Peace, Love and C++

DNSync MAC Addresses

Sun, 11 Dec 2016 22:30:27 -0500

I’ve been hacking on a project on and off for my LAN called DNSync. This will take a DNSMasq leases file and sync it to Amazon Route 53.

I’ve added a new feature, which will create A reccords for each MAC address on the LAN.

Since DNSync won’t touch CNAME records, I use CNAME records (manually) to point to the auto-synced A records for services on my LAN (such as my Projector, etc).

Since It’s easy for two machines to have the same name, I’ve decided to add A records for each MAC as well as their client name. They take the fomm of something like ab-cd-ef-ab-cd-ef.by-mac.paultag.house., which is harder to accedentally collide.

DNSync

Sun, 18 Sep 2016 17:00:08 -0400

While setting up my new network at my house, I figured I’d do things right and set up an IPSec VPN (and a few other fancy bits). One thing that became annoying when I wasn’t on my LAN was I’d have to fiddle with the DNS Resolver to resolve names of machines on the LAN.

Since I hate fiddling with options when I need things to just work, the easiest way out was to make the DNS names actually resolve on the public internet.

A day or two later, some Golang glue, and AWS Route 53, and I wrote code that would sit on my dnsmasq.leases, watch inotify for IN_MODIFY signals, and sync the records to AWS Route 53.

I pushed it up to my GitHub as DNSync.

PRs welcome!

go-haversine

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 22:52:41 -0400

In the spirit of blogging about some of the code i’ve written in the past year or two, I wrote a small utility library called go-haversine, which uses the Haversine Forumla to compute the distance between two points.

This is super helpful when working with GPS data - but remember, this assumes everything’s squarely on the face of the planet.

go-wmata - golang bindings to the DC metro system

Sun, 21 Aug 2016 22:16:16 -0400

A few weeks ago, I hacked up go-wmata, some golang bindings to the WMATA API. This is super handy if you are in the DC area, and want to interface to the WMATA data.

As a proof of concept, I wrote a yo bot called @WMATA, where it returns the closest station if you Yo it your location. For hilarity, feel free to Yo it from outside DC.

For added fun, and puns, I wrote a dbus proxy for the API as weel, at wmata-dbus, so you can query the next train over dbus. One thought was to make a GNOME Shell extension to tell me when the next train is. I’d love help with this (or pointers on how to learn how to do this right).

Minica - lightweight TLS for everyone!

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 20:40:28 -0400

A while back, I found myself in need of some TLS certificates set up and issued for a testing environment.

I remembered there was some code for issuing TLS certs in Docker, so I yanked some of that code and made a sensable CLI API over it.

Thus was born minica!

Something as simple as minica tag@domain.tls domain.tld will issue two TLS certs (one with a Client EKU, and one server) issued from a single CA.

Next time you’re in need of a few TLS keys (without having to worry about stuff like revocation or anything), this might be the quickest way out!

HOPE 11

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 08:16:06 -0400

I’ll be at HOPE 11 this year - if anyone else will be around, feel free to send me an email! I won’t have a phone on me (so texting only works if you use Signal!)

Looking forward for a chance to see everyone soon!

SNIff

Sun, 10 Jul 2016 09:34:02 -0400

A while back, I found myself in need of two webservers that would terminate TLS (with different rules). I wanted to run some custom code I’d written (which uses TLS peer authentication), and also nginx on port 443.

The best way I figured out how to do this was to write a tool to sit on port 443, and parse TLS Client Hello packets, and dispatch to the correct backend depending on the SNI name.

SNI, or Server Name Indication allows the client to announce (yes over cleartext!) what server it’s looking for, similar to the HTTP Host header. Sometimes, like in the case above, the Host header won’t work, since you’ve already done a TLS handshake by the time you figure out who they’re looking for.

I also spun the Client Hello parser out into its own importable package, just in case someone else finds themselves in this same boat.

The code’s up on github.com/paultag/sniff!

Iron Blogger DC

Mon, 30 May 2016 21:37:59 -0400

Back in 2014, Mako ran a Boston Iron Blogger chapter, where you had to blog once a week, or you owed $5 into the pot. A while later, I ran it (along with Molly and Johns), and things were great.

When I moved to DC, I had already talked with Tom Lee and Eric Mill about running a DC Iron Blogger chapter, but it hasn’t happened in the year and a half I’ve been in DC.

This week, I make good on that, with a fantastic group set up at dc.iron-blogger.com; with more to come (I’m sure!).

Looking forward to many parties and though provoking blog posts in my future. I’m also quite pleased I’ll be resuming my blogging. Hi, again, planet Debian!

Soylent Sherry Negroni

Sun, 31 May 2015 21:21:37 -0400

paultagskitchen:

Ingredients

1 tsp soylent

1 tsp simple syrup

1 oz Palo Cortado sherry

½ oz Rosso Vermouth

½ oz Campari

Assembly

Combine Soylent and Simple Syrup. Create what I’m going to start to call “Soylent Syrup”. Enjoy that one, folks.

Add ice to a rocks glass, pour Soylent Syrup over ice. Add Sherry, Vermouth and Campari. Stir. Garnish with an orange twist.

Big thanks to Matthew Garrett for sparking this one.

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 10:54:00 -0400

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies:

paultagskitchen:

Ingredients

¾ cups soylent

1 ½ cups rolled oats

½ cup sugar (white & dark brown)

¼ cup flour

¾ cup raisins

½ tsp baking soda & powder

½ tsp salt

1 stick butter (roomtemp - NOT melted. Don’t even try that. Stop. You. I see you.)

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

Assembly

Combine butter,…

BOS -> DC

Sun, 16 Nov 2014 21:06:54 -0500

Hello, World

Been a while since my last blog post - things have been a bit hectic lately, and I’ve not really had the time.

Now that things have settled down a bit – I’m in DC! I’ve moved down south to join the rest of my colleagues at Sunlight to head up our State & Local team.

Leaving behind the brilliant Free Software community in Boston won’t be easy, but I’m hoping to find a similar community here in DC.

On my way to DebConf 14

Fri, 22 Aug 2014 11:33:46 -0400

Slowly, but I’ll be in by Tonight, PST (early morning EST!)

Hope to see everyone soon!

PyGotham 2014

Fri, 15 Aug 2014 14:54:19 -0400

I’ll be there this year!

Talks look amazing, I can’t wait to hit up all the talks. Looks really well organized! Talk schedule has a bunch that I want to hit, I hope they’re recorded to watch later!

If anyone’s heading to PyGotham, let me know, I’ll be there both days, likely floating around the talks.

DebConf 14

Sun, 10 Aug 2014 21:06:28 -0400

I’ll be giving a short talk on Debian and Docker!

I’ll prepare some slides to give a brief talk about Debian and Docker, then open it up to have a normal session to talk over what Docker is and isn’t, and how we can use it in Debian better.

Hope to see y'all in Portland!

Plymouth Bootsplashes

Sun, 20 Jul 2014 17:02:53 -0400

Why oh why are they so hard to write?

Even using the built in modules it is insanely hard to debug. Playing a bootsplash in X sucks and my machine boots too fast to test it on reboot.

Basically, euch. All I wanted was a hackers zebra on boot :(

Satuday's the new Sunday

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 20:41:26 -0400

Hello, World!

For those of you who enforce my Sundays on me (keep doing that, thank you!), I’ll be changing my Saturdays with my Sundays.

That’s right! In this new brave world, I’ll be taking Saturdays off, not Sundays. Feel free to pester me all day on Sunday, now!

This means, as a logical result, I will not be around tomorrow, Saturday.

Much love.

Dell XPS 13

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 22:38:08 -0400

More hardware adventures.

I got my Dell XPS13. Amazing.

The good news: This MacBook Air clone is clearly an Air competitor, and easily slightly better in nearly every regard except for the battery.

The bad news is that the Intel Wireless card needs non-free (I’ll be replacing that shortly), and the touchpad’s driver isn’t totally implemented until Kernel 3.16. I’m currently building a 3.14 kernel with the patch to send to the kind Debian kernel people. We’ll see if that works. Ubuntu Trusty already has the patch, but it didn’t get upstreamed. That kinda sucks.

It also shipped with UEFI disabled, and was defaulting to boot in ‘legacy’ mode. It shipped with Ubuntu, a bit disappointed to not see Ubuntu keys on the machine.

Touchscreen works; in short -stunning. I think I found my new travel buddy. Debian unstable runs great, stable had some issues.

Apple Hardware: Part II

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 14:05:00 -0400

A few interesting things happened after I got a macbook air.

Firstly, I got a lot of shit from my peers and friends about it. This was funny to me, nothing really bothered me about it, but I can see this becoming really tiresome at events like hackathons or conferences.

As a byproduct, there’s a strong feeling in the hardcore F/OSS world that Apple hardware is the incarnation of evil.

As a result of both of the above, hardcore F/OSS (and Distro hackers) don’t buy apple hardware.

Therefore, GNU/Linux is complete garbage on Apple hardware. Apple’s firmware bugs don’t help, but we’re BAD.

Some might ask why this is a big deal. The fact is, this is one of the most used platforms for Open Source development (note I used that term exactly).

Are we to damn these users to a nonfree OS because we want to maintain our purity?

I had to give back my Air, but I still have a Mac Mini that i’ve been using for testing bugs on OSX in code I have. Very soon, my Mac Mini will be used to help fix the common bugs in the install process.

Some things you can do:

Consider not giving off an attitude to people with Apple hardware. Be welcoming.
Consider helping with supporting your favorate distro on Apple hardware. Props to Fedora for doing such a great job, in particular, mjg59 and Peter Jones for all they do with it.
Help me make Debian Apple installs one-click.

Apple and Debian: A tragic love story

Sat, 28 Jun 2014 21:22:33 -0400

One which ends in tears, I’m afraid.

A week or so ago, I got an MacBook Air 13" (MacBook Air 6-2), to take with me when I head out to local hack sessions, and when I travel out of state for short lengths of time. My current Thinkpad T520i is an amazing machine, and will remain my daily driver for a while to come.

After getting it, I unboxed the machine, and put in a Debian install USB key. I wiped OSX (without even booting into it) and put Debian on the drive.

To my dismay, it didn’t boot up after install. Using the recovery mode of the disk, I chrooted in and attempted an upgrade (to ensure I had an up-to-date GRUB). I couldn’t dist-upgrade, the terminal went white. After C-c'ing the terminal, I saw something about systemd’s sysvinit shim, so I manually did a purge of sysvinit and install of systemd.

I hear this has been resolved now. Thanks :)

My machine still wasn’t booting, so I checked around. Turns out I needed to copy over the GRUB EFI blob to a different location to allow it to boot. After doing that, I could boot Debian whilst holding Alt.

After booting, things went great! Until I shut my lid. After that point, my screen was either 0% bright (absolutely dark) or 100% (facemeltingly bright).

I saw mba6x_bl, which claims to fix it, and has many happy users. If you’re in a similar suggestion, I highly suggest looking at it.

Unfortunately, this caused my machine to black out on boot and I couldn’t see the screen at all anymore. A rescue disk later, and I was back.

Annoyingly, the bootup noise’s volume is stored in NVRAM, which gets written out by OSX when it shuts down. After consulting the inimitableMatthew Garrett, I was told the NVRAM can be hacked about with by mounting efivarfs on /sys/firmware/efi/efivars type efivarfs. Win!

After hitting enter, I got a kernel panic and some notes about hardware assertions failing.

That’s when I returned my MacBook and got a Dell XPS 13.

This is a problem, folks.

If I can’t figure out how to make this work, how can we expect our users?

Such a shame the most hardware on the planet gets no support, locking it’s users into even less freedom.

Adventures in AsyncIO: Moxie

Sun, 22 Jun 2014 13:49:21 -0400

This week, I started work on something I’m calling moxie. Due to wanting to use my aiodocker bindings on the backend, I decided to implement it in 100% AsyncIO Python 3.4.

What pushed me over the edge was finding the aiopg driver (postgres asyncio bindings), with very (let me stress - very) immature SQLAlchemy support.

Unfortunately, no web frameworks support asyncio as a first-class member of the framework, so I was forced into writing a microframework. The resulting “app” looks pretty not bad, and likely easy to switch if Flask ever gets support for asyncio.

One neat side-effect was that the framework can support stuff like websockets as a first-class element of the framework, just like GET requests.

Moxie will be a tool to run periodic long-running jobs in a sane way using docker.io.

More soon!