May 2025 - Lug-nuts - bigbrie.com

free software maintainer complaints
by Brian E. Lavender 02 Oct '26

02 Oct '26

LibXml2 seems to be one of those un glorious packages to maintain. I saw the following posted by a project maintainer. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/913 His observations on disclosing security vulnerabilities seem to be interesting. Brian -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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Re: Systemd
by Kevin Brisson 18 Feb '26

18 Feb '26

Gary, computers are hard and shouldn't be used by retired folks. :) Run it like below, it will load last. Use AI for docs - much easier and faster than our brains. Type=idle Behavior of idle is very similar to simple; however, actual execution of the service program is delayed until all active jobs are dispatched. This may be used to avoid interleaving the output of shell services with the status output on the console. Note that this type is useful only to improve console output, it is not useful as a general unit ordering tool, and the effect of this service type is subject to a 5s timeout, after which the service program is invoked anyway. https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.service.html Kevin

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whatever happened to OSCON
by Brian E. Lavender 28 May '25

28 May '25

I don't know how many of you ever went to OSCON, yet I have fond memories of attending it both in 2010 and 2014. I searched online and it seems that Covid put the nail in the coffin for OSCON and stopped it for good. https://www.oreilly.com/conferences/from-laura-baldwin.html What a bummer deal. I remember it was 1997 that I believe the first PERL conference started and it eventually turned into OSCON. I am going to start sing "Glory Days" by Bruce Springsteen. On a side note, I spoke with Kyle Rankin, who has presented at various conferences, and he presented at SCALE (Southern California Area Linux Expo). He said that they have a good in person conference. Brian -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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June social meeting
by Brian E. Lavender 28 May '25

28 May '25

Hello Everyone, We will have another social meeting at Kupros, June 17, 6:30pm https://www.saclug.org/articles/2025/june-2025.html We will likely be at a large table upstairs. I will put a paper penguin in one of the holders on the table. If you are not sure where to look, please email me beforehand we can coordinate. See you there. Brian -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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May meeting at Kupros
by Brian E. Lavender 20 May '25

20 May '25

See everyone back at Kupros on May 20. https://www.saclug.org/articles/2025/may-2025.html -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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I might have to cut back
by Gary 16 May '25

16 May '25

I just spent about 4 hours setting up a pubkey ssh authentication. The problem was that my sshd was no longer accepting pubkeys generated on my remote system using rsa or dsa. I finally tried an ecdsa and everything worked. Running ssh -v, -vv, and -vvv didn't really help because it just fails silently. You have to figure out what a message offering the private key as the public key is important and then make a guess that something bad happened there because the authentication process continues. There are other messages earlier in the chain that make is seem like it can't find files. I spent a lot of time confirming file permissions. My books didn't agree with a lot of what I found on line. Which is right? A lot of thrashing around there. Granted, I'm retired and doing all this for fun. Well sort of. I do like to use a lot of this stuff and I find it helpful. But when something I, "know how to do" and is suppose to make my life easier and simpler, takes a lot of time, I need to reevaluate my approach. Your average person just buys a 3rd party tunneling/VPN service and goes from there. Which is great if you are running Windows. I think it is time for me to consider my approach and how I am spending my time and money. This just isn't sustainable. I'm not saying things were better "back in the day." There was definitely a time when it was hard to do a lot of things. We had "install fest" for example. Documentation was nonexistant. Then, it seemed like for awhile, things were pretty good. Things just worked and there was documentation and you could get information. I think there was a definite peak in usability. Or is it just me? Maybe I'll start by figuring out a minimum set of functionality that I need and take a fresh approach from there. -- -Gary It is a simple thing to make things complex, a complex thing to make things simple.

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Lug-nuts May 2025