Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (93).
Seamlessly going from wireless to wired network and back #net
One thing that has annoyed me for a while is that when I dock my laptop I lose all the current connections - so I have to close down Gnus and start it again, the same goes for jabber.el.
So this evening I looked for a solution, and found all kinds of suggestions about bonding, bridging, NAT, ebtables, arp routing and things.
It all looked... complicated. The recipe I tried... did not work.
Then I saw someone who wrote "Just assign both interfaces the same static IP address."
So I did. And it works.
If I am on wifi and plug in the cable, 5-10s later, the cabled network kicks in, and because I've set up metric on the interfaces for priority [I guess], the cable takes over. When I unplug the cable, it takes around 25-30s before the wifi takes over, but connections in Gnus and jabber.el "survive" unscathed.
This is great - \o/
ifmetric #free software #net
If you are annoyed when you dock your laptop that the cabled network doesn't get prioritized over the wifi, here are two steps for you:
- Add
metric 2to the wifi interface, andmetric 1to the ethernet interface in/etc/network/interfaces - Install the package
ifmetric - There is no step 3
Enjoy!
Home server upgrade #debian #hardware
I thought it was time to upgrade my home server, virgil.
My home server runs a bunch of services:
- Web server (for my own websites and a couple of other's)
- Mail server, SMTP and IMAP (ditto)
- XMPP server
- DNS server for my domains
- Atom/RSS aggregator with NNTP interface (Feedbase)
- CalDAV and CardDAV server (for me and my families phones)
- Backup storage (for my laptop and semiregularly some other's)
- Weather station
- An IRC proxy (seldomly used)
- NTP and DHCP for my local network
Think about hosting your things yourselves, instead of "gifting" it all to big corporations, folks!
Apparently I am not good at recording/remembering when I do stuff like this, so let's try to remedy that.
I switched from a 4 core AMD FX-4170 CPU (125W) in a [large] Gigabyte motherboard with 32 MB of memory and a 1TB Samsung 850 SATA SSD to a 4 (8 with hyperthreading) AMD Ryzen 5 2400GE (35W) in a new and smaller Gigabyte B450M DS3H motherboard, equipped with 64GB of memory and a new 2TB Intel 660p NVMe SSD.
The new setup has built in graphics, so I could retire the fanless Asus Radeon-something graphics card I had attached.
What I hadn't thought about was that the new motherboard only has PCIe slots, while I was using a PCI slot for the Intel Pro 1000 GT network card, so now I'm using the Realtek 8169 that is built into the motherboard. So far it works.
Another problem was the huuuuge Scythe Ninja 3 rev B CPU cooler that I used - it doesn't fit the new motherboard, as the holes on an AM4 socket board are placed differently than on an AM3+ board. So I had to find an old cooler that clicks on in the standard way.
I also went from no cabinet (parts lying on a shelf) to a SilverStone SUGO SG11. This posed some challenges - the old cooler I dug up is smaller than the huge one I was using, but it is large enough that the [fanless] power supply wouldn't fit in its natural place. So I yanked out the drive cage from the cabinet and plonked the power supply in there. Only problem then was that the plug had to go through the side of the cabinet. Nothing a little violence couldn't fix, though.
Transfering the contents of the old SSD to the new was as easy as connecting both of them, booting from a USB-stick, partitioning and formatting the new SSD, rsync'ing over the contents, chroot'ing into the new SSD with /sys, /proc and /dev bind-mounted, running grub-install, and rebooting, after adjusting the fstab and /etc/network/interfaces. Ah, the joy of Debian GNU/Linux.
Part of the exercise was to reduce the power consumption (although that was mostly an excuse for upgrading). I have an old "Watt-o-meter", which showed 75-80W most of the time for the old setup. Unfortunately it seems quite unreliable, because now it shows 0.4-0.5W.
Browsing gopher in Emacs #emacs
There's a nice mode to browse gopher sites in Emacs: gopher.el on Microsoft Github.
First impressions:
- Cool!
- Links should be highlighted better - underlined?
- Going back is
B- which is annoying to type, why not a lower case letter? I'm used toqfrom Magit, Gnus and many other places in Emacs - that would be my preference. - When you to back, the cursor is put at the top of the page, rather than where it was, which makes browsing a bunch of pages less easy, as you have to remember how far down the page/list you got.
- I don't have w3m installed, so I had to uncomment 4 lines to make gopher.el load; maybe that could Just Work™ automatically?
Chromium won't show PDF's served from your webserver?
If Chromium won't show PDF's inline when served from your webserver, it might be because you followed some security advice and set a "Content-Security-Policy"-header, containing the rule "default-src 'none'".
The symptom is that instead of showing the PDF, Chromium will just show a grey page with a tiny rectangle with rounded corners in the middle.
I fixed it by changing "none" to "self"; but I guess I should figure out which of the more specific policies it is that Chromium needs to be changed.
Some more digging reveals the I can keep "default-src 'none'" if I add "object-src 'self'", and Chromium will then display PDF's inline, so that's what I'm using now.
Just like last year /koldfront.dk/archive/20 ... - I still ♥ Free Software.
Serverless means no server to hack into? #computers
From the technical details page on instant.page:
"instant.page’s script is hosted serverless with Cloudflare Workers so that there’s no server to hack into."
When I read something like that, I turn into that guy from that XKCD-strip.
I get this overwhelming urge to oldsplain (yes, that's a word) to this whippersnapper that even though it apparently is called "serverless", there still is a machine somewhere, doing something. And that can, of course, theoretically, be hacked.
Maybe someone can youthsplain (also a word) this to me. Thanks in advance, xoxo, YOLO.
Hello World by Hannah Fry
I managed to finish a book!
For quite a while I have been buying [real, paper] books once in a while, reading ¼, ½ or something, and then I've kind of left the book.
This also happened to Hannah Fry's "Hello World", which is about algorithms and how they are used/abused in our current world. But today I read the last two chapters!
It is not a technical book, but it does bring up a bunch of examples of bias in the use of various systems and algorithms today, that aren't immediately obvious, and I think it is worth reading for those.
It would have been fun with a little more detail in how these things work, but I guess that would have limited the audience.