u/-lousyd

I would love to be able to highlight a block of text and then hit a key combo to open a command line where I could manipulate the text with a selection of Linux style commands. Like, highlight my text and then pipe it through grep and then sort, hit enter, and it replaces the highlighted text with the grepped and sorted output. sed, perl, column, paste, cut, tr, all those goodies. That'd be cool.

From an interview with Charity Majors:

DevOps was about trying to create a feedback loop that connected people writing the code to the code running in production. She thinks that the "ops people: learn to code!" wave worked, but the "software engineers: understand your code in production" failed, to this day.

I haven't listened to the actual interview.

But based on my personal experience I agree. Ops people have changed a lot about how they do their work in the last 10 or 15 years, to where infrastructure and its configuration have become an exercise in writing code of various kinds. No infra team has been unchanged, even the ones that had to be dragged kicking and screaming. But I still see a lot of dev teams that sit in their silo producing their product to then hand it over to someone else (i.e. us). The one change for all devs is that they write Dockerfiles and have to think about how that works. But the dev teams I work with still don't actually touch infrastructure, by and large.

You know what would be super secure and not at all inconvenient? If we implemented a process where you have to go into Entra and click a button to elevate your account, hang out for a minute watching a thing spin, and *then* go login to your web app. We'll put on a little theater performance in the lobby about how forward thinking we are and everyone will clap and throw bouquets. /s

What is this BS? I get (and support) MFA, but that's something you do at the point and time of login. And I get the general idea of having to go through an extra elevation step to take specific administrator-level actions, like the Windows UAC prompt or sudo or apps that ask for your password again when you do certain things. But the process here is to go somewhere completely different, click a button, and then go to the app you need to get into and try logging in. And they want you to enter a text field "justification" every time you do this. What do you think the justification is?? Doing my job, that's what.

What if you can't get to Entra? What if you forget where to go in Entra? (I totally would.) What if you have work to do and can't be faffing about in someone else's security sadism fantasy?

I have a script that collects a list of directories that match a set of criteria and then goes into each one and runs a command. So something like this:

#!/bin/bash
startDir="$(realpath "$1")"
cd "$startDir" || exit
while IFS= read -r -d '' dir; do
  cd "$dir";
  printf '\n\n%s\n' "$(realpath .)";
  update-this-dir.sh --file "./name.txt"
  cd "$startDir";
done < <(find . -type d -iname '.config' -exec dirname {} \; | tr '\n' '\0')

It works wonderfully for my purpose.

But there's, like, a couple thousand directories and the update command takes some small amount of time in each directory, one after the other. How can I modify this script to either run the update for each directory in parallel (with some rate-limiting) or to break up the list into chunks of, say, 100 each and work on each sub-list in parallel?

I bought a server. Where's my website?

Friend: Hello, this is generic hosting company, how can I assist you today?

POTU: HELLO? I bought a server from you guys a few days ago and on your website you claimed 2 hour set up but it isn't online yet.

Friend: No problem, let me check it out for you.

friend checks their CRM and find the server is, in fact, up and running. So he goes back on the line.

POTU: That can't be. I'm going to <insert pottery company name website here>.com and it isn't working.

Friend: I'm sorry m'am, but you do realise that buying a dedicated server means you get only the host, and nothing on it right? So no website will be created for you.

[Flock cameras sawed off and stolen in Winona, Minnesota](https://www.news8000.com/news/crime/flock-cameras-sawed-off-and-stolen-in-winona-minnesota/article\_bd34e1a2-b911-4e64-871e-f22a891aaf83.html)

There's gotta be a reason, right?

Fark is a really funny website. It shares news articles and stuff but the point is the fark headline, not the articles themselves. You should totally check it out if you want that old school human feel. I'm posting because [apparently their subscriber numbers are dropping](https://bsky.app/profile/drewcurtis.bsky.social/post/3mqzzcrtbdk22?utm\_source=fark&utm\_medium=website&utm\_content=link&utm\_campaign=fark&ICID=ref\_fark). An old internet site might go dark. Get in on it before it's gone!

Here's a bit from Wikipedia about the site:

"Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites.

"Fark was created in 1999 by Drew Curtis of Lexington, Kentucky. Curtis states that the word "fark" originated either from a chat room euphemism for the word fuck, or from a drunken misspelling, although he tells people it is the former because it is a "better story that way". He registered the domain name in September 1997, when a friend mentioned that all of the four letter domain names were disappearing. Originally, Fark contained no content except for an image of a squirrel with large testicles."

Like pb and j, gzip and tar go together. Some questions:

Why didn't tar just grow an encryption feature? Why is being able to zip a new program?

Does any other common file format pairing combine extensions the way you do with .tar.gz or (sometimes) .tgz?

Why don't people do that with video files to show codec and container format?

I thought surely someone must've asked this before, but I can't find it if so.

Oh no! No more robot to almost accidentally run over in my car. ... Truth be told, they managed to control them pretty well. It's just weird seeing the things *right there*.

I wrote a one liner to query my EC2 instances in AWS. I wanted to run it on multiple servers (in multiple AWS accounts) so I decided to run:

ssh servername 'oneliner'

and then do that for each server/account. Problem is, the one liner has single quotes (and they have to be single quotes), so I base64 encoded the command line and then ran:

ssh servername 'echo "aGVsbG8gci9saW51eAo=" | base64 --decode | bash'

And did that for each server. That's not the real base64, but you get the point.

I arrive at my desk this morning to find an email from the security team. Microsoft Defender on those servers flagged my command as "suspicious". Microsoft snitched on me! Security wanted to know if I had indeed run that command and if so why, what was I doing, etc. What I wanted to tell them was you can decode base64 just as well as I can ya idiot. You even see how to do it in the report you got. And if you can see the command then you can see that what I was doing was regular old Linux commands doing regular old aws cli queries. Pound sand! I chose other words though...

I am handy with a Linux command line and I'll be damned if I'm gonna apologize for doing regular Linux things.

I got "inoculations" as a child. Today they call them immunizations or vaccines. When did that happen?

We have been an AWS-only shop for a long time and have always used Terraform. We took on an Azure project a bit ago. Small, uncomplicated. I tried to use Bicep then eventually switched back to Terraform. It's fine. We now have a project coming in that wants to use Azure and is quite a bit more involved than the previous one. So I'm thinking about Bicep.

I feel salty about using a vendor-specific IaC tool but also I remember running into a few issues with Terraform on the last Azure project, like certain features of a resource not being available in the provider. Obviously Microsoft is going to favor their own tool to the detriment of Terraform. But it's not like our existing modules with Terraform are going to be of any use. You have to rewrite them anyway. Maybe the team's familiarity with Terraform is a plus. HCL is the same and we understand the state file and manage it pretty well.

Edit: Oh. I just noticed that GitLab's IaC security scanning tool can't scan Bicep.

Another edit: Bicep can't delete resources created with Bicep? That seems like a big deal.

I know that DevOps has become a role now and I'm cool with that. There are a typical set of tasks we do that employers need done, so why not?

But what has become of the culture part of DevOps? Shift left. Fail fast. Break down silos. Etc. Have we achieved all those things and so we don't need to talk about them anymore? When people ask "How do I learn DevOps" do we just assume they'll pick up on the culture stuff on the job? Has the culture stuff moved to other tech management roles? Do those things matter anymore?

Dude already moved his barn once, to save it from Waukee, but Waukee keeps growing... Now they're building a road that ends at his property line, but will obviously need to go through his barn the next time they extend it.

It's a hundred year old barn originally mail ordered from Montgomery Ward. Check this out. You used to be able to [mail order barns](https://dailybungalow.blogspot.com). It showed up on a train, all the parts ready to go. Nails, pre-cut lumber, paint, an instruction book probably not written by a Swede. Tab A, Slot B. That kind of thing. You gather your neighbors and you put it all together. Crazy! I didn't know that was a thing!