Stuff and things - Peter Wemm's personal blog

Stuff and things

Goodbye LastPass! You're fired!

Caution: Rant ahead. I've been reasonably happy with LastPass [https://lastpass.com/] for around 5 years. My whole family used paid premium subscriptions. When I first had to make a choice of password managers, it essentially came down to 1Password or LastPass. At the time I preferred 1Password

Using Let's Encrypt within FreeBSD.org

I decided to give Let's Encrypt certificates a shot on my personal web servers earlier this year after a disaster with StartSSL. I'd like to share what I've learned. The biggest gotcha is that people tend to develop bad habits when they only have

How a failed disk lead to a kernel bug in the network stack.

Sometimes, you should just stay in bed. Today was one of those days. Over my first coffee (of many) I check in with the other freebsd.org admin folks and see if there were any fires while I was asleep. I was reminded that one of our mail servers has

Why we don't run freebsd-update inside freebsd.org

We don't run freebsd-update or portsnap in the freebsd.org cluster, but not for reasons you might think. It's more for philosophical and practical reasons. Having recently mentioned this in a firestorm on twitter, I will attempt to shed some light on why. The first reason

Using nghttp2 to work around nginx bugs.

For the most part nginx has been my default go-to choice. While it has its quirks and strange design choices usually doesn't get in the way. Lately their refusal to backport bug fixes from their development version to the stable version has been causing some problems. Specifically, the

Accidentally fixing problems I didn't know I had

I confess. I use KDE on FreeBSD on my primary desktop. The nVidia drivers were the big enabler for me and it was enough to switch back from an OSX desktop to FreeBSD. My desktop demands weren't that great - my main use case was to be able

Looking for ideas: simple kerberos/gssapi authenticated key-value data store

I have a problem that has irritated me for a while. I have lots of FreeBSD machines and jails. In general, all the command and control is pull based. For the most part, this works fine. Except where that's mighty inconvenient. For the sake of keeping the discussion

Switching SSL certs to letsencrypt

Last night's StartSSL outage - including the OCSP servers - was the last straw. I decided to give letsencrypt a go. I won't miss StartSSL - it was always painful to deal with them and having them permanently blacklist FreeBSD.org as a rogue site always

Setting up FreeBSD with Comcast IPv6

There have been a number of how-to posts of various ages. Here's how I do it with no pain and suffering. There's some documentation in the FreeBSD handbook [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-ipv6.html] but it is not usable for a Comcast client configuration.

Upgrade your subversion repositories!

We use Subversion [https://subversion.apache.org] in the FreeBSD [https://www.freebsd.org/] project. Without a lot of fanfare, the Subversion folks have recently release version 1.9. If you are using subversion, you should care about this. A lot. A dump/load has potentially significant savings. In this

Site migration fun

As many people in the FreeBSD community know, we're in the process of moving core parts of the FreeBSD.org cluster from one site to another. As part of the process we're taking the opportunity to pay off some of the tech debt and clean things

Back out all the things! Oh wait..

It's one of those things that everybody knows. When something breaks, you revert recent changes (or bisect) until it works. You keep going until you solve the problem. The identified code is removed from upstream and everyone moves on. That's the way it works, right? But

140 Characters is not enough

I like twitter. I like that it encourages me to get to the point. But sometimes, it just isn't enough. Lately I've found myself resorting to pastebin-like services for adding extra information and posting a teaser with a link to twitter, but enough is enough. Behold,