Surgut

So let's encrypt thing started. And it can do challenges over http (serving text files) and over dns (serving .txt records). My "infrastructure" is fairly modest. I've seen too many of my email accounts getting swamped with spam, and or companies going bust. So I got my own domain name surgut.co.uk . However, I don't have money or time to run my own services. So I've signed up for the Google Apps account for my domain to do email, blogging, etc. Then later i got the libnih.la domain to host API docs for the mentioned library. In the world of .io startups, I thought it's an incredibly funny domain name. But I also have a VPS to host static files on ad-hoc basis, run VPN, and an irc bouncer. My irc bouncer is ZNC and I used a self-signed certificate there, thus i had "ignore" ssl errors in all of my irc clients... which kind of defeats the purposes somewhat. I run my VPS on i386 (to save on memory usage) and on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS managed w...

There are four gunmen outside of my hotel. They are armed with automatic rifles and pistols. I am scared for my life having sneaked past them inside. Everyone else is acting as if everything is normal. Nobody is scared or running for cover. Nobody called the police. I've asked the reception to talk to the gunmen and ask them to leave. They looked at me as if I am mad. Maybe I am. Is this what shizophrenia feels like?! Can you see them on the picture?! Please help. There are four gunmen outside of my hotel. I am not in central Beirut, I am in central Brussels.

One of the WSGI servers that is commonly using with nginx is uwsgi . One way to configure and deploy simple and complex WSGI middlewares and apps is by using Paste deploy tooling. However, until now uwsgi was only able to load a default app under the suffix "main". There is no such limitation in the Paste deploy code itself, as functions there accept a name argument. What was missing is an option in uwsgi to pass, optionally, alternative non-default name of the app to load. A patch adding this option has now been merged upstream and should be available in the next uwsgi release. What I was hoping that one will be able to do something like this: $ uwsgi --ini-paste /etc/nova/api-paste.ini --paste-name osapi_compute But alas that didn't work. I wish all OpenStack Software service were deployable as normal wsgi stand-alone apps without any addition glue code. Keystone is kind of like this with /usr/share/httpd/cgi-bin/keystone/main entry point for deploying keys...

Today at work, I announced something James Hunt, Ikey Doherty and myself have been working on. We integrated Clear Containers  technology with Docker* Engine  to create Clear Containers for Docker* Engine . After following installation instructions , one can pull and run existing Docker* containers in the secure Clear Containers environment. This means that instead of namespaces, a fast virtual machine is started using the kvmtool hypervisor. This VM is running an optimised minimal Linux* kernel and the optimised Clear Linux* for Intel ®  Architecture Project user-space, with the only goal to execute the Docker* workload and then shut down. The net effect is almost indistinguishable from typical Docker* container usage: $ docker run -ti ubuntu:vivid root@d88a60502ed7:/# systemd-detect-virt kvm Apart from, as you see, it's running inside a kvm VM, and thus protected by  Intel® Virtualization Technology. This is available on Clear Linux* as well as multiple o...

Given a string, get a truncated string of length up to 12. The task is ambiguous, as it doesn't say anything about whether or not 12 should include terminating null character or not. None the less, let's see how one would achieve this in various languages. Let's start with python3 import sys print(sys.argv[1][:12]) Simple enough, in essence given first argument, print it up to length 12. As an added this also deals with unicode correctly that is if passed arg is 車賈滑豈更串句龜龜契金喇車賈滑豈更串句龜龜契金喇, it will correctly print 車賈滑豈更串句龜龜契金喇. (note these are just random Unicode strings to me, no idea what they stand for). In C things are slightly more verbose, but in essence, I am going to use strncpy function: #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> void main(int argc, char *argv[]) { char res[12]; strncpy(res,argv[1],12); printf("%s\n",res); } This treats things as byte-array instead of unicode, thus for unicode test it will end up printing just 車賈滑...

$ sudo find /etc -type f | wc -l 2794 Stateless When was the last time you looked at /etc and thought - "I honestly know what every single file in here is". Or for example had a thought "Each file in here is configuration changes that I made". Or for example do you have confidence that your system will continue to function correctly if any of those files and directories are removed? Traditionally most *NIX utilities are simple enough utilities, that do not require any configuration files what's so ever. However most have command line arguments, and environment variables to manipulate their behavior. Some of the more complex utilities have configuration files under /etc, sometimes with "layer" configuration from user's home directory (~/). Most of them are generally widely accepted. However, these do not segregate upstream / distribution / site administrator / local administrator / user configuration changes. Most update mechanisms cre...

Current Setup I am a Linux Distribution Engineer and work on arbitrary open source projects. Mostly I'm patching/packaging existing things, and sometimes start fresh projects. My "IDE", or rather I shall say "toolbox" is rather sparse: GNOME Terminal Google Chrome GNU Emacs GCC toolcahin with GDB Python3 - iPython, iPdb, pyflakes git, GNU bazaar There are a few things that annoy me, and should be done better these days. Documentation I lookup documentation mostly with Google Chrome. This includes the texinfo renderings of the docs. There are a few reasons for that. First of all my developer machine is not polluted with all the dev packages under the sun, instead I compile practically everything in a chroot. And most of the time chroots have much newer versions of everything (from gcc & automake, to boost and whatever other dependencies are in use). However I would like to have easy generic lookup builtin for common things that I lookup in...