AdamW on Linux and more (Posts about Personal)

Site and blog migration

2020-11-24T00:36:54Z

So I've been having an adventurous week here at HA Towers: I decided, after something more than a decade, I'm going to get out of the self-hosting game, as far as I can. It makes me a bit sad, because it's been kinda cool to do and I think it's worked pretty well, but I'm getting to a point where it seems silly that a small part of me has to constantly be concerned with making sure my web and mail servers and all the rest of it keep working, when the services exist to do it much more efficiently. It's cool that it's still possible to do it, but I don't think I need to actually do it any more.

So, if you're reading this...and I didn't do something really weird...it's not being served to you by a Fedora system three feet from my desk any more. It's being served to you by a server owned by a commodity web hoster...somewhere in North America...running Lightspeed (boo) on who knows what OS. I pre-paid for four years of hosting before realizing they were running proprietary software, and I figured what the hell, it's just a web serving serving static files. If it starts to really bug me I'll move it, and hopefully you'll never notice.

All the redirects for old Wordpress URLs should still be in place, and also all URLs for software projects I used to host here (fedfind etc) should redirect to appropriate places in Pagure and/or Pypi. Please yell if you see something that seems to be wrong. I moved nightlies and testcase_stats to the Fedora openQA server for now; that's still a slightly odd place for them to be, but at least it's in the Fedora domain not on my personal domain, and it was easiest to do since I have all the necessary permissions, putting them anywhere else would be more work and require other people to do stuff, so this is good enough for now. Redirects are in place for those too.

I've been working on all the other stuff I self-host, too. Today I set up all the IRC channels I regularly read in my Matrix account and I'm going to try using that setup for IRC instead of my own proxy (which ran bip). It seems to work okay so far. I'm using the Quaternion client for now, as it seems to have the most efficient UI layout and isn't a big heavy wrapper around a web client. Matrix is a really cool thing, and it'd be great to see more F/OSS projects adopting it to lower barriers to entry without compromising F/OSS principles; IRC really is getting pretty creaky these days, folks. There's some talk about both Fedora and GNOME adopting Matrix officially, and I really hope that happens.

I also set up a Kolab Now account and switched my contacts and calendar to it, which was nice and easy to do (download the ICS files from Radicale, upload them to Kolab, switch my accounts on my laptops and phone, shut down the Radicale server, done). I also plan to have it serve my mail, but that migration is going to be the longest and most complicated as I'll have to move several gigs of mail and re-do all my filters. Fun!

I also refreshed my "desktop" setup; after (again) something more than a decade having a dedicated desktop PC I'm trying to roll without one again. Back when I last did this, I got to resenting the clunky nature of docking at the time, and also I still ran quite a lot of local code compiles and laptops aren't ideal for that. These days, though, docking is getting pretty slick, and I don't recall the last time I built anything really chunky locally. My current laptop (a 2017 XPS 13) should have enough power anyhow, for the occasional case. So I got me a fancy Thunderbolt dock - yes, from the Apple store, because apparently no-one else has it in stock in Canada - and a 32" 4K monitor and plugged the things into the things and waited a whole night while all sorts of gigantic things I forgot I had lying around my home directory synced over to the laptop and...hey, it works. Probably in two months I'll run into something weird that's only set up on the old desktop box, but hey.

So once I have all this wrapped up I'm aiming to have substantially fewer computers lying around here and fewer Sysadmin Things taking up space in my brain. At the cost of being able to say I run an entire domain out of a $20 TV stand in my home office. Ah, well.

Oh, I also bought a new domain as part of this whole thing, as a sort of backup / staging area for transitions and also possibly as an alternative vanity domain. Because it is sometimes awkward telling people yes, my email address is happyassassin.net, no, I'm not an assassin, don't worry, it's a name based on a throwaway joke from university which I probably wouldn't have picked if I knew I'd be signing up for bank accounts with it fifteen years later. So if I do start using it for stuff, here is your advance notice that yeah, it's me. This name I just picked to be vaguely memorable and hopefully to be entirely inoffensive, vaguely professional-sounding, and composed of sounds that are unambiguous when read over an international phone line to a call centre in India. It doesn't mean anything at all.

No more Wordpress!

2020-04-24T00:57:51Z

So I finally managed to bite the bullet and move my blog off Wordpress! I've tried this multiple times over the last few years but always sort of ran out of gas, but this time I finished the job. I'm using Nikola, and with a bit of poking around, managed to convert my entire blog, including existing comments. I don't intend to allow new comments or user registrations, but I wanted to keep the existing ones visible.

More or less all old URLs should be redirected properly. This domain is still set up in a really icky way that I should redo sometime, but that's gonna have to wait till I get some more roundtuits. I didn't bother trying to copy the theme I was using before, I'm just using one of the stock Nikola themes with minor tweaks to display the comments, so the site's appearance is a bit different now, but hey, it's just a blog.

I killed my tt-rss deployment and an old cgit deployment I had forgotten I had running at the same time. Now if I can find some time to switch from Roundcube to Mailpile or something, I can uninstall PHP forever...

Uptime

2020-02-02T17:17:40Z

OK, so that was two days longer than I was expecting! Sorry for the extended downtime, folks, especially Fedora folks. It was rather beyond my control. But now I'm (just barely) back, through the single working cable outlet in the house and a powerline ethernet connection to the router, at least until the cable co can come and fix all the other outlets!

Downtime

2020-01-30T09:54:59Z

happyassassin.net - this blog, all email addresses, and anything else hosted there (which should only matter to me...) - will be down for about the next day and a half or so, just For The Record. I'm moving house again, and am now at the whims of the fickle gods of Shaw Cable. Make all homage unto them.

Boycott Youtube

2019-12-18T10:45:08Z

Youtube is both an awful idea and flat out immoral. There is no plausible justification for a system that depends on grossly underpaid contractors to watch five hours a day of grotesque violence. It shouldn't exist. Don't use it and don't contribute to it.

That's all.

Devconf.cz 2019

2019-01-24T12:31:42Z

For anyone who - inexplicably - hasn't already had it in their social calendar in pink sharpie for months, I will be at Devconf.cz 2019 this weekend, at FIT VUT in Brno. I'll be doing two talks: Things Fedora QA Robots Do on Friday at 3pm (which is basically a brain dump about the pile of little fedmsg consumers that do quite important jobs that probably no-one knows about but me), and Don't Move That Fence 'Til You Know Why It's There on Saturday at 11am, which is a less QA-specific talk that's about how I reckon you ought to go about changing code. The slides for both talks are up now, if you want a sneak preview (though if you do, you're disqualified from the audience participation section of the "fence" talk!)

Do come by to the talks, if you're around and there's nothing more interesting in that timeslot. Otherwise feel free to buttonhole me around the conference any time.

QA: the glamorous bit

2018-05-31T09:28:56Z

Of course, we all know that working in QA is more or less a 24x7 whirl of red carpets and high-end cocktail parties...but today is particularly glamorous! Here's what I'm doing right now:

Build an RPM of a git snapshot of Plymouth
Put it in a temporary repo
Build an installer image containing it
Boot the installer image in a VM, see if it reaches anaconda
Repeat, more or less ad infinitum

I just can't take the excitement!

Flock 2017: trip report

2017-09-15T20:56:49Z

Better late than never, here's my report from Flock 2017!

Thanks to my excellent foresight in the areas of 'being white' and 'being Canadian' I had no particular trouble getting through security / immigration, which was nice. The venue was kinda interesting - the whole town had this very specific flavor that seems to be shared among slightly second-class seaside towns the world over. Blackpool, White Rock or Hyannis, there's something about them all...but the rooms were fairly clean, the hot water worked, the power worked, and the wifi worked fairly well for a conference, so all the important stuff was OK. Hyannis seriously needs to discover the crosswalk, though - I nearly got killed four times travelling about 100 yards from the hotel to a Subway right across the street and back. Unfortunately the 'street' was a large rotary with exactly zero accommodations for pedestrians...

Attendance seemed a bit thinner than usual, and quite heavily Red Hat-y; I've heard different reasons for this, from budget issues to Trump-related visa / immigration issues. It was a shame. There were definitely still enough people to make the event worthwhile, but it felt like some groups who would normally be there just weren't.

From the QA team we had myself, Tim Flink, Sumantro Mukherjee and Lukas Brabec. We got some in-person planning / discussion done, of course, and had a team dinner. It was particularly nice to be in the same place as Sumantro for a while, as usually our time zones are awful, he gets to the office right when I'm going to bed - so we were able to talk over a lot of stuff and agree on quite a list of future projects.

The talks, as usual, were generally very practical, focused and useful - one of the nicest things about Flock is it's a very low-BS conference. I managed to do some catch-up on modularity plans and status by following the track of modularity talks on Thursday. Aside from that, some of the talks I saw included the Hubs status update, Stef's dist-git tests talk, the Greenwave session, the Bodhi hackfest, Sumantro's kernel testing session, and a few others.

I gave a talk on how packagers can work with our automated test systems. As always seems to be the case I got scheduled very early in the conference, and again as always seems to be the case, I wound up writing my talk about an hour before giving it. Which was especially fun because while I still had about ten slides to write, my laptop starting suffering from a rather odd firmware bug which caused it to get stuck at the lowest possible CPU speed. Pro tip: LibreOffice does not like running at 400MHz. So I wasn't entirely as prepared as I could have been, but I think it went OK. I had the usual thing where, once I reached the end of the talk, I realized how I should have started it, but never mind. If I ever get to give the talk again, I'll tweak it. As a footnote, Peter Jones - being Peter Jones - naturally had all the tools and the know-how necessary to take my laptop apart and disconnect the battery, which turned out to be the only possible way to clear the CPU-throttling firmware state, so thanks very much to him for that!

As usual, though, the most productive thing about the conference was just being in the same place at the same time as lots of the folks who really make stuff happen in Fedora, and being able to work on things in real time, make plans, and pick brains. So I spent quite a lot of time bouncing around between Kevin Fenzi, Dennis Gilmore, and Peter Jones, trying to fix up Fedora 27 and Rawhide composes; we got an awful lot of bugs solved during the week. I got to talk to Ralph Bean, Pingou, Randy Barlow, Pengfei Jia, Dan Callaghan, Ryan Lerch, Jeremy Cline and various others about Bodhi, Pagure, Greenwave and various other key bits of current and future infrastructure; this was very useful in planning how we're going to move forward with compose gating and a few other things. In the kernel testing session, Sumantro, Laura Abbott and myself came up with a plan to run regular Test Days around kernel rebases for stable releases, which should help reduce the amount of issues caused by those rebases.

We started working on a 'rerun test' button for automated tests in Bodhi during the Bodhi hackfest; this is still a work in progress but it's going in interesting directions.

Downtime

2017-05-29T01:17:48Z

Hi folks! Happyassassin Towers is being physically relocated tomorrow, so there's gonna be some downtime (for this site, for email, and...for me). Hang tight!

LinuxFest Northwest report

2017-05-09T19:17:35Z

EDIT: recording link added!

Hi folks!

This weekend was LinuxFest Northwest 2017, and as usual I was down in Bellingham to attend it. Had a good time, again as usual. Luckily I got to do my talk first thing and get it out of the way. Here's a recording, and here's the slide deck. It was a general talk on Fedora's past, present and future.

I saw several other good talks, including Bryan Lunduke's 'Lunduke Hour Live' featuring a great discussion with John Sullivan of the Free Software Foundation. I also saw the openSUSE 101 talk he did with James Mason - it was quite interesting to compare and contrast the openSUSE organization with Fedora's. Together with James and an Ubuntu developer, I formed a heckler's row at Kevin Burkeland's Linux 102 talk on choosing a distribution; it was actually a great talk that was pretty well though-through and had nice things to say about Fedora and openSUSE, so our heckling was sadly pre-empted.

I spent a few hours working on the booth too, but as usual the Jeffs Sandys and Fitzmaurice were the real booth heroes, so thanks once more to them.

The trivia event on Saturday night was pretty fun (and our team, The Unholy Alliance (of SUSE and Fedora folks) won with only minor cheating!). My now-traditional Sunday afternoon board gaming with Jakob Perry and co. was also fun (and I managed not to come last...)

Got to chat with Jesse Keating, Brian Lane, Laura Abbott (briefly - hope your voice is recovered by now!) and many other fine folks too. It was also really nice to hear from a whole bunch of different people that they tried out a recent Fedora release and really liked it - almost feels like we're doing something right!

If I promised you something at the conference and I don't get in touch by the end of this week, please do give me a poke and remind me, I probably forgot...