My Wordpress domain is coming up for renewal soon. I might migrate the domain off Wordpress since I'm finding it very restrictive being unable to manage my DNS entries via the Wordpress UI. This may cause the blog to be unavailable for a while, but I'll drop a note here before I start.
I decided to try upgrading my Fedora to Fedora 39 (from 38)
I ran into a few issues already.
initrd issue I've encountered before (https://blenderfox.com/2023/05/02/fedora-5/), I fixed that by booting up the previous version, then finding I couldn't log in unless I picked "Gnome on XOrg". ~/.config/dconf/user, logging out and then back in via Wayland. It completely reset my Gnome state, so all my custom docked shortcuts were gone and it offered to run me through the Gnome tutorial againpip module -- but that looks like a module build failure, not the playbook.And now I discovered that there's no F39 of VirtualBox yet, so I guess I'm rolling back for now....
The fallout continues.
Okay, so I swiped the headline from the video, but it's pretty much a given.
Further to my previous blog entry about Hashicorp's decision to change Terraform's license, I mentioned how the OpenTF Initiative put a choice to Hashicorp: change the license back or we will fork Terraform.
Unsurprisingly, Hashicorp didn't comply, so now Terraform has (or will be) forked as OpenTF at [github.com/opentffou...](https://github.com/opentffoundation)
This story has been covered in several places including The Register and several videos on YouTube including a nice short summary by Fireship
If the fork goes ahead, I'm curious as to whether Hashicorp sees it as a competition and goes after the foundation, but if it does, what little reputation Hashicorp has left in the OSS community will be nigh on destroyed.
Meanwhile, I'm going to continue playing with Pulumi in case the OpenTF doesn't work, gets blocked or if we need another alternative.
Two major updates recently
Firstly, as suspected, I finally got the notification saying that Google Domains' registrations would be acquired by SquareSpace so all my registrations would be transferred over them should I not do anything. Obviously, I didn't want that, so I transferred them over to AWS (Route 53) so now my domains are registered with AWS, but are DNS managed by Cloud DNS. I had some weirdness when trying to migrate all my domains in bulk, with respect to the auth code not being accepted on one of the domains when doing the bulk migration, but it was accepted when I did the migration on that one domain alone, so... go figure.
Next update is Terraform. In case you didn't know, Hashicorp has changed the Terraform license and essentially made it no longer open source. This behaviour is similar to what Red Hat did with its RHEL offering and the backlash is just as bad.
Immediately I knew someone would fork it, and already, there's the OpenTF Initiative and this is the key part:
Our request to HashiCorp: switch Terraform back to an open source license.
We ask HashiCorp to do the right thing by the community: instead of going forward with the BUSL license change, switch Terraform back to a truly open source license, and commit to keeping it that way forever going forward. That way, instead of fracturing the community, we end up with a single, impartial, reliable home for Terraform where the whole community can unite to keep building this amazing ecosystem.
Our fallback plan: fork Terraform into a foundation.
If HashiCorp is unwilling to switch Terraform back to an open source license, we propose to fork the legacy MPL-licensed Terraform and maintain the fork in the foundation. This is similar to how Linux and Kubernetes are managed by foundations (the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, respectively), which are run by multiple companies, ensuring the tool stays truly open source and neutral, and not at the whim of any one company.
OpenTF Initiative (https://opentf.org/)
Essentially, make Terraform open source again, or a fork from the MPL version will be made and maintained separately from Hashicorp's version. This will essentially lead to two, potentially diverging versions of Terraform, one BUSL and one MPL licensed
I'm already looking at alternatives and the two currently that I'm looking at are Ansible and Pulumi
Ansible I've had experience in , but there's two main issues with it:
Pulumi I've heard lots of good things about, but its a new technology, and I don't know if it is can "Import" existing infrastructure.
Guess a "spike" is worth doing for it.
It's been quite a long time since I did any updates on this blog so a couple of updates are in order
I've now been living in the new place for just over a year. Generally everything is good, we've started putting in a lawn and currently letting it get its roots in before we try to cut it
Oh, boy, what an absolute train wreck. I've tolerated Elon's presence at Twitter because most of the stuff he did wasn't far off what Jack was doing prior. But cutting off all third party clients, forcing everyone onto the new TweetDeck (which likely will be paywalled too) has literally driven users away. Twitter has been losing users and revenue constantly, and it is totally unsurprising.
I've disabled my two TweetDeck profiles (a professional one, and a casual one) from Ferdium. But I doubt I will be going back any time soon.
Another train wreck of a situation. Red Hat's decision to first kill CentOS's stability, then for RHEL sources to only be accessible behind a subscription has pissed of a lot of users, even if it's not strictly speaking against license.
The only one left in its sights will be Fedora so that leads me onto the next update
I've been tinkering with Manjaro more and more lately, with its rolling release schedule meaning I never need to upgrade from a major version to another major version.
It's downside I'm finding is that some packages, especially those in the AUR are essentially "compile from source" packages which does the build on your machine during the install. This can take a varying amount of time depending on the code. With my RSS reader of choice: QuiteRSS, this build takes a mind numbing 2.5 hours to do, even on a high spec machine.
That's where I found out about setting up your own Arch repo. I've been tinkering with that, setting it up on GCP and fronted by a CDN. This works pretty well, but I still need to find how I can do scheduled builds to keep that up to date, but it looks like I'll be switching to Manjaro at some point in the near future. Sound works fine, using lyncolnmd's work.
Another downside with Manjaro, however is that its btrfs filesystem, my home directory backup, and CloneZilla don't seem to want to work well together
One final update, I will likely be transferring out the blenderfox.com domain out of Wordpress, while I had this registered as part of the blog, I'm finding it much harder to maintain this domain using Wordpress's very limited DNS management tools. I will likely transfer it out to Google Domains, even though there's talk of them shuttering that service. Secondary service would be AWS.
I paid for the premium version of Citymapper primarily because I need to use their "speak directions" option while on public transport. Something that used to be free, and then they put it behind a paywall.
Now they only went and made it FREAKING FREE again, after I'd gone premium and paid for the year >_<
[citymapper.com/news/2589...](https://citymapper.com/news/2589/citymapper-club-features-are-now-available-to-all)
So I've terminated the premium subscription, but I'm still premium until the end of this annual cycle, which ends in November
This weekend was the coronation of King Charles III, the first new monarch for most of the people in the UK. Some may have been alive for the late Queen Elizabeth II's coronation but the are few now.
I was working coronation support cover on the Saturday from around 6:30am to about 3pm. Fortunately no major issues. One alert towards the tail end of the day, but that was about it.
Sunday were the street parties. Our local one was relatively small compared to the one during the Jubilee celebrations. Was great for the local kids though, and the weather was perfect for it.
Monday is a Bank Holiday so no-one was working in the London office, although the other offices were still working.
I chose today to retry doing my Manjaro file copy, and again it failed with checksum errors when I tried to back it up (even the btrfs check didn't manage to fix it)
I guess I'll have to restart my Manjaro attempts and not use btrfs -- probably return to using ext4 and lvm.
The final issue with the post-upgrade is now fixed (dependency issue) and it self-resolved by a new package update that came through this morning
I did fine one new issue -- a new kernel dropped and installed successfully, but did the same thing as the upgrade and did not generate an initrd line, but did generate the initrd line once I regenerated the grub configs.
Fixed the VirtualBox issue now.
Looks like on VB6 you had to add the current user to the vboxsf group.
But on VB7, you have to add them to the vboxusers group instead.
Managed to fix the issue mentioned in my previous post.
Looks like the system upgrade messed up generating the config during the system upgrade process.
The first time, with the blockdev error and second time, it was missing an initrd directive.
So I booted into the previous installation (which was still available as I made the grub menu visible as part of my Ansible playbook)
Inside the old installation, I just regenerated the grub configs:
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2.cfg sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2-efi.cfg
And this readded the initrd line and now I am able to boot into F38. Everything still works, I have some errors with VirtualBox and qemu that I will need to fix at some point:
So, quite a few things have been happening recently.
I tried to go the next step on Manjaro and copy my home directory across ready for me to run the Ansible playbook to do the setups (I've been testing it would work via VirtualBox on my Windows laptop)
After waiting ages for the file copy, when I went to do the backup, there was a btrfs checksum error so I'll have to try again some other time.
Separately, I got a message on an issue I raised at Fedora's bugzilla the Fedora 36 (the version of Fedora I raised the bug on), was coming up to EOL so I should look to move away from it or upgrade. So I decided to try doing the upgrade.
The upgrade completed without error, but first boot after the upgrade hung with a weird Kernel Panic error (I have posted this on the Fedora Forums)
So I rolled my laptop back to preupgrade state for now.
I suspect I may need to end up doing a clean install, so I've prepared a btrfs and a ext4 lvm installation and have imaged those in preparation.
Finally, Wordpress posted that they're stopping Autosharing to Twitter because of Twitter's Idiot-in-Chief screwing up the API usage.
Still, they have mentioned they will be adding autosharing to Instagram and Mastodon instead, and that helps me, since I'm slowly moving what little Twitter presence I had onto Mastodon anyway.
My Twitter has been disconnected from my Wordpress and I've revoked its access from Twitter's side anyway.
I've been continuing to tinker with ArchLinux and Manjaro and have since found out about "Oh-My-Zsh" and "Oh-My-Bash" -- basically addons you can add onto your shell via the shell's rc and profile files and it provides a really nice prompt that tells you additional information at a glance, like which branch you are in if you are in a git repo, or whether the previous command returned a non-zero error code.
They are quite polarising though, as I found out when I mentioned this to one of the systems architects here in the office. One of the architects told me someone he worked with even considered OMZ malware.
Vanilla ArchLinux uses bash out of the box, Manjaro uses zsh out of the box, which is how I found out about the OMZ/OMB addons.
OMZ has a ton more plugins than OMB - unsurprisingly since it's also the default shell for Macs (vomit).
I did start copying my files across to my Manjaro installation. It took nearly 6 hours to copy. However, when trying to do the backup afterwards, it failed with a btrfs checksum error. That worried me since I hadn't done anything since the previous backup other than copying files.
I do remember running into similar issues with btrfs last time I tinkered with it when reinstalling Fedora. It could end up with me switching to either ext4 (like I did with Fedora) or trying the xfs file system option in Manjaro.
Referring to my earlier blog post, I finally got Manjaro sound to work and have been spending my spare time working on getting the Arch/Manjaro side of my setup playbook to work. VirtualBox has helped with that.
I've been struggling with making CloneZilla backups on my new Toshiba SSD. The transfer speed onto it is horrendous, but the speed on my Samsung SSD is fine. And the return window is now closed so I can't return it. I guess, I'll need to look at purchasing yet another external SSD.
It's been a while so here's a few updates in the meantime
It's coming up to a year since I moved house and only now have the pile of construction rubbish been moved from outside my old flat. Dumping of rubbish by the neighbours in the adjoining block of flats into the garage is still happening.
Conservatives lost control of the area to Labour but I'm seeing absolutely no change
We went through a period of very cold weather (-6degC) and this was costing us £10-£15 per day in gas usage.
Moving onto other updates. As posted previously, I went into hospital to remove a lump from my mouth. I'll soon get a follow up call from the doctor to check how I'm doing. Stitches took about 10 days to dissolve. I just have a small white patch there now where the lump was removed and the doctor cauterised the wound.
Twitter has descended into a real s**thole since Elon took over. First killing all third-party clients and then indicating it may start charging for API usage.
The third-party client purge I can tolerate -- it was originally started during the Jack era, but charging for API usage, or even limiting tweets per day is not something many people will accept.
I started working on stripping out twitter functionality from my TFL updates bot and that's near enough done now. It now tweets (or should that be toots) into a Mastodon account at https://mastodon.xyz/users/updatesbf
RSS feed functionality should still work, but it is not enabled yet, until I can get Keda to work.
Now here's a surprise:
Linux users surpass macOS users on SO survey responses.
Windows still trumps both, though.
[survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/](https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-technologies-operating-system)
My dislike of the Apple brand is well-known and documented, and recently, I came across a story that made me hate them even more.
It seems like Apple are now locking out older devices and devices running older versions of their OS. This obviously then forces them to buy the newer, greater model and spend more money in their stores, forcing customers to remain locked into their ecosystem.
Heck, I still have an ASUS TF101 running Android Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.4) and it still runs. Sure, a lot of apps refuse to install, but the basic stuff I need the device for works, and that's all I need.
When your festive f**k-up makes it onto The Register, you know you've fked up good.
[www.theregister.com/2023/01/0...](https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/03/askern_medical_cancer_message/)
The message went out to patients of the medical facility – there are reportedly about 8,000 of them – on December 23, 2022. It asked patients to fill out a DS1500 form, which is used to help terminal patients expedite access to benefits because they may not have time for the usual bureaucratic delay.
About an hour after thoroughly alarming recipients of the not-so-glad tidings, the medical facility reportedly apologized in a follow-up text message.
Error or not, there should have been failsafes to prevent this happening. Even Tom Scott has a story from personal experience when he had to get himself tested for STDs (his face tells you everything you need to know
Finally found a way to do the install on Wine on Fedora -- and that's using Lutris. Lutris lets you install Windows games onto Linux and allows you to script the setup of the game environment to fit the game itself.
So I used it to download the WeChat binary, setup the environment (which involved downloading fonts via winetricks) and adding a registry hack. That seems to work now. Have added it to my app-installs playbook on Gitlab (https://gitlab.com/blenderfox/pixelbook-fedora-setup)
It's not fully automated, it does still require you to run through the setup manually, and then quit both the WeChat application (so Lutris sees that the setup has exited) and Lutris before the playbook proceeds.
This slightly lengthy article goes through my attempts at installing and setting up Fedora on my Pixelbook.
I previously had Ubuntu on there, modified and hacked using https://github.com/yusefnapora/pixelbook-linux.
However, as Ubuntu progressed on, it was clear this repo was not being maintained and updated and rapidly, stuff starting to fail as it required later versions of packages. Even the kernel was still on 4.4.x even now. I spent a long time trying to compile the kernel while trying to figure out the right options for a working kernel, with not much luck.
Putting in things like the "old-releases" repos helped keep things ticking over, but things were still breaking repeatedly, and the microphone kept breaking during calls due to the way the hacks were implemented.
The final straw came when the office decided to buy Apple M1 Macs for the developers (I refused to use one. My hate-hate relationship with Apple is well documented)
The decision to use M1 macs has now led to a problem whereby the docker images that are used are no longer compatible with the macbooks since they are arm64. The macs can use qemu emulation, but that is not perfect, giving weird errors when running the docker images under emulation. Leaving it to me, who is still using an amd64 machine to try to figure out multiarchtecture builds.
I was (and still am) reluctant to do the multiarch builds. Using multiarch builds would mean the devs are running a docker image that is not the same as that which is running on the test and production clusters and that in itself, means they are not developing on, or testing on an infrastructure that is representative of the test or production environments.
If the infrastructures were arm-based environments, sure, then that would be representative then, but not as it stands.
In fact, right now, if the developers build the docker image locally to test something, then pushed that to production, they would break production, as it runs on amd64 images.
I don't think this was thought through carefully enough, to be honest.
But enough of the rant. We are where we are, and I need to try to bail out the situation.
My hacked Ubuntu would not support multiarch build no matter what I tried, but when I tried to use Fedora in a Qemu VM (virtualbox also wouldn't work, since the virtualbox installer compiles kernel modules and that always failed with the custom kernel used by the hacked Ubuntu installation.)
So I decided to try to wipe the Ubuntu installation and start again from scratch, with Fedora.
Fedora 35 was the version I ended up using, and the latest at the time I started this activity.
Out of the box, it had native support for the touchpad, including two and three-finger scrolling via Unity 41. Two-finger scroll scrolls the active window. Three-finger scrolling up gives the window overview, and three-finger scrolling left or right switches workspaces.
Fedora by default uses btrfs. CloneZilla didn't seem to play well with that so had to start again, but perhaps it was due to the MyChromebox BIOS being too old. Upgraded and that seemed to work better.
After CloneZilla'ing the initial install so I could rollback to that if everything fell over, I started setting up the installation.
First thing I did is visudo'ed myself into the sudoers file, with a NOPASSWD param for passwordless sudo
Next I ran dnf update to update packages. There was about 1G of data to update and install.
Then I ran a CloneZilla to backup the laptop state at this point.
From this point, I started setting up the laptop. I found this repo on GitHub where the owner created a setup for Pixelbook https://github.com/jmontleon/pixelbook-fedora -- similar to the one I used for setting up Ubuntu on the Pixelbook. The repo owner also appears to have compiled his own version of the kernel and has his own COPR repository.
After spending a week tinkering with the instructions and getting some bugs ironed out, audio finally worked.
I built an Ansible playbook to help with the instructions running. This was adapted and incorporated into the repo.
With audio now working, I CloneZilla'ed the laptop state again, to have a good state to rollback to.
I then copied my file backup from my external USB into the laptop and then CloneZilla'ed the state again
With the files copied, now it was time to get the apps installed. I built another Ansible playbook to help speed things up and it's located here https://gitlab.com/blenderfox/pixelbook-fedora-setup/
The repo contains two playbooks one for doing the audio (it's essentially the same one in the jmontleon repo) and the second for app installs.
Summary of apps I installed initially:
module ‘collections’ has no attribute ‘Mapping’. Followed this: https://gehrcke.de/2021/11/gcloud-on-python-3-10-module-collections-has-no-attribute-mapping/ to fix. Had to make sure to put the export line in ~/.bash_profilednf install gnome-extensions-app -- can also use the flatpak instead)sudo dnf install qemu-user-static then docker build ls to check available platforms on the builder. Docker ships with buildx https://github.com/docker/buildx#working-with-builder-instances on later version. dnf install openconnect
sudo systemctl restart snapd.seeded.service
I've been suffering from horrendously slow network speed with Three since August, and all my complaints have not been satisfactorily dealt with.
I took the complaint up to the Ombudsman and eventually was ruled against and so now I can either leave the network by paying the leaving penalty (though reduced) and returning the phone.
But I don't even have my old Samsung anymore so that isn't an option.
So now I'm stuck with the network for 2 years until I go out of contract again and can leave without penalty.
DON'T USE THREE.
A step in the right direction
Australia to require social media to 'unmask trolls' • The Register
It's been a long time since I posted on here -- my last post (before today's posts) was July 17 when I had to self isolate. A lot has happened since then, so this post will be a bit of an update list
I had to take my dad into hospital for a prostrate operation (this was planned before I had to self-isolate) -- he already had a PCR test and was cleared. My LFT was also clear, but I still had to self isolate. This was before the self-isolation changes happened. The operation was successful, but he needed to be held a few more days to see an ENT specialist due to them finding lumps in his throat. The concern was that they might be cancerous, but turns out it was just irritation so they gave him some Gaviscon to take after means and soothe the throat. Both my dad and I are prone to post-meal throat irritation so it might mean I might be subject to the same thing later in life.
I got a ticket after driving my dad to the hospital for taking a left turn when I was not supposed do, due to badly signposted roads. My appeal was rejected on the grounds I had paid the ticket. This is how the council screws you over -- if you pay the fine to avoid the 100% charge, they will claim that admits guilt. If you don't, they delay the response until after the 2-week window so you then have to pay the 100% charge.
I finally decided to upgrade my phone and went for a OnePlus 9 Pro. The phone is classed as a "Phablet" and much bigger than the Samsung Galaxy S5 I have been using for years:
The case on the left is for the OnePlus, the case on the right for my S5
I had problems activating the new SIM and eventually Three had to send me a new one, and soon after I got that new one, I got a message saying Three were going to be doing works on the mast in my area and ever since then I have had horrendously bad speeds at home. By bad, I mean speeds of < 1Mbps and even down to 0.2Mbps. Using 3G band sometimes helps, but only marginally.
I've taken my complaint up to the Ombudsman but Three are still refusing to do anything about it -- even charging me to leave contract early.
I've been with Three many years but I will not be recommending them going forward. I will be checking other providers when my contract expires.
We've started to go back to the office. My team is doing three days a week in the office, and you pick which three days as long as there are a max of 8 people in the office (due to some office reorganisation, we only have 8 seats for the entire team).
Surprisingly many people have left jobs during and post lockdown (some might have been nudged due to the lockdown, and not just in my office, but generally.)
I won a Twitter completion by Curve for a swag bag. Just had to tweet them three images of their different adverts -- all of which showed up on the same station, so that wasn't too difficult.
Then we had the annoying as heck "Panic at the Pumps" causing shortages.
This video from my dashcam shows the queue of traffic. This is the queue leading into the Alperton Sainsbury's. I was there at around 5am and it took me 30 minutes to clear the queue even with less people in the queue. This queue will probably take 90 minutes to clear, assuming the fuel was not gone by the time they got to the front of the queue
This video, also from my dashcam shows the queues that built up outside the petrol stations -- this Esso I actually went into at 4:30am that morning and they were not open, even though there were staff in the shop (so maybe they were waiting for delivery?)
You'll get people tooting impatiently and even people cutting the queue and then blocking the lane for the people behind (they must be luxury car drivers)
My house purchase has progressed and we have moved on and are now ready to exchange. However, one of the two sellers is unable to complete his purchase (he's part of a chain and needs to complete his purchase before he can complete the sale on the current house).
Finally, I got a letter from Principia Law who are the ones trying to claim money back from the drunk driver who wrecked my previous car.
They want me to release my bank records for the period of time I had the hire car. But everyone I have discussed this with seems confused as to why this is required since the accident is a "no-fault" claim on my part, so they should not even need my bank details.
I asked them to call me today to discuss this. I may also speak to the office legal team for their thoughts.
Yes, that's right, another place plans to ditch Microsoft and go to Linux and OpenOffice
Found out why I couldn't backup my new machine -- Windows 10 had BitLocker setup which meant CloneZilla couldn't clone it. Ubuntu installation on computers running Windows and BitLocker turned on - Documentation - Ubuntu Community Hub told me how to remove it. But still had a few issues with the backing up, namely Clonezilla still reporting some filesystems being read-only.
Turns out Fast Startup was also enabled by default https://help.uaudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/213195423-How-To-Disable-Fast-Startup-in-Windows-10 for disabling it.
Trying to back up the machine before installing Ubuntu
Backup was fine, completed successfully, and was able to install Ubuntu
Benchmarked both Windows and Linux on 4K, and Linux performed a bit less, presumably due to the APIs being different
And it's been another hot day, and people have been really tetchy today, lots of horn tooting and then, inevitably, this happened
The heat really does bring out the worst in people.