The shift from "two factor" to "multi-factor" authentication
While I wasn't paying attention, something interesting happened toauthentication terminology; what was once called "two factorauthentication" has now become "multi-factor authentication", orat least people now mostly talk about MFA instead of 2FA. Somesources will say that there's a difference between MFA and 2FA,while others consider MFA to just be the new name for 2FA (see, forexample, how the PCI standard shifted to using "MFA" ).
Most of my exposure to
Firefox's slow takeover of the address bar's space
In the current Firefox 88, and I believe in the next version aswell (currently Firefox Beta), part of the address bar is a '...'menu for "Page actions". Through using the right button on itemsin this menu, or on the icons on the right side of the address bar,you can add or remove certain icons from the right side, thingslike the "Bookmark this page" star. If you start up a current FirefoxNightly, you will discover the
Maybe a local, on-machine caching DNS resolver should be standard (for us)
We have traditionally configuredour Ubuntu servers to have an /etc/resolv.conf that points at ourcentral recursive DNS resolvers. People in research group sandboxnetworks have generally donelikewise, partly because it's usually been the easiest thing to do.Machines have to consult our local resolvers in order to correctlylook up other local machines, and once you're doing that you mightas well not add any extra layers (which have generally taken extrawork to add). But there's a downside to
The question of how to do non-annoying multi-factor authentication for SSH
Suppose, hypothetically, that you have access to a general multi-factorauthentication (MFA) system such as Duo (with the choice of MFAsystem not being under your control), and that you would like touse this for secure SSH logins to your collection of (Ubuntu)servers. This is generally easy by itself, with pretty much any MFAsystem having a PAM module that adds a second factor challenge toyour regular SSH authentication. Unfortunately the result of astraightforward MFA integration with SSH logins is going to
The question of having SATA drives behind modern SAS expanders
A long time ago, when we were building our second generation ofZFS fileservers , I wound up digginginto SAS and using SATA disks with SAS . WithSAS, there are two ways to talk to your disks; you can directlyconnect each SAS port to a single disk or you can connect one SASport to a SAS expander , whichthen connects (directly or indirectly) to some number of disks. Atthe time, talking to SATA disks through SAS expanders was prettymuch not recommended, so we built both
Why people care about SAS despite not being 'enterprise'
The short way to describe SAS (Serial AttachedSCSI) is that it's the 'enterprise' version of SATA. This isn'tliterally the case (SAS evolved from SCSI, while SATA came from ATA),but in practice the two occupy more or less the same niche as diskinterconnect technologies. As the Wikipedia page will tell you, there'slittle physical difference between them (which is good for everyone),and you can often connect to SATA drives using SAS controllers andother hardware .
How I want to use pip with PyPy to install third party programs
After seeing PyPy run a moderate program faster than CPython , I wondered how easy it would be to use PyPy to run pyls (which I usefor LSP-based editing for Python in GNU Emacs ),since pyls is reasonably big and probably reasonably CPU intensive.Pyls is a third party program that's not packaged by Ubuntu butwhich is available through PyPI , so normallyI install it with ' pip3 install --user ... ' so that it goes in $HOME/.local/bin
Go 1.17 will allow converting a slice to an array pointer (some of the time)
In Go , slices contain a reference to theirbacking array, whether this is an array that exists somewhere as adistinct variable of its own or is simply an anonymous array thatwas allocated to support the slice (that it can be either case cansometime make slices seem like two data structures in one ). The presence of this backing array can leadto interesting memory leaks or just surprisingchanges to your slices , but in Go through 1.16you can't get direct access to the backing array without
PyPy starts fast enough for our Python 2 commands
Some day, Linux distributions like Ubuntu are not going to packagePython 2 even in a limited version, the way they're doing now. Oneway for us to deal with this would be to migrate all of our remaininglittle Python 2 programs and scripts to Python 3. Another optionis to run them under PyPy , which saysthat it will always support Python 2.7 .
One of the potential issues with PyPy is that its JIT has a highwarm-up cost ,which means that small, short
Trying out learning more Vim on demand
These days, I have a reasonably active interest in learning moreVim. Mostly I've done it by reading articles about Vim ( eg ,and I'm keeping an index ). Sadly, a lot ofthe time this reading doesn't really stick. Recently I have beentrying another approach, one that feels really obvious. When I wantto do something, such as capitalize uppercase a numberof words, I'll go do an Internet search for the answer (here [vim capitalize uppercase word