Rubenerd

I’ve been subscribed to some of the BBC’s RSS feeds for years, but I only just noticed their website doesn’t publish them anywhere obvious anymore. The RSS icon and site headers no longer exist, so people coming to the site wouldn’t realise they publish them. This is sad.

The XSL for the feeds reference this help page which hasn’t been updated for a decade, and the copyright notice is for 2008! I’m putting the links below in case this page disappears:

• Top Stories
• World
• United Kingdom
• Business
• Politics
• Health
• Education
• Science and Environment
• Technology
• Entertainment

I almost don’t want to ask the BBC to link to these from somewhere again, in case they forgot they published them and turn them off.

Aiyo. All I can think to say.

Dear Equinix Customer,

In the event of protests or other activity related to the U.S. election is proximate to our IBX locations, please be advised Equinix has business continuity plans in place to ensure our IBXs remain fully operational and to safeguard access to our data centers or office locations.

If protests or related road closures or curfews occur, we will make customers aware of the situation and any impacts to IBX Access via an IBX Advisory - as is our standard practice.

Our sites remain fully operational, and Equinix is prepared to maintain the necessary on-site staffing levels required to support continuous operations, which include Smart Hands services should customers opt for remote services rather than scheduling a visit to the IBX.

In keeping with our current COVID-19 health and safety protocols, appointments are required.

Last night at work we started getting multiple customers reporting kernel panics in Debian 9 Stretch VMs. People were rebooting their VMs to apply updates, only to have them hang and enter a reboot loop.

Other Debian and Ubuntu versions weren’t affected, and we hadn’t made any platform changes, so we jumped on the chat platforms with our clients trying to figure out what was going on.

The one thing they all had in common was the client had unattended-upgrades on, some of which had been activated without the admin’s knowledge by a specific piece of software. Systems should not be upgrading themselves unless the sysadmin enables this and is aware of it, but that’s for another post.

I ran updates on a fresh Debian 9 VM, and noticed I got a new kernel version:

linux-image-4.9.0-14-amd64

Upgrading and rebooting the VM resulted in the same reported kernel panic. Booting from HVM to PV mode though, and it booted fine.

Around that time we realised this was a much wider spread issue. It was solved upstream in Ubuntu in September, but it appears a broken backported patch made it into Debian. This affects any guest VM booting in Xen, irrespective of any recent version.

If your VM runs on a cloud like OrionVM with a console and the ability to change virtualisation modes, change to PV and downgrade the kernel or update grub to use the previous version, then boot back to HVM if required. If you’re on AWS, you’ll probably need to use a helper VM to mount the disk.

Holiday presents have come early this year! We saw updates for the three biggest BSDs this month, all with something interesting to try. Emphasis added on what my weekend will be spent checking out:

NetBSD 9.1:

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.1, the first feature and stability update for the netbsd-9 release branch.

Over the last months many changes have been made to the NetBSD 9 stable branch. As a stable branch the release engineering team and the NetBSD developers are conservative with changes to this branch and many users rely on the binaries from our regular auto-builds for production use.

The new release features (among various other changes) many bug fixes, a few performance enhancements, stability improvements for ZFS and LFS and support for USB security keys in a mode easily usable in Firefox and other applications.

FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE:

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE. This is the third release of the stable/12 branch.

Some of the highlights:

• Updates to the wireless networking stack and various drivers have been introduced to provide better 802.11n and 802.11ac support.

• The ice(4) driver has been added, supporting Intel(R) 100Gb ethernet cards.

• The jail(8) utility has been updated to allow running Linux(R) in a jailed environment.

• OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1h.

• OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.9p1.

• The clang, llvm, lld, lldb, compiler-rt utilities and libc++ have been updated to version 10.0.1.

I don’t run OpenBSD anywhere, but I keep being given good reasons to finally try it again. OpenBSD 6.8, via the OpenBSD Journal:

On its 25th birthday, the OpenBSD project has released OpenBSD 6.8, the 49th release.

The new release comes with a large number of improvements and debuts a new architecture, OpenBSD/powerpc64, running on the POWER9 family of processors. The full list of changes can be found in the announcement and on the release page.

I’m reading a lot of corporate estimates and quarterly revenue updates in the tech industry, all of it rosy and bullish about the future. Expectations were either met or exceeded, and profits are all up. I walked past a corporate office in Sydney this morning, and the breakfast business show projected on the TVs showed all smiles.

In the tech front, Apple announced their new expensive phones, and Samsung now have ones that are upwards of $3,000. The tech press have been fawning over them; either obliviously or as a form of escape.

Meanwhile, Covid cases around the world continue to soar, and people are still losing their jobs and livelihoods by the thousands. Places like Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand that have contained the spread watch with clenched teeth as people elsewhere suffer, knowing full well that our economies can’t escape the international fallout indefinitely.

Never before have I been more acutely aware that I’m engaged and benefiting from what my economics professor called the two-speed economy. The tech sector hasn’t come out unscathed, but those among us lucky to have a job before this started, and to be retaining it now in one of the few sectors doing well in this crisis… it feels in equal parts unreal and undeserved.

I don’t work any harder than someone in the travel or hospitality industries who’ve seen their jobs evaporate. And I damn well don’t work harder than nurses or cleaners that are keeping us safe on the front lines, from hospitals to trains. So why should my industry disproportionally reap the benefits without any afterthought or introspection? It grates for me, and I benefit from it! Imagine being someone unemployed with little savings seeing these reports.

I wish I saw more of a reflection on this in the press when Tech Company X breathlessly announces a record profit. Companies in the world wars were expected or compelled, as part of patriotic duty, to contribute to the war effort. Why is it not being demanded now? Surely I can’t be the only one noticing the silence on any of this.

I subscribe to ZDNet Australia’s RSS feed which carried this story, presumably from their American parent company:

Now that Windows 10 20H2 has started rolling out, what comes next? Windows 10X in the spring and Windows 10 21H2 with some big UI changes in the fall?

When I read “spring”, my mind went to that place that everyone from Chile to South Africa has to go to: do they mean our spring, or theirs? It was confirmed theirs when they said “the fall”; a phrase we don’t use.

In the words of Michael Franks in Jardin Botanico:

I abandon the bleak December chill;
There’s nothing like Christmas in Brazil.
The weather’s completely upside down;
When we touch down.

Technical journalists, podcasters, Wikipedia editors, companies, PR departments, social media posters, all of you: I implore you once again to not use seasons to denote time. They’re not only vague and ambiguous, they literally ignore half the planet. Possibly slightly more than half, given that seasons also mean absolutely nothing to people on or near the Equator.

I’m okay with the press denoting American currency as simply “the dollar”, even when multiple other countries use it. It was the first one, and its overwhelmingly the largest one in circulation and global reach. But nobody has a monopoly on the seasons or time, despite the best efforts of twisted mad scientists hunkering in their basements plotting to take over the world with their chronoparticles.

Not that this frustrates me, or anything. Find out next hivenglaven why!

While I’m talking about the US today, please vote if you can. All I can say. 🇺🇸

I respect Om Malik a great deal. His GigaOm site was among the best infocomm news outlets out there, as evidenced by its civil and fun comment sections. I have all the time in the world for his takes on the personal and wider impact of technology and design, especially when the rest of the industry is off chasing the new shiny. Please read and subscribe to his blog where he also podcasts from time to time.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a recent post to see he loves his Ricoh GR III as much as I do! It’s such a polarising—heh—camera; Ken Rockwell and his followers don’t see the point in it, and others say it makes too many compromises. It’s perfect for my needs: an SLR-sized sensor wed to the sharpest lens I’ve ever used, with an intuitive focusing system and beautiful colours. The best camera is the one you have on you, and this tiny one always is. I don’t have an SLR or an interchangeable lens camera anymore.

Om took his GR III out around San Francisco one early evening and took some beautiful shots. I especially love the colour gradients in the sky and landscapes. Makes me think I should go out there and share more of my photos too, rather than just talking about it!

I’d love to go back to San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia again once the winds over there blow over. Travelling and working from there was still one of the highlights of my life.

John-Mark Gurney shared this worrying mailing list find:

So, just learned that the OpenSSL devs decided to break /dev/crypto on FreeBSD.

Benjamin Kaduk posted this output:

$ openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc -engine devcrypto    
    
82677: openat(AT_FDCWD,"/dev/crypto",O_RDWR,00)  = 3 (0x3)
82677: ioctl(3,CIOCGSESSION,0x7fffffffde70)      ERR#22 'Invalid argument'
82677: ioctl(3,CIOCGSESSION,0x7fffffffde70)      ERR#22 'Invalid argument'
82677: ioctl(3,CIOCGSESSION,0x7fffffffde70)      ERR#22 'Invalid argument'
82677: ioctl(3,CIOCGSESSION,0x7fffffffde70)      ERR#22 'Invalid argument'
82677: ioctl(3,CIOCGSESSION,0x7fffffffde70)      ERR#22 'Invalid argument'

John raised using LibreSSL in FreeBSD if non-Linux compatibility isn’t a priority anymore. Michael Warren Lucas responded in the Twitter thread with something I wasn’t aware of:

The support cycle on LibreSSL is shorter than a FreeBSD release’s lifetime, which means they won’t switch.

This is the manifestation of what I just talked about. I didn’t think I’d get a specific example again so quickly.

As a FreeBSD guy as well as a Mac user, I agree that among the biggest challenges today are Linux-first/only development, as opposed to thinking about the underlying architecture.

We all realised how perilously under-resourced and staffed the OpenSSL project was during the Heartbleed days. Is this another manifestation of that, or are we just witnessing yet another project that preferences Linux above *nix?

Antranig had a great email for me a few weeks ago pontificating the state of a few things which I’m just getting around to responding to. Me, taking forever to answer something!? Never!

But first thing first, do you have a blog-post about what you use? e.g. hardware, software for home and work? I’d really like to know what you use for RSS. I use Reeder (and that’s how I follow you) but I’m not able to add new feeds via Reeder because I use Fever-compatible API.

All the stuff I use to run the site here is on the Engine Room page, but general stuff is on Software. Between that and Ansible playbooks it’s how I keep track of things, especially console tools that would be a pain to install manually on each new machine!

I haven’t written about it yet, but for the last few weeks I’ve been trying NetNewsWire again. I forgot how nice proper desktop software can be! It’s so fast and slick, though I haven’t looked into how to sync it again. Before then I was exclusively using TinyTinyRSS on a FreeBSD cloud VM, and before that Thunderbird which was surprisingly capable.

Basically I feel like we have a similar setup and have the same feel about Apple (a unified experience. wanted to get an X1. I’m either stuck with 1080p in 2020 OR the software doesn’t understand QHD :( )

This was in response to my earlier post about why most PC makers still ship crappy displays, and a more recent post about crappy laptops, when Apple hardware has had Retina/HiDPI for almost a decade. It’s definitely as much a software issue as hardware; even until recently FreeBSD and Linux desktops were still rougher than they needed to be with HiDPI and QHD.

I don’t even fault F/OSS software for the subpar state of affairs; graphics seems to be one of the last bastions of binary blob obtuseness.

Okay, other than that. How do you feel about this whole Apple Silicon thing? Will you move when they announce it?

I talked a bit about it when getting my refurbished 16-inch MacBook Pro—with an x64 CPU!—but it sounds like I’m on the same fence as Antranig.

It’s hard not to see the future as ARM, even just from a performance and energy-efficiency perspective. An ARM-Based Mac with all day battery life for business trips—remember those?—or when you’re on call would be great. But for my main workstation an Intel CPU is a feature; if only for the elephant-sized desktop OS in the room that we need to run for specific software.

One thing that hasn’t been discussed as much is just how splintered ARM is, too. We’re used to a modicum of compatibility on x86, or POWER, or SPARC back in the day, but check out the FreeBSD mirrors or any Linux distro and see all the dozens of different ARM-based boards that need to be supported with their own distros. There are so many SKUs all implementing vastly different feature subsets. I’ve been told it’s getting better, but saying something “runs on ARM” is still generic enough to be meaningless.

I’m having a hard time, I’m sure it will work for day-to-day applications, but not sure about Unix programs, we(the tech industry)’re not even able to write portable code between Linux, macOS and *BSD, how will we guarantee that software will work on different archs? :D

Admittedly I’m slightly more bullish about a mixed architecture world. Apple have put in effort to help some of the more popular F/OSS packages running on macOS, which they definitely didn’t need to do. As a FreeBSD guy as well as a Mac user, I agree that among the biggest challenges today are Linux-first/only development, as opposed to thinking about the underlying architecture. It’s inevitable when the OS has taken the lion’s share of the *nix world, but it’s still disappointing.

P.S. I know you love to blog about your interactions, yes, you may use the content of the email for a blogposting (I should do the same!)

Phew! Now I just need to remember to respond and discuss them every now and then, too. I know of at least two people with Hales in their name who have submitted great stuff, and there’s still Hacker News follow-up. I appreciate the feedback, please don’t let my backlog dissuade from sending more.