Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, January 26, 2023.
Excluding a couple of images that I need to migrate over the conversion of my old posts from WordPress to Hugo is completed.
©2023 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Wednesday, January 25, 2023.
It works.
Because themes are dependent on the sections each site uses for the homepage I ended up having to work on my own theme.
There isn’t any automated migration tools for wordpress content. So content migration takes a while.
©2023 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Tuesday, January 24, 2023.
Short answer security updates in OpenWRT 22.03.3 and performance problems related to this bug.
After some indepth research I have two options, either use a git version of OpenWRT until a new version comes out using a 5.15 or newer version of the Linux Kernel, or I can convert the wrt1900ac over to a “dumb” AP and using something else as the router.
I have decided to use OpenWRT on an older X86_64 machine as the primary router. I am using OpenWRT both because it works and my assistant network manager is only familiar with the OpenWRT interface.
©2023 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Sunday, January 22, 2023.
They are all some version of a pain in the backside.
©2023 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, January 20, 2023.
Over the last few years I have been using various VoIP systems for work. So far I have come to one conclusion about softphones. They all suck.
Everybody wants you to use their proprietary softphone. This causes two problems. No support for standards and inconsistent features. The first is the bigger issue in my opinion. It guarantees that you have to uses their proprietary softphone app. Without the freedom of choosing your softphone application you are stuck with the features your telphony provider provides.
©2023 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, January 19, 2023.
There are two reasons I am migrating over to Hugo from Wordpress. The first has to with the decline in support for the Classic or pre Gutenberg editor. The second has to do with the lack of utility in comments versus the maintenance cost of Wordpress.
Since releasing Gutenberg Wordpress has slowly been migrating all of their theming over to a collection of CSS files and a loop of php code that simply prints the blocks HTML. All of the functionality is migrating over to JS provided by the implementer of the block. This sounds like a good idea because you don’t need custom themes for adding special stuff to the top of a page or post. It does come with a problem though. If you like to write longer form material Gutenberg is not easy to use. However, if you wanted to use a lot multimedia inside your content Gutenberg is much easier than the Classic editor.
What about comments? Simple, a day or two before writing this I cleaned out the comment spam folder. It had about 350 spam comments inside it. I have gotten more positive interactions about a post on Twitter than I have ever gotten on my actual website itself. There are a handful of websites/blogs that I read with active comment sections. Active meaning less spam than actual comments. That does not mean a high signal to noise ratio however. One of the sites in particular could employee several moderators just dealing with civility and personal attacks in the comments.
Against the headache of filtering spam and uncivil discourse the use of more JS in the Wordpress ecosystem has lead to several more security problems. See (https://thehackernews.com/2023/01/wordpress-security-alert-new-linux.html) for more information about those.
Given the two previous issues I am working on migrating the website over to Hugo. It will take a few weekends for the migration to be completed. I also need to figure out some best practices for handling a few large files I have on this site without polluting the git history.
It looks like I am going to need to use a CDN for some files.
©2023 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Saturday, July 30, 2022.
The last few days have been frustrating. The good news is ZFS’s data protections actually works.
A bit of backstory. I have a storage server for my home network. That storage server previously had 6 hard drives in it. I used ZFS with in stripe over mirrors configuration. With only 4 drives this is commonly referred to as RAID10. One of the drives decided to start returning uncorrected read errors earlier in the week.
After some emergency drive purchases on Amazon. I started a full rebuild and migration of the storage array. Since, OpenZFS and Fedora are a bit less cooperative than Debian and OpenZFS, I decided to migrate the storage over to Btrfs. An ongoing performance degradation of this storage array is also responsible for the change. Btrfs has a data rebalance option which helps maintain the arrays performance after a longer term of use.
The migration has mostly gone okay. I am still cleaning up a few loose ends from some other maintenance on the storage server that was in progress before the storage array became degraded.
I have managed to crash a Btrfs file system. No comments about Btrfs not being production ready. ZFS wouldn’t have survived that mistake any better.
©2022 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, January 14, 2022.
It is now a new year. With that comes job changes and other changes. Right now I am working on a life insurance career. The job change is cutting into my time for blogging.
©2022 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Saturday, October 30, 2021.
I have needed a tool to manage my local Ubuntu and Debian mirrors. Aptly is probably the best tool available to do the job right now. However, none of the available tools are actually great. Most are in varying degrees of non-maintenance or throw out hordes of errors because they look for every file variation even though the Ubuntu and Debian mirror creation tools only release 1 or 2 variations.
Since I run several physical and virtual machines on my local network, I need a local software mirror. I am also packaging a few updated or tweaked Debian packages, so I need a storage location for those packages. As a result, I am mirroring the stable and testing versions of Debian, and all the versions of Ubuntu back to the current LTS, Focal Fossa. Add to those a few extra repositories I mirror, PPA’s basically, and my maintenance scripts are getting ridiculous. I am getting tired of directly modifying that massive pile of shell scripting every time a new distro release happens. To help with that, I have released a new tool that will create the non-PPA chunk of the shell scripts from scratch.
After trying to build the same piece of software in Go, PHP, and actual proper shell, this time, I decided to try Rust. The result was pretty interesting. Importing dynamic data structures from any configuration file sucks. While I spent about 12 hours figuring out that the TOML would take longer than I originally wanted to implement. The hard-coded configuration took about 16 hours to build and test. You can get a copy from (https://github.com/rrbrussell/aptly_manager).
I would describe using Rust so far as enjoyable frustration. I use a code, run, evaluate, repeat development cycle. While cargo build is not as fast as go build, it is quick enough that I can work at a fairly productive rate. When I understand the language in front of me. The completion of the first sub-command to the final v0.1.0 took about one, maybe two hours. I rapidly completed the last part compared to the fourteen or fifteen hours I spent bumbling around parsing command lines and figuring out Rust’s borrow checker.
I am more familiar with Go, PHP, Java, and C# now than with Rust. However, even accounting for the learning curve, I prefer Rust. First off, it integrates better into Linux than C# or .NET. This would not be a big issue, except I like using one language for most tasks, and it appears to be easier to get Rust and GTK working on Windows than C# and GTK working on Linux. There are a couple of larger projects that I have on the back burner. My options for those projects boil down to three options
Go unfortunately does not work for any of the options because it does not support dynamically loaded plugins or have a useable GUI library available. Rust may not fully support dynamically loading plugins, but it is probably as safe and idiot-proof as Go and supports generics. Rust supports C’s foreign function interface natively, so the worst case is I may write the plugin management code in C and everything else in Rust.
©2021 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved
Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, June 21, 2021.
I flew with family on Southwest. We took three flights. The first was from Tulsa International Airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada. The airport actually is in Paradise, Nevada. Flight SWA1746 was 2 hours and 40 minutes long. The second was from McCarran to Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport in San Jose, California. Flight SWA974 was 1 hour and 15 minutes long. We picked up the last party member in San Jose. Then we flew from San Jose to Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keahole. Flight SWA768 was 5 hours and 43 minutes long.
The planes were a Boeing 737 Max 8, a Boeing 737-700, and a Boeing 737-800. Of the three planes, the 737-700 is too small. The 737-800 was too small for the five-hour flight to Hawaii. All of the flights were full or nearly full.
Photos will be in a separate post.
©2021 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved