From time to time, I have felt the need to install a specific version of a Homebrew formula. Like the other day, I was
investigating whether a particular problem I was facing with Podman was because of a version bump from 2.x to 3.x.
At some point in the past, a way around it was to find the formula file at a particular commit of the Homebrew tap, and
directly install it via brew install $URL.
That is no longer supported, for good reason. But the tip provided is pretty terse.
I thought I will just jot down the steps I took to do this the recommended way.
So the tech world went a little crazy today, as usual ignoring more consequential problems happening in the world.
Docker posted a notice saying that its Mac and Windows desktop clients will no longer be free for anybody
other than individuals and small companies.
Docker will restrict use of the free version of its Docker Desktop utility to individuals or small businesses, and has
introduced a new more expensive subscription, as it searches for a sustainable business model.
The company has renamed its Free plan to “Personal” and now requires that businesses with 250 or more employees, or
higher than $10m in annual revenue, must use a paid subscription if they require Docker Desktop.
This gave me an excuse to try out something which I had been meaning to do for a while - use Podman as a replacement
for Docker desktop on my Mac.
For most simple to moderately complex web servers in Golang, I have always
preferred to use the standard net/http library, laboring through the
parsing of RequestPaths and query parameters when necessary.
But when the boilerplate code for request parsing starts obscuring the business
logic, I tend to look out at other libraries. I however have always hesitated
using too heavy a framework to keep dependencies simple.
For HTTP routing, for example, I have found httprouter to satisfy most
of the gaps in the standard library that I have frequently faced, and at the
same time the library is totally dep free!
Here are some really quick notes about using the library, mostly for my own
reference. 😄
MySQL 5.6 onwards introduced GTID based replication drastically simplifying
replication setup and increasing reliability. New MySQL cluster 5.6+ setups are
already done with GTID enabled by default.
But if you are one of those people who migrated from a pre-5.6 MySQL version,
you probably avoided enabling GTID to make the upgrade easier. In such a
situation, typically, you would upgrade the slaves to the new MySQL version, and
then failover the master to an upgraded slave. This would let you do an online
upgrade of a MySQL cluster from a pre-5.6 to a 5.6+ installation, but you will
not be able to do this with GTID enabled.
I recently had a requirement to move a bunch of such MySQL 5.7 clusters using
the old binlog position based replication to a GTID based replication setup.
Now there is a pretty good official document about how to do
this manually, which you should definitely read up before doing this. But it is
a pain to do this manually on a bunch of servers.
I captured all the steps mentioned in the document into an Ansible playbook to
automate the whole process. It also includes a procedure missing in the official
document, to actually flip the ongoing replication to GTID protocol.
The playbook source is here with step by step documentation here.
I have a couple of systems at home which provide web services, like my Intel NUC
and my Synology NAS, and I have been wanting for a while to move all of them to
a proper https only environment.
But my biggest hurdle for doing that, has been the enormous pain in managing
certificates in a way that makes everybody - the servers, the browsers, the
local http clients happy. From my previous attempts, there was always the
browsers which annoyed me to no end, and I ended up getting by using improperly
made self-signed certificates and accepting all the invalid certificate warnings
that my browser threw up.
So this Friday night, I spent my late night hours trying to get at the bottom of
it all, and several frustrating hours later, finally made everybody happy.
If you add this bit of code in the <head> section of an HTML 5 page, clicking on
every link will open in a new tab.
<basetarget="_blank">
This tag is mostly used to set a URL to resolve all relative links on a page. But it offers an additional
attribute target to set a default target policy for links.
You can, of course, override the target attribute on a link to link basis, if you are using this feature.
The default Ansible privilege escalation mechanism requires broad sudo
privileges. If your production environment gives you sudo access but bars you
from getting a root shell, you are out of luck. As, the doc says - you cannot
expect Ansible to work when sudo commands are restricted.
Privilege escalation permissions have to be general. Ansible does not always
use a specific command to do something but runs modules (code) from a
temporary file name which changes every time. If you have /sbin/service or
/bin/chmod as the allowed commands this will fail with ansible as those
paths won’t match with the temporary file that ansible creates to run the
module.
I just found another significant part of the spec that I had previously glossed
over, this one is also about untyped constants - numeric constants
in Go live in an unified space with arbitrary precision and a fungible numeric
type.
So, coming from a language like Python, this might not surprise us:
So I ran into this problem at work today with an runit based service breaching open files limit.
My first thought was to increase the system ulimit for nofile in /etc/security/limits.conf. I changed this
from 30k to about 60k. But strangely, the service still keep dying.
Sometimes instead of creating a logger and then passing it around, it is convenient to just use a
global logger.
The standard log library allows you to both create a custom logger using
log.New() or directly use a standard logger instance by calling
the package helper functions log.Printf() and the like.
zap provides such a functionality as well using zap.L() and zap.S(), however using them
didn’t seem so straight forward to me.
