GnuPG, IPv6, Cloud, HDD, Ubuntu, Foldering, GCP

  • So much fun, for some unknown reason gpg-agent / default pinentry program (pinentry-curses) totally fails, when run in screen on server over ssh. Strange, way strange. Seems pretty basic fail. Strangely I didn't quickly find anyone else reporting the same issue. But it's clear, it's totally messed up. If screen is detached and gpg run without screen, it works normally. Anyway, using pinentry-tty worked prefectly after installing it. For some interesting reason also the pinentry process was in infinite loop consuming 100% of singe thread performance. Really don't know how this happened.
  • IPv6 routing issues on Scaleway disappeared as strangely as those started. It seems that they fixed it and just didn't bother to notify me on my ticket. Well, issue resolved. Everything's good so far and for now.
  • A cloud provider gave a two weeks notice. They're shutting down. You've got two weeks to move everything off, because systems are going down. Great. Actually that's not that bad, because I've got plan for that. But I'm sure there would be many businesses, where that would cause some kind of issues. Another thing is, what if the "cloud" would disappear over night without any warning and never return. How would you deal with that. - Sure, that wouldn't be fun, it would take quite a lot of work, but not a huge problem after all. I personally think it's huge risk to put everything in the cloud, and think it's safe, especially if you're using single service provider or something like that.
  • Installing new HDD and burn-in testing it took several days. But I think it's worth of it. It's just crazy to install new drive, without properly testing it. I've unfortunately done that so many times, I'm not doing it anymore. What's more annoying that finding out that the drive has been all the time broken, but you just haven't known about it. I also had forgotten how long it takes to initialize ext4 block groups lazily on large drive. It took several hours.
  • Upgraded bunch of servers to the 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver. Interestingly everything worked perfectly, phew! Also checked that systemd-timesyncd.service uses local fast NTP server which less than 1 ms round trip latency.
  • Pursuance Project - It's been getting forward. Yet their Kickstarter campaign is as lame as it can be. It's interesting to see what kind of circus some open source projects are. And how different that's from the traditional style of getting things done. - One American friend got insulted when I said that their Presidential Election is more like bad reality TV show. Yeah, I of course do understand the political and governmental value of it. But it doesn't make it any different how silly the campaigning appears to be.
  • Really enjoyed reading The Psychology of Money. Obviously it got nothing new. But a few of the examples were kind of hilarious, most of stuff was just plain obvious.
  • CPU temperature alarm went off, first time like forever. I were converting one video to AV1 format while playing another HEVC video and, beep. Alarm goes off. I guess I haven't loaded my CPU this much for extended periods ever. Just proves the 95% of CPU resources are wasted.
  • Manafort 'Foldering' - Everything you put to the cloud / Internet, stays there forever. You don't know who's going to access it, and if the copies are stored forever. That's good to keep in mind. There's no way to be sure data is removed, unless you're running the systems.
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is publicly launched in Finland. Finally. Interestingly the networking latency to Google Cloud is exceptionally high and bad. Yet, that's nothing new. Compared to competitors, Google has been really slow all the time. That's around 4 times higher ping than to UpCloud and Hetzner locations. Yet I prefer more cost efficient generic solutions like UpCloud or Hetzner, yet Hetzners VPS servers aren't available in Finland yet. Update: Of course Hetzner VPS are now available
  • Read more about ROTACS / PolarNet / Artic Connect. It remains to be seen when it will be built. Route is good, so it will probably happen sooner or later. Cinia tries to push it forward.
  • Nice post about Python GIL. Yet there's nothing new in it. Yep, that's the way it works. That's also the reason why some tasks require multiprocessing.
  • Studied and tested setting up custom (sub)domain with GitHub, GitLab worked fine and using pages feature. But it seems that Bitbucket doesn't support it, so I didn't event bother to try.

2019-11-24