Blog posts

I have a deep affection for email and regard it as one of the most crucial components of modern communication, and to some extent, society at large.

But email is badly treated. Yes, it has flaws, but it accomplished something unique: an universal way to contact someone, for free, from anywhere on the planet.

In this post, I will rant about email, about what I love and what I hate. Some of it will be constructive, while most of it will be a graybeard grumbling about how society ruined something great.

I will use the term email to speak of everything, from protocols to the user perspective. It is an over simplification, but I reassure you and I'll brag about it just now: I know "a lot" about emails.

Also, when I say you I mean developers, sysadmin, webmasters but never users. Users are sacred, users are never wrong, users are like babies in cribs and should be looked after. This is important and should drive our industry.

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I wanted to watch a file under OpenBSD to synchronize my PowerDNS database between two hosts.

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Introduction

I use Ansible to manage all my infrastructure. It's about 50 bare metal servers that sit in my basement.

It works well, but I have a few issues:

• It can be very slow
• YAML can be very tricky to edit
• Sometimes, it takes ages to find how to do something that seems very simple
• The output is not helpful, it is either not detailed enough, or a huge flow of debug information

The third one is the biggest pain point. I spent sometimes hours trying to get how to use some plugin to do something simple.

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I use keychain from funtoo which helps re-using ssh-agent.

But I had an isssue from time to time, the $SSH_AUTH_SOCK would be unset.

It seems there is an issue with Universal fish variable which keychain uses.

The workaround is to copy those variables to global ones, like so in your config.fish.

if status --is-interactive
    keychain --agents ssh --eval --quiet --inherit any -Q | source
    # Make those variables global to avoid universal version override
    set -xg SSH_AUTH_SOCK $SSH_AUTH_SOCK
    set -xg SSH_AGENT_PID $SSH_AGENT_PID
end

This ensure that setting those variables in other terminals will not mess them up.

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