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vetrom

480 karma · joined February 15, 2013

I do stuff with Linux and distributed systems. Embedded hardware too, nowadays.
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vetrom··on Show HN: We built a ClickHouse-based logging service
JVM runtimes have a relatively high startup cost, are not often good 'citizens' in an instance running multiple types of software, and the build processes for a lot of JVM deliverables is an ungodly mess.

Many of those bells and whistles are near-necessary in the enterprise world, but you have the accumulated mass of 'red zones' and developmental landmines in that ecosystem that can quickly turn you off it as a whole if you want to understand the whole system.

vetrom··on Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know
`rm -r` is a great starter. Real conniseurs go for `wipe -fcrsQ1 /dev`.
vetrom··on Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original
Any (quite relevant actually) discussion of SCM policy and management aside, you've got to remember: There is no 'cloud', it's just somebody else's computer.
vetrom··on System76 AMD-Only Laptop Returns
Are new S76 laptops still Clevo or some other ODM?
vetrom··on “This removes a.out support globally”
I got hit by the glibc breaking make (not a joke) bug once upon a time. To fix it you had to go download make sources and build them from a shell script. Almost as much fun as dpkg breaking in Debian once or twice upon a time.
vetrom··on Sshfs Is Orphaned
oof, the situation can be even rougher than that. At 9000 MTU on IPv4, you have a 'safe' NFS-over-UDP data rate of roughly 18 megabytes/second. Plenty of room at 1GbE, but not enough for 10GbE or greater. I suppose using krb5i/p mounts or some other integrity-providing GSSAPI/crypto implementation could help with this, but thats a different pile of worms. You would also get issues with not-strictly-necessary retransmits impacting your effective bandwidth.

Thankfully, IPV6 can help mitigate this problem by extending the fragment id length from 16 to 32 bits. This gets you up to roughly 1.18 trillion bytes of 'safe' NFS traffic/second. There's plenty of reasons why IPv6 adoption is still fragmentary, but if you're running a high throughput network, this is certainly a motivator to move at least part of it to IPv6.

vetrom··on Sshfs Is Orphaned
You still get stuck processes on D state which can be locking other resources. Maybe the kernel could use an alternate kill api for this, as being able to kill a D state process normally is problematic in many apps and should never be possible 'accidentally'.
vetrom··on Web3.0 Must Be Destroyed
Well, to me it sounds like it was 'merely' a reference to `Carthago Delenda Est`. Given the polarized view on the subject matter, I suppose it fits.
vetrom··on Google Drive could soon start locking your files
Now imagine having to deal with disposition of the data and the ownership of the NAS throughout a bankruptcy.
vetrom··on Git password authentication is shutting down
Invest in (or build?) an enterprise content management system for people that don't, for whatever reason, think of SCM in terms of commits, branches, and graphs.

If you can make one that thinks in terms of git on the backend, great.

If you want to go a bit further, you could expose the underlying operations to the user. You will need to get them to reason around and interact with the minimal requirements inherent to a versioning system, namely explicit versioning and an explicit commit process, along with explicit merging and conflict resolution.

There are GUI clients that help with some of this, but you're not going to get away from some concept of dealing with branches and merges in any SCM. You hear about it less often, but you'd have the same troubles dealing with a chewed up repository in Perforce, ClearCase, or the like.

(edit: even Subversion!)

vetrom··on Portable GELI: A portable version of GELI on GNU/Linux
don't forget ecryptfs, which is what drives android storage encryption most of the time.
vetrom··on Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat
Native vs yet another Electron app, customizable in pretty much every fashion, and it has inbuilt support for positional audio chat (so you can manually move entities in relation to each other, or use one of many available plugins to feed positional data from something else!)

see: https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Games

vetrom··on Assange Is Still in Jail
How is right to trial in the UK codified in terms of their legal tradition? Is that covered in the (implicit) English Constitution, or their case law somewhere?
vetrom··on TC Energy scraps Keystone XL pipeline project after Biden revokes key permit
You could also stretch and call it an indictment of externalizing oil production costs. I'm aware that building and running a refinery is an extremely expensive operation, to the point where it isn't economical to either mobilize a refinery, or base them at the site of extraction.

That said, running a refinery also has local costs that are usually externalized, in terms of local pollution and populace movement. Canada itself though has a fairly large amount of space, but perhaps a surfeit of people. Why doesn't TC energy (or other Canada producers) build a refinery somewhere in Canada and transport to there?

vetrom··on Ubiquiti Networks Breach
RouterOS is not, but Mikrotik added wireguard support to their firmware sometime in mid-late 2020. IDK if its out of beta yet.
vetrom··on Piipcam – 1080P IP Camera on a Raspberry Pi Zero W
There's a significant amount of parts to put together, software wise, but you can build a strong streaming solution with gstreamer or ffmpeg. I've done so and shipped hundreds of devices. It was not a trivial amount of work. We eventually transitioned to a purpose built dedicated camera solution however. If you're capturing sound, you will also have challenges as the BCM2xxx family has..... interesting audio hardware, especially if you want to reduce your BOM and integrate PDM microphones.
vetrom··on Feds may target Google's Chrome browser for breakup
Many devices already do this. Most modern IPv6 stacks create temporary 'privacy' addresses regularly.
vetrom··on Xen on Raspberry Pi 4
Microsoft Surface units in non-US markets have been available in ARM variants for some time now. There was some different market name for the unit but I can't recall what they're called just now.
vetrom··on A grim outlook on the future of browser add-ons
Have you tried uzbl? (see uzbl.org)
vetrom··on Amazon's Surveillance Infrastructure and Revitalizing Worker Power
While not identical, the warehouse store model is essentially this, with different examples of execution more or less close to the exactly this.
vetrom··on I want to have an AWS region where everything breaks with high frequency
Not exactly. "halt -f" depends on some variant of power management working. For extra fun, you could also have partial power-offs, like say a power cut to the motherboard, or any combination of other devices with their own power lines from a power supply. (in a current PC these would typically be PCI supplementary power, motherboard, SATA power, 4-pin 12v molex power, supplemental CPU power.)

Granted, most of those are out of scope for cloud development, but the concept of externally cutting off a VM is different than even calling whatever power service you have to cut power. In the 'real' world, enough of those failure triggers above would probably also trigger an automated power cycle if you're in a managed environment.

vetrom··on EFF Database of Police Agencies and Tech Tools They Use to Spy on Communities
Police spying is discoverable, to a point, in the U.S. by following the money disclosed in public records and targeted employment of FOIA requests.

You might be able to glean sources like court records for evidence of things like corporate data sources used at trial, or perhaps other secondary sources. Finding and compiling that data is much less straightforward than that which is manadated, at least in theory, to be in the public record.

The EFF has always been aimed at the government anyway, and its taken decades of pressure to reveal what it does. A different organisation is probably necessary to dedicate itself to corporate overreach.

vetrom··on eBay is port scanning visitors to their website
Sometimes that isn't even enough. Windows for example ships with a feature called the "Windows Platform Binary Table" that will load and run DLLs embedded in a machine's ACPI tables.
vetrom··on Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More
I've seen live Alpha installations of windows NT driving RIPs at large format printing shops in the 90s. It was also not unheard of at VMS shops.
vetrom··on Joplin – an open source note taking and to-do application with sync
It's a bit to setup, but theres always TWiki with the git plugin.
vetrom··on Running servers and services well is not trivial (2018)
Chef at least provides a partial approach here, where components essentially define an api that you can define mock and/or integration tests for.

Ansible is not as 'data-structure' oriented, so testing that is more difficult, but each element (modules, libraries, roles, playbooks) can be written to be fairly environment-neutral, which you could then use a test a fixture like BATS to easily check for regressions.

To answer your 'type-checking' expectation, its generally on the developer to implement those tests. In my experience, its rare that those are implemented in publicly available devops libraries, even though we have most of the tools to do so. It's definitely an area where the practice can improve.

vetrom··on What's SAP?
Even in the dotnet era, you have WinSxS and exe/dll specific manifests pinning specific library artifacts with apps and a loader that keeps a repository of every version referred to on the system. The linux/ELF ecosystem on the otherhand decided to try to implement various degrees of semantic library versioning, with differing (often poor) degrees of success.

When your target is a system image thats rebuilt entirely from source you can get away with the latter somewhat more easily, but its definitely no panacea. Just look at OpenSSL. (libmemcache is another personal 'favorite' of mine.)

vetrom··on OpenSK: a fully open-source security key implementation
When last I checked, at least on linux/ubuntu the blocking issue was in opensc-pkcs11, not ssh.
vetrom··on Elixir v1.10
Speaking as a sometimes Erlang developer: the ecosystem certainly isn't as universal as language $FOTM. That said, Erlang's concurrency primitives and runtime are second to none, and there is little that is more battle-tested in the industry.

Individually developers will be more expensive, but if you have a product that demands maximum leverage of concurrency (i.e. data-heavy api, whatever-in-the-middle services, multiparty real-time data), you will more than makeup the developer premium when you get to that point.

I havent hit Elixir yet, but it seems to make access to the Erlang runtime much easier. As far as SDKs/api, Erlang itself has primitives and libraries to build useful access to most APIs you can find. If you're worrying about what services you can access though, you probably don't need Erlang's features, at least not yet.

vetrom··on Cartridge cannot be used until printer is enrolled in HP Instant Ink
Quality printmaking on heavyweight papers.
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