Password fields should usually have an option to show the text
I recently had to abruptly replace my smartphone , and because of how it happened Icouldn't directly transfer data from the old phone to the new one;instead, I had to have the new phone restore itself from a cloudbackup of the old phone (made on an OS version several years olderthan the new phone's OS). In the process, a number of passwords andother secrets fell off and I had to re-enter them. As I mentionedon the Fediverse, this didn'
Go still supports building non-module programs with GOPATH
When Go 1.18 was released, I said that it made module mode mandatory , which I wasn't a fan of because it can breakbackward compatibility in practice (and switchinga program to Go modules can be non-trivial ).Recently on the Fediverse, @thepudds very helpfully taught me that I wasn't entirely correct and Gostill sort of supports non-module GOPATH usage , and in factaccording to issue 60915 ,the current support is going to be preserved indefinitely
Discovering that my smartphone had infiltrated my life
While I have a smartphone , I think of myselfas not particularly using it all that much. I got a smartphone quitelate, it spends a lot of its life merely sitting there (not evennecessarily in the same room as me, especially at home), and whileI installed various apps (such as a SSH client) I rarely use them;they're mostly for weird emergencies. Then I suddenly couldn'tuse my current smartphone any more and all sorts ofthings came out of the woodwork
Do you care about (all) HTTP requests from cloud provider IP address space?
About a month ago Mike Hoye wrote Raised Shields , in whichHoye said, about defending small websites from crawler abuse inthis day and age:
If you only care about humans I strongly advise you to block everycloudhost subnet you can find, pretty easy given the effort theyput into finding you. Most of the worst actors out there are livingcomfortably on Azure, GCP, Yandex and sometimes Huawei’s servers.
(As usual, there's no point in complaining about abusive crawlersto the cloud providers .
We can't fund our way out of the free and open source maintenance problem
It's in the tech news a lot these days that there are 'problems'with free and open source maintenance. I put 'problems' in quotesbecause the issue is mostly that FOSS maintenance isn't happeningas fast or as much as the people who've come to depend on it wouldlike , and the people who maintain FOSS areincreasingly saying 'no' when corporations turn up ( cf , also ).But even with all the corporate presence, there are still a reasonablenumber of people
Duplicate metric labels and group_*() operations in Prometheus
Suppose that you have an internal master DNS server and a backupfor that master server. The two servers are theoretically fed fromthe same data and so should have the same DNS zone contents, andespecially they should have the same DNS zone SOAs for all zonesin both of their internal and external views. They both run Bindand you use the Bind exporter , whichprovides the SOA values for every zone Bind is configured to be aprimary or a secondary for. So you can write an alert with anexpression like
BSD PF versus Linux nftables for firewalls for us
One of the reactions I saw to our move from OpenBSD to FreeBSDfor firewalls was to wonder why we weren't moving all the way to nftables based Linuxfirewalls. It's true that this would reduce the number of differentUnixes we have to operate and probably get us more or less stateof the art 10G network performance. However, I have some negativeviews on the choice of PF versus nftables, both in our specific situation and in general.
Making Polkit authenticate people like su does (with group wheel)
Polkit is how a lotof things on modern Linux systems decide whether or not to letpeople do privileged operations, including systemd's run0 ,which effectively functions as another su or sudo . Polkit normallyhas a significantly different authentication model than su or sudo ,where an arbitrary login can authenticate for privileged operations bygiving the password of any 'administrator' account (accounts in groupwheel or group admin, depending on your Linux distribution).
Suppose, not hypothetically, that you want a su like model in Polkit
The (early) good and bad parts of Polkit for a system administrator
At a high level, Polkit is how a lot of things on modern Linux systems decide whether ornot to let you do privileged operations. After looking into it abit , I've wound up feeling that Polkithas both good and bad aspects from the perspective of a systemadministrator (especially a system administrator with multi-userLinux systems, where most of the people using them aren't supposedto have any special privileges). While I've used (desktop) Linuxeswith Polkit for a while and
Brief notes on learning and adjusting Polkit on modern Linuxes
Polkit ( also , also ) is a multi-faceteduser level thing used to control access to privileged operations.It's probably used by various D-Bus services on your system, whichyou can more or less get a list of with pkaction , andthere's a pkexec programthat's like su and sudo . There are two reasons that you mightcare about Polkit on your system. First, there might be tools youwant to use that use Polkit, such as systemd's run0