Thought Bricks

I’m in my second uke class at Front Porch. It’s been a great experience. I’m much better than I was when I started earlier this year. I’m not good, but that’s sort of besides the point. Uke really is about the journey for me. I don’t even know what the destination is. I don’t have ambitions to be like this guy, not that it would even be possible. It’s been a great distraction as well.

I’ve recently volunteered to help with a website for a local organization that I participate in. The website (which is quite good and serves the organization well) is created in WordPress and hosted on WP Engine. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked with WordPress. My old website was on WordPress for while, but I discontinued that in about 2011. I’ve been doing some background reading on it and associated technology (e.

Jack Cook has a great post about a side-channel attack on web browsers. He explains the attack very well and illustrates it with some nice hands-on examples that run the browser. What I like most is that he outlines how he developed the attack by simplifying a more complex approach and applying AI to the results. It’s quite sobering in its simplicity and power. Really well done. If you have any interest at all in this sort of thing, give it a read.

This article on the IBM Developer site has a history of shell evolution. It isn’t anything novel, but the nice family tree diagram and comparison of scripts in different shells are illuminating. They don’t discuss zsh. The zsh FAQ outlines a brief history of that shell. In that FAQ, zsh is described as closest to the Korn shell (ksh). There are also some options to make zsh act like other shells like CSH_JUNKIE that makes it more compatible with csh.

I was setting up some simple jails following the useful instructions in the FreeBSD Handbook. Setting up a thin jail using ZFS snapshots is pretty straightforward and I was able to get a jailed system up and running in short order. That’s when the fun began. I wanted to test a NGINX server running in the jail on an inherited IP. When I tried to do the install from the host using pkg -j thinjail install nginx-lite it failed essentially saying that it couldn’t connect to update the repository catalog.

After some deliberation, experimentation and research, I’ve decided to go with zsh as my interactive shell on FreeBSD. zsh has nice modern shell features that I’m missing when I’m at the shell prompt in sh, the default FreeBSD shell. Simple stuff like !! or !$ that I tend to use quite a bit. I’m most familiar with bash, but that seems to cut against the grain of FreeBSD. Also, zsh is the default on MacOS now so I use it quite freqently there.

Although the name is resonant of a Beyonce fan group, bhyve is an interesting hypervisor for FreeBSD. To get started, I followed the script in the FreeBSD Handbook and within about 5 minutes, had a FreeBSD guest running on a VM inside my FreeBSD host. I did get caught in a boot loop. Going to the shell and using shutdown -p now got me out of it and I was able to start the VM normally using sh /usr/share/examples/bhyve/vmrun.

One of the most interesting aspects of FreeBSD to me was the virtualization features. There are two main ones: jails and bhyve. I haven’t looked at bhyve in detail yet, but jails are very interesting. Jails are akin to LXD/LXD as they are both ways to improve on chroot. They are both more about system virtualization rather than the application virtualization approach of Docker. On a first comparison, creating a jail seems more involved than creating a container on LXD.

One thing that I’ve noticed and appreciated about FreeBSD is that it is a monolithic project. In Linux, you have the kernel and then all of the user space stuff that is part of a distribution. Sometimes, it just seems strange to have these different parts being updated with one command. FreeBSD does it differently. freebsd-update fetch gets the updates for the OS and pkg update gets them for the installed packages.

My Dell R620 server has an iDRAC 7 card in it. Since the server is very loud compared to my other computers (laptops and a custom build micro tower), it’s nice to be able to control it from across the house. It’s not exactly in the most accessible place in my office and I hate crawling around to hit a power button. Due to the noise and power consumption, I tend to switch the system off (shutdown -p now) when I’m done with it and it’s very nice to have a system that you can just ssh into and run /admin1-> racadm serveraction powerup to start it up.