Kevin's musings

I hope everyone is having a lovely holiday season and doing the things they find fun or recharging.

I’ve finally gotten to a few hacking projects that I thought might be interesting to share with others:

• I finally cleaned up my local ansible repo some and set it up as a pagure project: ( https://pagure.io/scrye-ansible/ ). It still needs a bunch more cleanup (these playbooks were some of the first I ever wrote, so many years ago), but they should help anyone who wants to setup test machines like I have here or provide some more ansible examples.
• For 4+ years I have had a CentOS6 digitial ocean droplet I have been using as a secondary nameserver for my domains. It actually predates IPV6 support at digitial ocean and had a manually setup he.net ipv6 tunnel on it. I finally looked at the ansible digitial_ocean module and setup a new shiny Fedora 25 droplet, created entirely via ansible as well as putting my secondary nsd configuration in it. This is all now in the above scrye-ansible repo. I may well be using more digital ocean droplets now that I see how easy it is via ansible.
• I looked around for a new rom for my phone (nexus 6) and didn’t find much that filled me with joy. So, for now I just moved to the latest nightly CM version and will see if this new fork ( http://lineageos.org/ ) pans out. The other roms out there are really unprofessional looking: (homepage is a xda forum post, binaries have no checksums and download from bigfiles.com or the like, last commits to source repos was years ago, etc).
• One big issue I had had with my phone of late is it quitting when it has 30-40% battery left and suddenly saying it has 0%. I found that you can reset the battery calibration (boot with power, down volume, select ‘bootloader logs’, press power for 10+ seconds until the phone reboots). That seems to have gotten things a good deal happier now, but time will tell. Unfortunately, the battery on the nexus 6 is not very easily replaceable.
• I got all my home machines rebooted into the latest update kernel. I sometimes delay on my firewall/gateway machine because it means a short outage, but everything is updated now.
• Pulled all the old backups off my phone and freed up a fair pile of space. There’s no reason to store them there, I can copy them back if I need to restore something from them (which I never really do after the initial restores).
• Setup usbguard on my home machines. The chances of someone plugging in a evil usb device to them is small, but no harm in setting it up and denying all the non known to me devices. I’ve been using it on my laptop for a long while now.
• Updated my drop-keys (gnome) and xscreensaver-keys (Xfce) scripts and pushed them to the pagure repo: https://pagure.io/scrye-ansible/c/37610c85918125d92bedff6673b58310605e90dd?branch=master basically these scripts can watch for the screen to lock and drop all your unlocked ssh keys. For gnome there’s an upstream bug that might make this land in upstream gnome-keyring: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735149

In the next few days I hope to catch up on some packaging backlog and perhaps get some armv7 installs done.

I hope everyone is having an enjoyable, relaxing holiday!