OK, so it’s been a while since the last status update and I was going do these round-about every six months. No big deal, no big deal, but I do feel the need to communicate a thing or two. In slightly particular order:
Status (2)
NepTunes 1.7.0 →
One of the things I really love about Mac is the availability of the nifty small utilities that aim at solving one problem and doing it right. Maybe it’s simply my admiration of UNIX philosophy.1 I’m an avid Last.fm user2 and I stumbled upon NepTunes while looking for something integrating iTunes with it. With the release of Catalina and introduction of the new Music.app, NepTunes stopped working and my scrobbles failed to be noted on Last.fm. With 1.7.0 release this is now fixed and everything is back to normal! 🎉
Ansible 2.9.0 →
Ansible 2.9 “Immigrant Song” has just been released. Back in May I already mentioned how slowly but surely Ansible won my heart and I must admit that I’m constantly impressed with what can be done with this tool. It’s a huge release yet again, but there are no major changes — which is good. It means that the project focused on bug fixing and improving on things already present.
It also coincide with release of my new Ansible Role: Rsyslog. I’ve been working on it for past few days and found it good enough for shipping today. Should you look for something handling rsyslog on Ubuntu/Debian, give it a spin! 😊
Ni No Kuni Wrath of the White Witch →
I’ve been playing Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom for a while now and I still think it’s the best RPG I played in years. I’m also a big fan of Studio Ghibli and while NNKII wasn’t done in collaboration, the style and inspiration is clear.
Some time ago I received as a gift Ni No Kuni Wrath of the White Witch DS version. Reason is simple — as I have 3DS I can play old DS games just fine. The problem was with… Translation. First Ni No was published with PlayStation 3 in mind, but due to large popularity of DS system in Japan at that time, it was ported there as well. I have a wonderful deluxe edition, with book inside and what not, but everything is in… Japanese.
I’ve been following this fan translation attempt1 for quite some time, but recently I noticed that there is a new, remastered version of Ni No Kuni coming to the PC! And now it’s available on Steam, fully translated! 🎉
Rolling out containers w/ Ansible
I’m not huge on containers, but I can see and appreciate their value in rolling things out fast for testing purposes. I have my own server(s) running here and there and I use Ansible for handling pretty much everything on them. Until not long ago, Docker containers were among notable exceptions from that rule. But then I finally discovered1 docker_container module. The only thing I was still missing was better handling of defining multiple containers.2
NGINX Extended Security Update →
There were three vulnerabilities discovered by Netflix in NGINX: CVE-2019-9511, CVE-2019-9513 and CVE-2019-9516. Both current stable1 and mainline2 were patched and point releases had been issued. As I mentioned in my NGINX Extended post I was not going to work on 1.14.x branch any more with the exception of security updates. Canonical backported patches to their nginx package3 with the following changelog:
- SECURITY UPDATE: HTTP/2 Data Dribble issue
–debian/patches/CVE-2019-9511.patch: limited number of DATA frames insrc/http/v2/ngx_http_v2.c,src/http/v2/ngx_http_v2.h,src/http/v2/ngx_http_v2_filter_module.c.
– CVE-2019-9511 - SECURITY UPDATE: HTTP/2 Resource Loop / Priority Shuffling issue
–debian/patches/CVE-2019-9513.patch: limited number of PRIORITY frames insrc/http/v2/ngx_http_v2.c,src/http/v2/ngx_http_v2.h.
– CVE-2019-9513 - SECURITY UPDATE: HTTP/2 0-Length Headers Leak issue
–debian/patches/CVE-2019-9516.patch: reject zero length headers with PROTOCOL_ERROR insrc/http/v2/ngx_http_v2.c.
– CVE-2019-9516
I also took these patches and rebuilt my NGINX Extended version.4
Having this opportunity I thought it’s worth mentioning that there’s also Docker container available with my NGINX version. Dockerfile is available on GitHub and image itself on Docker Hub. Internally it’s also using my PPA to provide the package so it has exactly the same version as the one provided there.
Panic’s Nova Text Editor Private Beta →
Panic’s Nova Text Editor entered private beta testing. I don’t exactly look for a new text editor,1 but I’m watching this one closely. Two reasons: 1) it’s Panic and their software for Apple devices is absolutely awesome; 2) it’s going to be a native editor for macOS. Not some Electron app, but a real deal. I never got myself to use BBEdit and Coda looks a bit vintage these days, so I’m keeping my eye on this one.
Apple’s Convergence
There’s this craving out there in the industry. Imagine walking around with super powerful device inside your pocket. You can do all sorts of cool things on it like browsing the Internet, taking amazing pictures, listening to the music, downloading apps, documents and what not. Not that hard to imagine these days, most of the smartphones out there can do of the above and then some. Most of them can and does replace multiple devices we needed in the, not that distant, past (walkmans 1, iPods, calculators, cameras etc.). But the craving is still there. Common understanding is that these devices are so powerful nowadays, that they could take on doing even more. Imagine — the last time, I promise! — walking around with super powerful device inside your pocket. Imagine you get back home or arrive to the office, you bring the device out of your pocket and you connect it to the big screen, pointing device and a keyboard. All of a sudden, your pocket device became your desktop device. Bam! 🤯
Farewell Joyent Public Cloud →
I was working for at&t when I first learned about SmartOS. Reason was simple, I’ve been in UNIX/Solaris team so I was more in “this world” back then. I found the concept of this new OS fascinating and it was additionally sprinkled by Bryan Cantrill’s amazing lightning talk. It’s one of those moments when I felt that I’m being interested in the right things at the right time. To me SmartOS in many ways felt revolutionary and I still think that some of its concepts1 are ahead of the industry.
ZFS 0.8.0 →
My first encounter of ZFS happened on Solaris 10 running on some SPARC box. It felt very refreshing after SVM or, goodness me, VxVM. I became a fan instantly as the overall simplicity in administration and promise of reliability were nowhere else to be found.1 Throughout the years I’ve been playing with it mainly on Illumos distros (OmniOS and SmartOS) and FreeBSD, but never got myself to entrust it fully on Linux.
While it appears that ZFS is still sort of persona non grata at least in the Linux kernel, but with Canonical shipping it by default with Ubuntu helps a lot. Quite recently it also became apparent that the community behind ZFS on Linux is the largest and most active one. It also seems that both Illumos and FreeBSD (among others) are going to be syncing with/against it.
This release brings impressive set of new features. I for one am the most excited about the native encryption and possibility to transfer raw encrypted snapshots.