Archives

Antranig Vartanian

November 8, 2023

If you’re seeing this then the migration is done! The weblog has moved from weblog.antranigv.am to antranigv.am.

I have also spent some time updating my About page, I hope I haven’t missed anything important. I will be adding more pages soon, such as link to friends, blogs that I read, what I use, etc.

I hope ActivityPub is working properly with the new domain.

Long Live The Web!

Reply via email.

Antranig Vartanian

October 31, 2023

Once a month, the WordPress app on my iPhone stops working. Specifically, it stops loading and sending data. It just “hangs” there. I’m honestly considering using the mobile web interface to blog remotely.

I wish there was MarsEdit for mobile…

Any alternatives or suggestions? Maybe I should use the “Post via Email” feature like back in the good old days 🙂

Reply via email.

Antranig Vartanian

October 26, 2023

The following happened in a group chat (technically, XMPP Multi-User Chat)

<inky> @antranigv, looks like the sarian website is broken again

<antranigv> @inky, fixed! It was an SSL/TLS certificate issue

<inky> @antranigv, It seems that now, the bot that cross-posts the submissions from sarian to here is not working

<antranigv> Looks like there’s an issue with Ruby. I have to upgrade it

<tigran> This is how the robot revolution begins!

<inky> If we are going to "do it", it will end just like it starts: one robot will fail because of SSL, the other because of a wrong version of ruby.

I’ve been ROFLing for 3 minutes now… xD

Cheers.

Reply via email.

Antranig Vartanian

September 12, 2023

After 6 weeks of being unproductive, I’m finally able to get things done thanks to a whole day of planning, awesome software and friends pushing me to do better.

See you soon!

Reply via email.

Antranig Vartanian

July 10, 2023

In case you didn’t know, OpenSMTPd is so outdated on Ubuntu systems, that you’ll need to install it from sources, otherwise expect some TLS issues 🙂

You will need to use the following:

./configure \
 --with-user-smtpd=opensmtpd \
 --with-user-queue=opensmtpq \
 --with-group-queue=opensmtpq

mkdir -p /var/empty

ln -s /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt /usr/lib/ssl/cert.pem

Congrats, now you have a proper working SMTP server.

Cheers.

Reply via email.

Antranig Vartanian

July 1, 2023

I just learned that the WordPress mobile app supports non-block classical editor. Wow this is a life saver! Now I can blog on the move without opening my laptop or mobile browser!

Reply via email.

Antranig Vartanian

July 1, 2023

A customer asked me to help them setup a tiny lab with many open-source tools. They are planning to move from corporate services to open-source alternatives such as NextCloud, Gitea, etc.

Unfortunately, they run only Linux, Ubuntu to be more specific, and as a UNIX gentlemen, I didn’t want to put everything into a single host, so I decided to use containers, in this case, LXC, a.k.a Linux Containers.

How hard could it be?

Oh god, layers of abstraction on within the system that have no idea about each other.

Like, who would assume that LXC would automatically download and install dnsmasq and assign IP addresses without my knowledge, or that it would push rules into the firewall?

The more I use Linux Container, the more I understand why FreeBSD Jails / illumos Zones didn’t win.

People don’t want automation or control, they want “please do this for me as I don’t wanna do it myself” tools.

I’d expect at least a message post-installation that says “We have installed and configured dnsmasq, reconfigured some systemd things, modified the following file (which is not mentioned in any man page, so you can use Google instead of man/apropos) and will use IP address ranges that you didn’t approve”

Is this why Docker won? Is it because people DIDN’T want to learn how to do software packaging? I hope not. I wanna believe its because developers wanted to “think operationally”

Oh, and from a FreeBSD perspective, what’s even more weird is that

  1. there are no proper manual pages.
  2. the documentation is weird. It talks about a utility named lxc but I’m using 20 utilities named lxc-*, and I still cannot find the proper documentation for that
  3. it’s very much segmented. For example, on FreeBSD, we talk about which is better, jail.conf, BastilleBSD, pot, AppJail or Jailer. Here the same utility (lxc) that has multiple config files with no proper versioning, pretty complex manual pages and the not even examples or HowTos.

I’m looking at this and thinking ”oh well, if we build a proper tool, I bet we can win some of the market” until you realize, of course, that when people hear FreeBSD, they will be thinking ”it’s not Linux? maybe it’s not worth it, otherwise I would’ve heard about it”

I’m just angry here. Please ignore my rants.

Cheers y’all.

Reply via email.

Antranig Vartanian

June 25, 2023

“If eyes are the window to the soul, then writing is the door to the mind.”

It’s Only Words
Colin Walker

Reply via email.