A short note about posting links to facebook

by on 2018/09/28 at 5:57 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

Just a short note to everyone out there that posts links to facebook pages or posts: Something you may not realize is that for those of us that do not have or want to use a facebook account the experience is pretty subpar.

You go to the page (without being logged in to facebook) and the page or post loads, you start to read it and then… BAM a gigantic popup appears, blocking all the page contents. It’s a dialog asking you to login to facebook or create a new account or (in small print on the bottom: “Not now”). So, not wanting to login (for whatever reasons), you click on ‘Not Now’. The dialog disappears… but is replaced by a wide bar on the bottom of the page asking you to login or create a new account. Thee is no close button on this bar, and it blocks about the bottom 25% of the content, so you get to page up and down and try and read around it.

I know all the reasons facebook is doing things this way, but I just wanted to mention it to those of you who do login to facebook and perhaps didn’t even know about this.

So, do think, next time you share a link, is there some more free place to share it?

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backups⁉️

by on 2018/09/03 at 4:27 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

A nice long weekend (in the US at least) is a great time to deal with your Backups. You do have backups right? They work right?

For a number of years now I have been using rdiff-backup for my backups. Unfortunately, a week or so before flock my backups started erroring out and I put off looking into it for various reasons until now. rdiff-backup has a lot going for it, but these days it also has a lot against it:

  • It’s in python2 with no python3 support, and as we all know, python2 is going away before too long.
  • There’s not really any upstream development. A few years ago development was handed off to new team, but they haven’t really been very active either.
  • No encryption/compression support
  • slow, especially when you have a lot of snapshots.

So, I decided it was time to look over the current crop of backup programs and see what was available. My critera, which may be very different from yours:

  • Packaged in Fedora (bonus points for epel also. I don’t have any RHEL/CentOS boxes at home, but I’d like to be able to use whatever I find in Fedora Infrastructure too, where we are also using rdiff-backup).
  • Encryption/Compression support.
  • Active and responsive upstream

I went and looked at: BackupPC, zbackup, borgbackup, burp, bacula, obnam, amanda, restic, duplicy, and bup. (and possibly others I didn’t remember). From those I narrowed things down to restic and borgbackup. Both have very active upstreams are packaged in Fedora, but retic doesn’t have compression support yet (its written in go and they are waiting for a native implementation). Also restic isn’t (yet) packaged in EPEL.

So, with that I took a closer look at borgbackup. Upstream is quite active, there’s various encryption and compression support. You can store an encryption key in the repository or outside and use zlib, lz4, or lzma compression. There is a interesting ‘append-only mode’, so you can set that in the ssh key a particular client uses to conact your backup server and then that client can only append, not delete any backup data, which might be nice if you are backing up a bunch of clients to the same repository (and thus getting the deduplication savings), of course you can only run one backup at a time on the same repository, so you would need to spread them out or keep them retrying or something.Likely not a big deal for my home network as I only have the laptop, and a main server to backup here, but in larger setups could be a problem.

So, after a bit of cleanup on my laptop (I had some old copies of emails in several places, photos in a few places, junk I no longer needed/wanted, etc), I fired off a initial borg backup to my storage server. It’s still running now, but it seems to be going along pretty nicely. As soon as I have a full backup, I’ll try a restore of a few random files to make sure all is well.The final part of my backups is moving the backups from my storage server ‘off site’. In past years I copied my backups to an encrypted external drive and gave it to a friend to store, but I don’t have such a local person here, so I will need to investigate amazon glacier or other options, look for another post on that soon!

If you are reading this, perhaps you could take a minute to think about your backups, make sure they exist, are running ok and work.

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Flock 2018: The journey home

by on 2018/08/14 at 12:46 pm
Posted In: fedora, flock, linux

I decided to take a slightly different way home. In part because I couldn’t find a flight from DRS -> AMS that would get me there in time for the AMS->PDX leg and partly just because it would be fun:

I took the train from dresden to frankfort and then on to Utrecht. It was about a 10 hour journey, but it was nice. I went with Patrick and Randy and we had a bunch of discussions and watched the landscape go by. In Utrecht I got a hotel for overnight and we went to a great little resturant along the canal. Great place. My only regret it that it got too late for me to see Patrick’s place, so I just went to bed and got up the next morning for my flight.

On checking in I saw that I had a lovely SSSS on my pass, so I got to get extra searched at the gate, but it wasn’t too bad, and it let me board before I would have normally been able to. Then the flight back and the drive home were mostly uneventfull and I managed to get in around 2pm.

Overall this was a great flock, I had a lovely time and all the organizers did a awesome job!

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Flock 2018: Day 4

by on 2018/08/14 at 12:40 pm
Posted In: fedora, flock, linux

The last day came nice and early right into sessions. However, I instead gathered with a few folks to distribute some keys for various things so we were sure that if someone won the lottery and left we would be able to have access.

The next session I went to was Randy Barlow and Patrick Uiterwijk’s Openshift session. Not much I didn’t already know, but some good discussion and questions from the audience.

After that was group photo (many people already suggested we do this on the first or second day so some people haven’t left yet), then council wrap up.

After things wrapped up, some of us stayed at the hotel visiting and hanging out and saying goodbye. Until next year flock!

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Flock 2018: Day 3

by on 2018/08/14 at 12:33 pm
Posted In: fedora, flock, linux

Day 4 jumped right into sessions:

Protecting the batcave against the Joker: Fedora infra hardening workshop Michael Scherer. Some interesting vulnerabilities that misc found (but did tell us about in advance), and how they were found and some ideas to help mitigate such things moving forward. The big one was a predictable git checkout in tmp, so we could add noexec to tmp and/or do seperate tmp for all users. Running ansible-lint also is something we should really look at doing.

After that I again jumped to hallway track, and then a team lunch, which I was late getting back from.

After running back late from lunch I got to the Fedora Infrastructure hacking and planning and hacking workshop session. I wrote up a bunch of areas we wanted to talk about or work on in the coming year. There really wasn’t too much discussion on most of them, they were all things we knew we wanted to do it’s just a matter of doing them. Neal Gompa did a live demo of the current pagure 5.0 themes and appearence. It looks nice!

The list was:

  • new cloud – this is just very very close, so we decided to finish it asap.
  • project tracking – I will setup a test for this once pagure 5.0 is out.
  • replace nagios – many people suggested we look at zabbix again.
  • CAIAPI/noggin – asked folks to file requests for features
  • Repospanner – very close to existing, just need to finish it off.
  • fedora messaging – abompard gave us a overview of where we are and we discussed corner cases like FMN and datanommer.
  • sigul 1.0 – pretty much done we just need to have a flag day to update everything in step (since it’s not compatible with 0.9)
  • copr – we discussed plans to move parts of copr into main infra. Possiblly frontend in openshift and dist git and keysign replaced by sigul.

We had a number more we didn’t get to because we ran out of time:

  • python3 all the things
  • more openshift
  • more ci stuff
  • javascript frameworks

Next up was my Infrastructure Fix Fest. I was hoping we would get folks to come to us with all the small bugs they hit that we just haven’t had time to fix up and we could fix them right then in the session. Unfortunately, I think because it was the last session of the day and later in the week, many people went back to their rooms to rest for the evening activity or went to the hallway track to talk to people. We did get a few things fixed… I managed to close about 5 infra tickets, track down and fix a issue with kerneltest application that Justin wanted me to fix and discuss a few others. I think next year if we do this again I would ask people for items before hand and we can use it as a chance to show how to fix things.

The evening entertainment was a ‘roller coaster’ restaurant. You order from a tablet and they send your beer or food down on a set of rails. It was pretty amusing. There was a lot of sci-fi clash (the servers were wearing star trek the next generation outfits, but there were star wars characters all around too). At one point a bottle of beer broke, but no one was hurt and they got it cleaned up pretty fast. Overall a lot of good company and amusement.

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