I needed to set up a daemon for a service that’s in the low 1024 ports reserved for root on FreeBSD. However, I didn’t want to run the service as root. Instead, I set up pf (the firewall in BSDs) to simply redirect the port.
Continue readingMonth: February 2021
Fixing VisualEditor not being able to contact RESTBase server
If you set up a new wiki with MediaWiki 1.35 (since it adds the PHP-based Parsoid server), and you get this error trying to load VisualEditor:
Error contacting the Parsoid/RESTBase server: (curl error: 28) Timeout was reachedIt’s because the server is trying to contact itself with the server name (hostname/IP). If it’s a DNS name, then make sure the name it uses resolves to itself; a quick fix was to add it to the hosts file.
DNS as Code with DNSControl and GitLab
With the “infrastructure as code” renaissance, managing infrastructure has never been easier. Every change is easily recordable and reproducible and, because it’s all code, it’s never been easier to store a history of what’s changed to easily review in git log.
But short of running your own DNS servers and running custom scripts to convert code into a BIND zonefile, it’s historically been hard to manage DNS in the same way – so often, even though the servers themselves are easy to change, managing DNS means connecting to Route53, or Cloudflare, or any of a myriad of different domain registrars and DNS providers and manually changing fields in their application with no easy way to propagate changes across multiple domains or to roll back to a historical record if a new change causes something to break.
Using a tool like DNSControl, which allows a provider-agnostic view of DNS records as code, along with automatic capabilities to update records at your provides, fixes all of this.
Continue readingMastodon really is crumbling — and it will only get worse
I am 100% serious with the title, despite the appearance of click-bait. Mastodon has a serious structural rot that is only worsening as time gets on. I think this is for a few reasons which I will outline below.
Ironically, I don’t feel safe posting this directly to the fediverse because of the very forces I’m about to describe. I’m not worried about the cancel crew, I just don’t want to deal with hostile interactions right now. I might link to this post but it’s less likely to get hate mail I suspect if I do it that way rather than write this all up in a giant thread on fedi.
What I am presenting is largely anecdotal opinion, although it has been gathered from countless others (I’m not going to name any names, they deserve better than harassment or people trying to change their views and in the process merely reinforcing them).
Continue readingEmbeding application manifests into Windows executables as a resource
If your Win32 application needs to declare that is supports something before it even executes, this is where a manifest file comes in. While you can ship one with your application (in the form of appname.exe.manifest), it’s more fool-proof to just embed it into your application. You can do so with
RISC-V isn’t as interesting as you think
I had wrote this before the Unleashed was revealed, so some of the bits on economics have changed. As of writing this, I still stand by my other beliefs. One of the most hyped things in hardware design is RISC-V, the open ISA available without license fees. Many organizations including Western Digital have pledged support for RISC-V, and the open source community has a lot of faith in it, and with Nvidia’s recent purchase of Arm, people are concerned. However, I feel these hopes are somewhat misleading, as RISC-V’s openness is less at the benefit of the user and more for CPU vendors.