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Preamble

After like 5 years of no updates, due to, guess what, pandemic, depression and some other stuff, I have finally migrated my blog to Zola.

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Preambule

As always, a mix of re-reading books I like and new authors & series and some disappointements as well, nothing is perfect…

I did not achieve the 2019 Goodreads contest this time, partly because this has been a bad year work-wise (no I won’t give any details, please don’t ask) and I went another way to compensate for this, I started being more serious about playing World of Tanks¹ so it took most of my time. Still read a decent number of books but I felt I didn’t have enough energy to give to books, WoT is easier on my mind in these times. I did not write any blog posts either as you can see apart from these ones.

Our friends at Goodreads have done some nicely presented stats here and this article will go in more details than just stats :)

To the books!

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Preambule

Once again, I was too shy and blew away my challenge of 42 with reading… 100 ¹! This was an exceptional year for reading. Not that I mind though but I shall try next year to be more precise… :)

Our friends at Goodreads have done some nicely presented stats here and this article will go in more details than just stats :)

As always, a mix of re-reading books I like and new authors & series and some disappointements as well, nothing is perfect… This article is fairly long of course, due to the much higher number of books :)

To the books!

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Preambule

I have now completed my API Wrapper series with this new one for the SSLLabs API, currently at v3. It is the perfect complement to the Cryptcheck) API and the Mozilla Observatory one I published earlier.

Welcome to the Golang API wrapper, now at version 0.10.0 (and using Semantic Versioning to ensure compatibility) and available on Github there.

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Preambule

This is a rant. You are warned. Expect strong language. There be Dragons. You can still get away.

I have been protecting my personal

DNS zone with

DNSSEC for quite some time, it was not difficult, I used the “DNSSEC in 6 minutes” presentation a few years ago and it worked. I have changed the way I manage my zones mainly because Let’s Encrypt happened in my

TLS certificates workflow but still use DNSSEC. It is fine.

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Preambule

Like I did for the cryptcheck.fr API in the previous article), please welcome the API wrapper for the Mozilla Observatory API. The Mozilla Observatory is a site which include many tests for websites including TLS (SSLLabs & Cryptcheck) and HTTP-related ones (XSS protection, X-Frame, Content Security Policy and many others).

My Golang API wrapper, now at version 1.0.0 (and using Semantic Versioning to ensure compatibility) is available on Github there.

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Preambule

Many of you know the SSLLabs site. Built by Qualys, Inc., it enables anyone to test various

TLS -related parameters for given website running on port 443 (the default for TLS). But did you know there is also the cryptcheck.fr one? Formerly known as Imirhil, it allow not only for https websites to be tested but also

SMTP ,

IMAP ,

SSH and general TLS (using a different port like a few API do) ones.

Both are integrated in the Mozilla Observatory which also include more tests such as HTTP headers and whether a given site is pre-loaded in browsers (

HSTS ).

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Preambule

Hopefully I have broken the bad luck series I have been in the past two years; not only I managed to read all the books I planned to, I even manage to more or less explode my challenge with 65 books out of 35 \o/. What happened? Better work conditions with my new position and a new house might just have been what I needed so I could find more time for reading…

Our friends at Goodreads have done some nicely presented stats here and this article will go in more details than just stats :)

As always, a mix of re-reading books I like and new authors & series and some disappointements as well, nothing is perfect…

To the books!

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Background

A long time ago, I got a RIPE Atlas probe from a friend of mine — who does not know Stéphane Bortzmeyer?. For those who don’t know, these probes creates a big friendly botnet that enables all users — including you, whether you have one or not — to create “measurements” on the global Internet.

Measurements are used today to (guess what) measure things like DNS queries, network latencies and more. Having a probe enables you to participate by submitting your own network data. The more probes there are, the better. It has been frequently used on the past to find out about DNS censorship like here, here or here.

How does it work? The probes have a set of builtin measurements that get sent regularely to the RIPE servers and there is an API available to make queries out of these probes. There is of course an official tool available but it is in Python. While I could just use it, I do not like Python.

Various tools are available in different languages as well here.

As a Golang fan, I’ve tried to use these and was never satisfied. Either the CLI sucks or the tool had too many dependencies or something else. So you can guess, I had to write one myself. That was also an excuse to play a bit more with Go as a language :)

And today, I released version 0.21 of my so called ripe-atlas tool. After (way too many) commits, changes and test-by-errors, it is now usable.

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Preambule

You may remember these articles I posted a while ago in the “howtos” category on my website. I had two of them on my ZFS-on-root setup, one on FreeBSD 8.2 for a local machine and one for a remotely managed server on FreeBSD 9.2.

The most important one was the latter as I moved all my services on dedicated servers hosted in datacentres (all managed by Online¹).

My most heavily used machine at Online is getting old now by today’s standards and, to stay within the scope of the aforementioned articles, lacking the cryptographic hardware extensions in its CPU (an Intel Xeon L3426 — as you can see, old :)).

While I was just running my web & mail site out of it, I do not really need blazing fast disks (or I’d have taken SSD) but still, now that I’m sharing stuff with the Transmission P2P client and building my own set of FreeBSD packages for the host and its jails with Poudriere, the bandwidth limitation is taking its toll (35 MB/s without the

AES-NI instructions vs 150 MB/s).

I may also running out of disks space (ahem), the disks are 90% filled…

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Preambule

Well, if I thought (cf. the previous article) that 2015 was bad for reading, well, 2016 clearly beat 2015 by a long shot :(

I planned reading a bit more than 2015 (goal was 48) and I managed… 30. A freaking disaster. I was mostly unable to read during the first half of 2016, too many issues at work and in my personal life.

See for yourself: the 2016 challenge

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(followup on previous article)

The last day of BSDCan is always special: all talks start at 10AM instead of the usual 9AM to account for the preceding night, generally filled with beer and food for some reasons :) It is also when the famous auction is taking place. During the closing session, Dan will auction a few items and the money given to the Ottawa Mission charity. He does that also with PGcon, the equivalent of BSDCan for Postgresql.

But for now, the talks!

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(followup on previous article)

Dan officially opened the conference as usual, under supervision by Groff of course, now a regular attendee of all conferences :)

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Second day of the devsummit at BSDCan. One very important session on the morning, the one about what was finally put into upcoming 11-RELEASE and what we want to have (or at least try to) for release 12.0. See below.

This is a followup on yesterday’s post

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Let’s begin this new series on BSDCan 2016!

As usual, we will have two days of both tutorials and FreeBSD devsummit, a regular event in almost all BSD-related conferences now.

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Yet another (tiny) proof 2015 was one of the worst in recent years, I did not manage to read all the 42 books I put on my 2015 Reading Challenge on Goodreads. I listed at least 42 books like last year and am at 38. 4 books short, mainly because I could not read for the last month more or less. Feeling depressed after the November attacks in Paris and death of friends didn’t help.

2015 is, like 2014, a mix between re-reading books I love (Roger Zelazny again!) and new books and authors.

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Last post in my series about EuroBSDCon 2015 — See previous one.

Day 2

I know most of his stuff but listening to Kirk McKusick is always funny as he has a lot of stories to tell about all these days a Berkeley :) — This time it was about the history of the

BSD Fast File System .

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This is a followup post on the one about the EuroBSDCon FreeBSD devsummit that you can find here.

This conference is dedicated to the late Paul Schenkeveld who passed away a the beginning of the year. Paul was President of the EuroBSDCon Foundation and a friend to us all.

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…and we are back for a new BSD-related conference :)

Now we are talking about the FreeBSD devsummit, taking place two days before the EuroBSDCon conference. This year, it is in Stockholm, Sweden.

Like last year in Sofia, Bulgaria, it is a smaller conference and devsummit compared to BSDCan. The list of topics is available on the FreeBSD wiki.

Our hosts this year are the company called Init, big thanks to them!

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(followup on previous article)

Talks

This is the last day of the conference today and I started it with Ed Schouten’s talk on CloudABI. CloudABI is there to add some more secure and testable features to UNIX systems. Something to look into in the future.

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(followup on previous article)

Introduction

BSDCan is having more than 280 people this year and is having an additional track which means 33% more talks \o/

Dan officially opened the conference as usual after playing a bit with the video feed on his phone and we got both of us on the screen :)

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Second day of the devsummit at BSDCan. Two working groups for me (Doc WG and LibXO) and some other things. See below. This is a followup on yesterday’s post

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After the series of articles I did for EuroBSDcon here, let’s begin this new series on BSDCan 2015!

As usual, we will have two days of both tutorials and FreeBSD devsummit, a regular event in almost all BSD-related conferences now.

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This is a Followup on the previous article

Just saw the Imitation Game yesterday night, in VOST ¹ in Paris.

Mild spoilers below, do not read if you intend to watch it :)

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Alan Turing

Everybody (maybe even the dog ¹) is speaking of the 2014 movie called “The Imitation Game” with Benjamin Cumberbatch starring as

Alan Turing but how many really know him?

For many people, Alan Turing is one of the fathers of the modern computer (along with

John Von Neumann ) and rightfully so. What they need to know and what the movie is trying to do (I have yet to see it) is to show how influential he was.

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2014 has been a very good year for my reading. In fact, I have not read that many books in a year for a long time and am pretty happy about it. Reading is very important to me and has been for a long time now, I remember thoroughly scrubbing the SciFi section of my town’s library in the ’80 (« Fleuve Noir », « Présence du futur »…) clean of everything I haven’t read :)

What made 2014 so efficient? Foremost the desire and will to read more of course but the most important thing that happened is me buying that iPad Mini Retina back in Oct, 2013. I’ve switched from physical books to ebooks a long time ago, when all my books were still in cardboard following our move from one flat to another¹. Maybe I will devote an article to the subject of ebooks…

UPDATE: Finally got 42 books (yeah for #geek in me!) in for 2014, thanks Corwin of Amber :)

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Foreword: this is not a just-for-ranting-blog but it seems News flying around these days are just “rant fodder” :(

TL;DR: I am ashamed of being a man. Please read on if you want to help.

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Last day of the EuroBSDCon 2014 conference (ok, there are only two days anyway :)) with all three tracks as yesterday, another keynote and the closing session where the next EuroBSDCon host is traditionally announced.

Like yesterday, I only chaired some talks so I’m going to talk only about the ones I followed.

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Very busy day today at the EuroBSDCon 2014 conference in Sofia, Bulgaria as I had to chair one entire track from morning to evening.

That means assuring the speakers are there on time, introducing each of them in a few words and managing questions after the talk is finished (while managing the time of course).

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Slightly less busy day during the second run of devsummit sessions, although the ones in the morning were pretty important for us.

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So today was the first day of the EuroBSDCOn 2014 conference, traditionally starting by two days of FreeBSD devsummit, a meeting of FreeBSD developers, talking about various topics and thinking about FreeBSD’s future.

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It is no secret that I like Science Fiction & Fantasy (my Goodreads profile shows that :)) and I like classical authors such as

Michael Moorcock ¹ ,

Isaac Asimov and of course

J. R. R. Tolkien . I’m not reading only these of course and my list of authors has been growing over the years.

One genre I’ve been reading into lately is

Steampunk which mix steam-powered machinery with special things such as post-apocalyptic world or magic.

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