“Diener des Volkes” ist überraschend gut.

In the Super Nintendo- and NES-apps from Nintendo Online on the Switch they released Mother 1 as „Earthbound Beginnings“ and Earthbound (Mother 2).

🤩

Ich muss bei einem selbst-gehostetem Bitwarden auch Geld einwerfen für Gruppen? Na toll…

Thinking again about the 1password-crypto-thing. And I hope I am not trying here to justify convenience over principals after failing to set up Bitwarden on one of my servers next to other service while using nftables instead of iptables ;)

In the end AgileBits only added a new password-item with a couple of new fields, didn’t they? Actually Phantom could add those custom fields by themself.

And this phantom-wallet-thing just added a button that jumps into your 1password and adds a new item and uses that item instead of its own storage? And they are just using the 1Password Connect API?

Reading this article on Cointelegraph it looks mainly like marketing-BS from AgileBits to be honest.

So, how does AgileBits gets into the cryptocurrency/NFT-space? They don’t do anything actually, do they? They created a blog post that some wallet-provider added 1Password Connect API-usage in their browser extension. And then AgileBits-marketing thought “hey, all the craze is about crypto-whatever these days, let’s speak with them and make a blog post about it because those Solana-people might be new market to cater to”. For some reason they didn’t see the controversy Blockchain-related things have nowadays embedded - especially NFTs. I don’t see them retract this “partnership” because what could they do? Withdraw API-access? Write “yeah, Crypto-things are stupid, we think so, too, sorry.” and then Phantom can still use 1Password.

In the end I think it is more or less just a marketing-thing - an imho very stupid marketing-thing, but a marketing-thing. Or does AgileBits started to push money or other major resources into this thing? Maybe I just overreacted becaues cryptocurrency-related things are kind of triggering because they should imho be forbidden since they do nothing useful besides being a means of exchange for criminal activities, being a speculative tool and being a ponzi-scheme and while being that they are destroying the environment - be it through sheer use of power consumption or using up other resources that could be used far more productively (like hard disks and their base resources). Would they partner up with Nestle or the Coca Cola-company, I would react kind of irritated but not the same way I reacted to the Phantom-announcement. And those two companies are even worse than any cryptocurreny.

But maybe, just maybe I am trying to justify convenience over principals. And that’s why we we have all the plastic trash in the oceans…

I started though looking for alternatives for me and my family. I could go back to pass, for other members of my familys things like the iCloud Keychain could be enough. Or I spin up a new machine and get Bitwarden up and running. Or start using Keepass with decent apps and sync it with webdav and have some shared files with other family members. Or have a look at secrets. Or whatever…

It gave me at least a push to look into alternatives again. One step at a time AgileBits is loosing me again as a customer.

So recently I had long discussions about Saltstack and Ansible. I like Salt, use it for years but realize the shortcomings when it comes to local development of states and formulas, especially when using gitfs.

But some people try to convince me that Ansible is so much better because you can locally develop, its error messages are better and it is easier to write.

Since I wanted to have an informed opinion, I started trying to use it. For my personal dot files it should be better usable than setting up salt-ssh and for my couple of servers it should be easy to use with some roles from the net.

But to be honest I am not convinced. Yes, developing locally and pushing only when something finished is nice but I had so many problems.

I needed only a couple of hours to get into my first hard to understand error-messages (yes, experience will make that easier). I also tried multiple roles and currently I ended up using two. One from someone who seems to be doing a decent job and one I had to fork because it wasn’t so flexible. The others, well. I saw dependencies to roles from other people, deprecation-warnings, missing flexibility and bad/incomplete documentation.

Speed was another issue, it is soooo slow. I have a copy-state with 92 files and a couple of directories which I run locally, since it copies over a base of Neovim-configuration-files and it is soooo slow. And apparently it doesn’t even know what changes, for that I need apparently with_filetree. But that made it unusable slow. Finding out about async, helped a bit - it is still slow, but other stuff can run. Using “strategy: free” for my servers helped as well in terms of speed, but that meant that the output became more or less useless because everything is mixed up. I already use MasterControl with ssh, so I only had to add pipelining to improve it a bit further. But still, I don’t see me rolling out playbooks over a couple of dozens servers, even with more forks.

I also seem to need a plethora of playbooks, or have to work heavily with tags, which I have to document? somewhere, since they are hard to discover because they are in files in a convoluted file structure of roles when I do not want always to run all tasks, since that slows things down because Ansible seems to be slow. With saltstack I just run a single state against a freely chosen set of targets. I know that a decent top.sls and just a high state would be better but in my experience it can be very useful to run just a single state. Especially when testing. With ansible I have to set up multiple groups or inventories with lots of copy and pasting stuff and then I can run it additionally against a subset of servers in a group. Targeting and running a single play/role against one or some servers seems to be a mess, or I do something fundamentally wrong.

Writing roles, even ones with some dynamics was ok-ish. I still figured out though how to use optional vars - only by adding a lot of “{% if somevar is defined %}”. And in the role I forked I have to dig deeper how I could correctly use it because I couldn’t figure out yet how the templating of the final file is done with asserts.

But in saltstack I do not necessarily need formulas, since I can use Jinja in state-files and in templates which makes life pretty easy.

And I always have to use a password…so annoying, either a become-password, or a vault-password. On my saltmasters I just have sudo with a timeout and/or use publisher-acls.

I am also not convinced that agentless in terms of bootstrapping is better. Yes with salt I have to bootstrap a minion. But with Ansible I need to have access to a server. But I know the case where people set something up or got sick, forgot to document access to the server and then nobody had access or needed to do some magic with single-user boot and usually trying out some defaults and searching the documentation if there is something somewhere. And then I would have needed to reach out. With salt I just roll out my user as long as the minion is connected (yes, and running). But using ssh-certificates makes life easier…when people set it up which might not have happened in the case mentioned above because it was just a “fire and forget”-thing and then it got somehow important enough that breakage was noticeable.

So yes, saltstack has some problems. I’d like to see the usually better readable error-messages from Ansible and I’d like to have a bit better development workflow. But the slow speed of Ansible makes up a lot to the slow speed of “salt-run fileserver.update”. But in the end Ansible isn’t really better and besides my use of dotfiles, I don’t see me running it in production or maybe I am doing something fundamentally wrong. Who knows. My experience was less than stellar though.

Update: Using synchronize instead of copy helps a lot with my neovim-role

In todays episode of a superheroes-tabletop game: two rival gangs want start a fight about a stolen truck. The heroes arrive and one of them destroys with a missile the loaded goods in the truck. Fight defused. All participants speechless.

Why is a recursive copy in Ansible so damn slow in comparison to SaltStack? And if I understand it correctly it won’t even detect changes. Only when using „with_filetree“ which makes it unusable slow. I copy less than 100 files locally.

The preparation of the Mutants and Masterminds-session took far longer than expected. And Roll20 is really bad in comparison to Foundry. I didn’t expect that. Please Green Ronin publish a Mutants and Masterminds-addon soon for Foundry.

Herolab is the ugliest piece of software I‘ve seen in a long time…

People, please: if you implement an ssh-client or something like that, don’t forget ssh certificates. They are great.

Gestern habe ich ein neues Wort gelernt und kann ein weiteres „Dings“ damit ersetzen: „Musterbeutelklammer“

don’t feed the troll…don’t feed the troll…

Wow…I got in a state where I am unwilling to share gained knowledge because I am sick of the more or less unrelated useless discussion that will probably follow.

I am reading The Underground Railroad by Whitehead. Great book and it is always astounding what the human species is able to do. Those race laws for example that existed in North Carolina and their effects are just chilling.

I hope Cora finds her way out of all of this.

Ich lese gerade „Ein deutsches Mädchen“ und eine Sache, die ich bei Neonazis bis heute nicht verstehe: Warum leugnen sie den Holocaust, offenbar nicht nur öffentlich, sondern auch vor sich selbst. Müssten sie nicht stolz drauf sein, was „erreicht“ wurde?

I am watching the first time Inception. It has a great basic idea and I’d like to create from that a tabletop RPG. But I don’t understand the hype and find it kinda boring 🤷‍♂️

I played today Alien RPG and it was pretty awesome. At the end the characters tried to kill each other or killed themself. That was a different experience. I have a great group 😃

👾👾👾👾👾👾👾👾👾👾👾👾

Gute Podcasts für Grundschüler? Alter ab 7 und ab 10 #followerpower

Ich wusste nicht, dass man beim Design eines Wasserkochers viel falsch machen kann. Die Firma KHG beleert mich eines anderen. Beim Einschenken kommt der heiße Wasserdampf an der Hand vorbei, er tropft, manchmal spritzt Wasser raus, was beim Einfüllen einer Wärmflasche schön ist.

I played yesterday mir with Foundry VTT. And it is astounding what you can do and what for cool stuff you can do with maps and tokens in terms of music etc. Such a cool tool. Definitely worth the price.

Super…neue Rollenspielrunde und ich bin gleich der Partypuper, weil ich an keinem der Termine kann und die Zeiten alle nicht wirklich familienkompatibel sind. Am Wochenende um 12 Uhr Mittags? Innerhalb der Woche um 18 Uhr? Selbst mit größeren Kindern problematisch für mich.

Why does a company that raises hundreds of millions of dollars which has probably a tripple-digit numbers of developers need to switch all their apps to Electron? They should have the devs to write native apps for all operating systems… #1password

Meh…ich muss ja schon wieder aufstehen…das ist noch dunkel da draußen und es hört sich nach Mistwetter an. 😑

Vielleicht gibt es ja unter meinen Followern Rollenspieler, die Interesse an einer Test-Session Alien RPG haben:

sonntagshelden.de/calendar/…

2 Podcastempfehlungen - 8 Episoden und 12 Episoden. Beide vom NDR.

180 Grad - Geschichten gegen den Hass: www.ndr.de/nachricht…

Slahi – 14 Jahre Guantanamo: www.ndr.de/nachricht…