A quick review of my Let's Encrypt setup

Let’s Encrypt makes TLS much easier for pretty much everyone, but can still be annoying to use. It took me a while to smooth over the cracks in my Let’s Encrypt configuration across my (large) fleet of different TLS-enabled services. I wanted to take a quick moment to share setup with you.

2020-01-02 update: acme-client is unmaintained and caught the BSD disease anyway. I use uacme and my current procedure is documented on my new server checklist. It might not be exactly applicable to your circumstances, YMMV.

The main components are:

nginx and cron need no introduction, but acme-client deserves a closer look....

ToxCon 2018

In October the Tox developer community will be holding a conference in Vienna. Join us as we talk about the progress we have made during the last 12 months with Tox and other security related topics. There will be lots of talks and other cool things to see.

For more details join the #toxcon2018 IRC channel on Freenode and contact robinli, sudden6 or zoff99.

More information will be revealed in a future post.

Should you move from GitHub to sr.ht

I’m not terribly concerned about Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, but I don’t fault those who are worried. I’ve been working on my alternative platform, sr.ht, for quite a while. I’m not about to leave GitHub because of Microsoft alone. I do have some political disagreements with GitHub and Microsoft, but those are also not the main reason that I’m building sr.ht. I simply think I can do it better. If my approach aligns with your needs, then sr.ht may be the platform for you.

There are several GitHub alternatives, but for the most part they’re basically GitHub rip-offs. Unlike GitLab, Gogs/Gitea,...

How I maintain FOSS projects

Today’s is another blog post which has been on my to-write list for a while. I have hesitated a bit to write about this, because I’m certain that my approach isn’t perfect. I think it’s pretty good, though, and people who work with me in FOSS agreed after a quick survey. So! Let’s at least put it out there and discuss it.

There are a few central principles I use to guide my maintainership work:

The...

2018-06-01

The maintainance is completed. Let me know of any important things that are broken. Internally we will keep tweaking the server configuration over the course of time.

Embedding files in C programs with koio

Quick blog post today to introduce a new tool I wrote: koio. This is a small tool which takes a list of files and embeds them in a C file. A library provides an fopen shim which checks the list of embedded files before resorting to the real filesystem.

I made this tool for chopsui, where I eventually want to be able to bundle up sui markup, stylesheets, images, and so on in a statically linked chopsui program. Many projects have small tools which serve a similar purpose, but it was simple enough and useful enough that I chose to make...

Why did we replace wlc?

For a little over a year, I’ve been working with a bunch of talented C developers to build a replacement for the wlc library. The result is wlroots, and we’re still working on completing it and updating our software to use it. The conventional wisdom suggests that rewriting your code from scratch is almost never the right idea. So why did we do it, and how is it working out? I have spoken a little about this in the past, but we’ll answer this question in detail today.

Sway will have been around for 3 years as of this August. When...

2018-05-27

There will be a scheduled server maintenance next Friday and Saturday, 2018-06-(01-02). The migration to the new server will happen on these days and the git repositories and mailing list will be frozen on the old (now current) server.

Introducing scdoc, a man page generator

A man page generator is one of those tools that I’ve said I would write for a long time, being displeased with most of the other options. For a while I used asciidoc, but was never fond of it. There are a few things I want to see in a man page generator:

All of the existing tools failed some of these criteria. asciidoc hits #1, but fails #2 and #3 by being written in XSLT+Python and targetting man pages as a...

Redirecting stderr of a running process

During the KDE sprint in Berlin, Roman Gilg leaned over to me and asked if I knew how to redirect the stderr of an already-running process to a file. I Googled it and found underwhelming answers using strace and trying to decipher the output by reading the write syscalls. Instead, I thought a gdb based approach would work better, and after putting the pieces together Roman insisted I wrote a blog post on the topic.

gdb, the GNU debugger, has two important features that make this possible:

With this...