Daenney's blog

Over the past few months I’ve started to reassemble a home server. I managed to get a great server board with 2 Xeon E5’s and 128GB of ECC RAM (b/c why not?) and spent Saturday breaking in the hard drives, setting everything up to be nice and encrypted and so on. One of the things I like to have at home is a decent monitoring system. I’ve toyed with Prometheus before but never really used it.

This has been a hard blog post to write, but to me it feels like it’s been a long time coming. For the better part of the past 5 years my job and open source contributions have revolved a lot around Puppet. I’ve been a member of the community for a long time, contributing to a range of different projects and giving a variety of talks at associated events like Puppet Camps, Configuration Management Camp and PuppetConf.

Every now and then I find myself in discussions with people around which tools we should use for what job. This comes up especially often in the context of FOSS with regards to communication platforms. Do we use IRC, Slack, Gitter? Also, are mailing lists still a thing? Should we have a Discourse instead? Fairly often the reaction of people will be “no you can’t use Slack, use FOSS tools for FOSS projects”.

One of the things I find myself doing from time to time it to execute the whois command. This allows me to figure out to whom an IP(range) or domain belongs. However, when doing this on OS X, especially with IPv6 addresses I’m greeted with: $ whois 2a00:1450:400f:805::200e No match for "2a00:1450:400f:805::200e". >>> Last update of whois database: Tue, 07 Jun 2016 12:55:53 GMT <<< I figured I should explicitly ask it to treat this as IPv6 and found this in the man page:

I recently moved to a new place (because the rental market is cray cray here). Despite how annoying it is to move around a benefit of the new place is that it has fiber so I wasted no time and got a connection from Telia. I plugged in the ISP shipped router and while browsing through the admin interface I noticed an IPv6 address showed up. All excited I checked my devices but no one was getting v6 addresses assigned.

FOSDEM is a wonderful event. But as with any event with geeks people will try to sniff your traffic, mess with GSM, grab your credentials and what not. The best way to stay safe? Don’t bring electronics with you or have them in flight mode (laptop included). No Bluetooth, no WiFi, no GSM/3G/tethering, nothing. If that doesn’t sound all that practical there’s a few things you can do. Spin up a Streisand server so you can VPN all the things.

Update: I’ve long since given up on PGP. It’s just not worth it. Ignore this post. Over the years I’ve tried to use PGP multiple times. However, I’ve always failed miserably at managing keys and understanding the lifecycle involved. This is evident by searching the keyservers for my name, it’ll turn up a few rather idiotic and dubiously keys. None of them should be used except for one, 0x18D40820FA0EE03C. These failures with PGP are in part my fault for not correctly understanding what I was doing and part because of the horrendous UX of the gpg tools and the documentation that comes with it.

update: We’ve settled on the name Vox Pupuli. It’s a play on the Latin “vox populi”, voice of the people, but in our case ends up meaning “voice of the puppets”. As quite a few of you know at PuppetConf 2014 we started a community collaboration effort on the maintenance of modules and tooling in the Puppet ecosystem. In our enthusiasm we baptised it Puppet Community. 20/20 hindsight The term Puppet Community (puppet-community) clashes in all kinds of ways with just the community around Puppet, the Puppet community.

Part of the fun of Puppetconf is getting to talk to so many people and learning clever new tricks from each other. I knew IntelliJ had some support for writing Puppet code but as Travis showed me it’s been greatly improved. If you’re running IntelliJ you’ll need to install both the Ruby and the Puppet plugins. If you’re on RubyMine only the latter is needed. By default the Puppet plugin handles single modules really well and gives you things like code completion and refactoring support for your classes and (defined) types.

Based on a remark of a friend about preconceptions we have with regard to gender I started looking more carefully at how I use gender pronouns. Though I’m usually fairly diligent in writing I noticed I failed entirely in speech. This usually happens to me when I meet a new person because at that point I have no context to go on. My autopilot takes over and based on their physique, dress style and preconceptions around gender that have been drilled into me for over 20 years, I end up selecting a pronoun like “he” or “she”.