Antranig Vartanian

March 29, 2023

After weeks of thinking, I decided that I need to fork Jailer. Yes, I want to fork my own code. There are two reasons to do this.

Keep the promise of Jailer being “very compatible with FreeBSD”
Have a new version that pushes these limits of compatibility.

The fork is going to be named bant, which is Armenian for jail. I think we’re all tired of Greek names at this point 🙂

I’ll share the details of bant as soon as I have a prototype, which means at least couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, Jailer will be the very-compatible-with-FreeBSD version, that doesn’t brake things and allows new users to use Jails with ease.

Fingers crossed…

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Antranig Vartanian

March 29, 2023

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.

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Antranig Vartanian

March 28, 2023

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!

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Antranig Vartanian

March 26, 2023

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!

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Antranig Vartanian

March 14, 2023

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.

When you start your work, make sure you’re dressed.
Get a static working desk.

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 🙂

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Antranig Vartanian

March 7, 2023

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.

Screenshot 2023 03 07 at 2 50 52 PM

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.

Screenshot 2023 03 07 at 2 50 12 PM

Someone PLEASE add this simple and powerful feature.

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Antranig Vartanian

March 3, 2023

I just learned that MarsEdit supports Markdown!

And I’ve been using the WYSIWYG editor all this time 🙂

Markdown FTW!

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Antranig Vartanian

March 3, 2023

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.

Screenshot 2023 03 02 at 8 48 08 PM

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!

Screenshot 2023 03 03 at 3 27 35 PM

I think I will be making an official Jailer v0.1.0 release in the coming days!

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Antranig Vartanian

February 8, 2023

Turns out when you start MariaDB for the first time it prints technical messages and theeen it says:

Please report any problems at https://mariadb.org/jira

The latest information about MariaDB is available at https://mariadb.org/.

Consider joining MariaDB's strong and vibrant community:
⠀https://mariadb.org/get-involved/

Starting mysql.

I love this!

I think we should add something similar to FreeBSD, where after the installation is done it says something like:

Please report any problems at https://bugs.freebsd.org/
The latest Handbook is available at https://freebsd.org/handbook/

Consider joining FreeBSD’s worldwide community:
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/

Thank you for choosing FreeBSD!

Wait, maybe we have such a message? I have to check and then patch if we don’t 🙂

That’s all folks…

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