their DNS.
$ dig SSHFP github.com +short | wc
0 0 0
Not so much… But then again, looks like they DO need to sign their zone first.
$ whois github.com | grep DNSSEC
DNSSEC: unsigned
DNSSEC: unsigned
I have to say, using SSHFP has changed my life. Obviously there are some issues (Windows and macOS, specifically), but if you’re running a normal, modern operating system (hello BSDs, hello Linux) then it’s like magic!
I just setup one for our hackerspace!
$ whois hackerspace.am | grep DS
DNS servers (zone signed, 1 DS record):
$ dig hackerspace.am SSHFP +short | wc -l
6
Anyway, I’m sure many CI/CD pipelines are going crazy because of this… Good luck everyone!
Couple of years ago, I saw an article that said “By the year 20XX 70% of all created content will be video”. Unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark the article, so I can’t link it.
But I did not believe that. More importantly, I did not want to believe that, and for a long time, I thought that it was wrong.
But couple of weeks ago, while sitting next to my girlfriend, I watched her scroll in Instagram, and oh my god, that article was very much accurate. Everything was a video.
This is specifically sad, because Instagram was a photo sharing platform and now most of the content there is indeed video.
After weeks of researching, looks like that most things ARE video these days.
I have mixed feelings about this.
I wonder if there are any non-Instagram, non-TikTok, actually a real world wide web, video blogs. We’ve seen web logs, we’ve seen photo blogs, but video blogs wold be very interesting. Maintaining them too!
One of the design guidelines of Jailer is don’t break FreeBSD. As in if someone installed and used Jailer, and then deleted the Jailer binary and libraries, their Jails would still run without any issues. We do this with minimal intervention, for example, jailer init patches FreeBSD’s /etc/rc.d/jail, but in a way that you wouldn’t feel the difference much. We don’t create new rc.conf variables, we just change couple of loops. In a way, you can keep these changes even if you delete Jailer so your system would be much improved. Obviously, we do sent these patches to FreeBSD src.
But I’m in front of an issue right now. On one side, I want to keep these guidelines, on the other, pushing the limit will allow me to improve Jailer way more than I expected.
These are the things that I think about before sleep, or during the shower. I gave a promise, that I will not break the Jail ecosystem. But what if, just what if, the ecosystem was broken in the first place?
Some of you might know, that we’ve been working on integrating libucl with Jail. The experiments have been going well, in such that I feel I want to integrate these experiments with Jailer already, even before they get into FreeBSD (and they might even not get in at all).
My dream of Jailer and its ecosystem is complex. I feel that these integration would do good on the long-term, but I want to keep the short term alive as well.
One idea is to fork Jailer, keep two versions of it. One version that’s FreeBSD compliant, and another one that is pushing the limits.
This is going to be an interesting week…
That’s all folks…
WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires an ActivityPub plugin so blogs can join the Fediverse
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr and other web publishing tools, is the new owner of the ActivityPub for WordPress plugin and has also recruited its developer to come work for the company, according to Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.
This makes me very happy! I’ve been using that plugin for a while now. As a matter of fact, that plugin was the main reason why I moved to WordPress.
The newly acquired plugin allows WordPress.org and WordPress.com blog owners to reach readers on federated platforms, like the Twitter rival Mastodon and others.
I absolutely hate that people are calling Mastodon a rival of Twitter. Mastodon (and the decentralized web) is not a rival to anything. It’s like saying that Coca-Cola’s rival is… water. Nope, Coca-Cola’s rival is Pepsi, Twitter’s rival is <insert a corporate and centralized social media here>, but not ActivityPub based networks.
The Internet is going back to its roots, and I am loving it!
It took me a while to realize this, but if you’re also working from home, these two tips might help you be more productive.
It seems so simple and rudimentary, right? It took me 6 months to realize this! Working from a desk fully clothed is a lot better than working in underwear in bed.
But I guess everyone is different. For me, this has been a huge productivity change 🙂
You’d think that macOS would have a Mission Control shortcut that does “Switch to last used Desktop”, but no, it does not. And this makes macOS very hard to use for people like me, who have 10 Desktops.
On the other hand, WindowMaker, the window manager that “reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NeXTSTEP user interface”, which macOS also was based on, had that shortcut for almost exactly 10 years.
Someone PLEASE add this simple and powerful feature.
Well, it’s finally here! After a week of sleepless work, I cleaned up the Jailer codebase and added many features (and removed some as well!) that I wanted since last year 🙂
If you are reading this, please consider testing Jailer on FreeBSD. The codebase is at illuria/jailer.
The README.md should have all the info that you need to run Jailer.
If find any issues, please report to illuria/jailer/issues or you can email me personally at antranigv [at] freebsd [dot] am
Here’s the roadmap for what’s coming next
jng.Jailerfile, which will be something similar to Dockerfile, allowing developers to create consistent images.jailerd and jailerctl, for remote jailer automation. This will be an open-source port of what illuria has already developed.jailerctl list will show not just what’s on a remote machine, but on a remote datacenter, inspired by Triton. Again, we have this at illuria, but we need to create an open-source port.This release is dedicated to
Thank you for reading 🙂
That’s all folks…
I just learned that MarsEdit supports Markdown!
And I’ve been using the WYSIWYG editor all this time 🙂
Markdown FTW!
I’ve been working very intensively with Jailer the last couple of days.
The first thing I added, which I personally needed it is a dry run, where Jailer says what it would do. Here’s an example.
by adding -D Jailer would display what it would do, including post the jail.conf file, ZFS commands and any network setup commands.
A while back kfv has made a jailer init
subcommand that initializes the system. Things like rc.conf variables, ZFS datasets and applying our own patches. I just added some coloring and confirmation to that!
I think I will be making an official Jailer v0.1.0 release in the coming days!