An announcement went out today from BitBucket, one of the largest players in the version control platform market. They let the world know that due to declining popularity, they were going to stop allowing Mercurial repositories to be hosted with them. But not only will they stop allowing new repositories and new commits, they will completely delete all existing repositories by the middle of next year.
Of course, a private company such as Atlassian is allowed to make their own decisions about their web presence and what they do with it, it is within their rights.
As a reward to myself for 6 months of regular posts - no mean feat given my previous history of blogging - I have allowed myself to splurge and purchase parts for a new ‘server’. In this case I didn’t use proper server components like my NAS re-re build, deciding that for the bang-for-buck I wanted wouldn’t be found trying to source Intel Xeon processors. I also wanted to avoid the sort of over-sized rackmount or workstation monolith that comes with powerful SME machinations and go for something meatier than the small business builds you find in things like the HP N40L MicroServer (one of which I already have from years ago).
Problem I recently purchased a new ‘server’ and started setting up a bunch of services including GitLab and Taiga. I also want these services available outside my home network but I also want to meet at least the bare modicum of security by having my sites secured via TLS. This isn’t too much of a problem if they’re all hosted on the same IP address or each service has a dedicated IP address like you’ll find in many public scenarios.
Running OpenNebula or miniONE on a single host with one NIC? Watch out! OpenNebula/miniONE creates a “dummy” interface with an address like 172.16.200.1 and then attaches the bridge to that directly. While this is probably useful for trialling and not having your virtual machines visible/attackable from the outside world, you might want to make them visible to other hosts on your LAN.
What you’ll need to do is go into /etc/netplan/minione.
Released in 1991, Gopher was a protocol designed for retrieving documents over the internet and a direct competitor/predecessor to the World Wide Web. The system of hierarchical menus and documents made it excellent for information organisation and allowed digital libraries and interconnected directories, bridging gaps between research campuses. It’s simple protocol was also well suited to text-only output devices, but the rise of graphical user interfaces probably assisted in it’s slow demise compared with the lurid layout and formatting capabilities of HTML.
For my game project, I want to have multiple Docker containers started up at once which are all linked together by easy-to-use hostnames (not terrible auto-generated Docker hashes).
The solution to this arrived to me pretty easily thanks to my friend @will2bill on Twitter who pointed out that Docker Compose is a thing! By declaring a YAML manifest file called docker-compose.yml and filling it appropriately you can have a series of linked containers come up easily with a single command, sudo docker-compose up -d.
One of the main drawbacks I can think of to a static blog is the lack of easy search function. Because all the files are pre-generated HTML, CSS, and JS, there’s no server-side interpreted language that can perform actions and no database of posts which can be filtered. I decided to change this and did a little proof-of-concept on my local machine for how it would work.
If you’re running a Hugo blog, you can repeat my little experiment yourself!
When you’re setting up SSH on a new Linux install you need to be aware of the right permissions for your files - especially if you’re manually importing files from another installation. Below you’ll find a list of what permissions are required for what files/directories.
To set these permissions, just run chmod XXX FILENAME where you replace XXX with the permission number and FILENAME with the file/path.
.ssh directory - 700 - this makes it not writeable by other users.
To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?
— Netflix US (@netflix) December 11, 2017 This tweet from Netflix and some similar stuff from Spotify is some really cute marketing but I’ve seen a few people worried, calling it a privacy violation and claiming that anyone at these companies can just access all your personal data.
So I’m going to try and put those worries/fears to rest.
I’ve previously discussed hosting my site on AWS using a combination of Simple Storage Service (S3), CloudFront, and Route 53. I’m still doing that now and it’s been amazingly responsive and great for a static website (still using Hugo like I posted about previously).
However one of the ultimate goals of the modern web is security and projects like Let’s Encrypt have helped democratise access to SSL certificates, providing a free alternative that lets everyone secure their website without huge costs or slow verification procedures.