Archives

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!

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In case you didn’t know, OpenSMTPd is so outdated on Ubuntu systems, that you’ll need to install it from sources, otherwise expect some TLS issues πŸ™‚

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.

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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!

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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.

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Antranig Vartanian

June 25, 2023

β€œIf eyes are the window to the soul, then writing is the door to the mind.”

It’s Only Words
Colin Walker

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Antranig Vartanian

May 16, 2023

A customer texted me saying they are having issues running our operating system on QEMU-KVM, so I opened a cloud provider’s portal, clicked on “Deploy a new bare metal”, and tried to SSH.

After waiting for a while, I see that I can ping the machine, but I can’t SSH into it…

I open the console, and this is what I see.

Screenshot 2023 05 16 at 6 37 28 PM

This. This is why I moved to FreeBSD.

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Antranig Vartanian

May 15, 2023

I like Windows because it’s the best for gaming!

Meanwhile on Windows: The simplest game that has been around for 30 years, Solitaire, has ads in it. You have to pay $2/month or $15/year to remove ads.

The design is ugly, it’s so ugly that the Windows XP version easily beats it and it takes at least 10 seconds to load the game, which used to take 1 second on Windows XP.

I’ve stopped using Windows 12 years ago, I’m not sure why everyone else hasn’t.

If I didn’t need to test network protocols every once in a while, I would be happier, because booting Windows feels like a pain already…

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