I migrated this blog to Hugo in 2013. At the time, I wrote features for Hugo to support the migration. For a while, I knew every feature of the software. Those days are long past. Much of what I knew, I have forgotten. I almost entirely just have post content, setup in a pattern which predates the themes and so forth. I have some static files, of course. But when it came to setting up a plain-text…
I’m going to pick holes in an approach which I think is actively harmful to our industry and the maintainability of the systems we write and manage. The problem is one of approach, and nothing is unfixable. The way is which YAML is used and abused is symptomatic of flaws in how we approach systems design and configuration. This is not the fault of YAML, as whichever language we use would…
I recently wanted a way for my team to run throw-away containers on a remote box, for development and testing. I did not want Kubernetes or a lot of overhead, I just wanted the ability for people to throw containers on the box and run them. The only access control needed was “is in the list of people allowed to talk to the container-runner service”: if you can talk to it, you can run…
(This post was originally written as a reply on the mailop mailing-list, but a friend asked me to turn it into a blog post. I’ve edited it, mostly adding more links to elsewhere, but there are some additions here.) Context: someone with a mail-server hosted in a German facility with a poor reputation for handling abuse reports was asking for help on sending email to their Gmail-using…
When a shell function declares a variable to be local and then unsets it, does the name return to being global in scope or is it still “known” to be local, even though unset (via some kind of tombstone mechanism, perhaps)? Let’s test it. Spoiler: the results vary. Note that POSIX does not provide local , this is a shell extension. The Test Here is our test as a pasteable…
Chambers of commerce should be urgently talking with the FTC to try to stave off an imminent forced tax on their members, by Slack. NB: I have no vested interest in any company mentioned here, unless my retirement index-tracker fund has done so, in which case I’m probably hurting myself by writing this. Slack as a company makes Slack, the product. It’s for team communications and basic use…
Today I took a look at one particular git repository’s configuration and saw something slightly off in the configuration for a credential helper, dating from an old experiment with AWS CodeCommit. I decided to dig deeper to figure out what the actual rules are for shell commands inside git configuration files. This side-diversion took a bit longer than expected. It’s a Sunday. Ah well.…
My home router is a Turris Omnia, which provides the option for running LXC containers; I use this for SSH jumphosts and other such things as belong “on the router itself”. Last night I decided that it was time to install an Alpine Linux container, to complement the Debian container which has been predominantly used to date. This presented a few issues, but all was done. In this post:…
Using macOS with Docker can be “interesting”. When I got started, I followed the useful advice at https://pilsniak.com/how-to-install-docker-on-mac-os-using-brew/ . This approach appealed to me, especially the use of xhyve. Because sometimes I just make life difficult for myself. Thus my initial setup was: brew install docker docker-machine xhyve docker-machine-driver-xhyve…
I’d like to set a couple of things straight, for the record. I’ll cover the post/blog, and then I’d like to counter some misconceptions. While part of me thinks “I must’ve been very unclear to have so many people misunderstand”, I also saw how many people commented without bothering to read, so really there’s a limit to how much self-flagellation will…