whois on OS X

One of the things I find myself doing from time to time it to execute the whois command. This allows me to figure out to whom an IP(range) or domain belongs. However, when doing this on OS X, especially with IPv6 addresses I’m greeted with: $ whois 2a00:1450:400f:805::200e No match for "2a00:1450:400f:805::200e". >>> Last update of whois database: Tue, 07 Jun 2016 12:55:53 GMT <<< I figured I should explicitly ask it to treat this as IPv6 and found this in the man page:

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IPv6 at home

I recently moved to a new place (because the rental market is cray cray here). Despite how annoying it is to move around a benefit of the new place is that it has fiber so I wasted no time and got a connection from Telia. I plugged in the ISP shipped router and while browsing through the admin interface I noticed an IPv6 address showed up. All excited I checked my devices but no one was getting v6 addresses assigned.

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I'm going to FOSDEM and I'm bringing

FOSDEM is a wonderful event. But as with any event with geeks people will try to sniff your traffic, mess with GSM, grab your credentials and what not. The best way to stay safe? Don’t bring electronics with you or have them in flight mode (laptop included). No Bluetooth, no WiFi, no GSM/3G/tethering, nothing. If that doesn’t sound all that practical there’s a few things you can do. Spin up a Streisand server so you can VPN all the things.

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PGP, one last try

Update: I’ve long since given up on PGP. It’s just not worth it. Ignore this post. Over the years I’ve tried to use PGP multiple times. However, I’ve always failed miserably at managing keys and understanding the lifecycle involved. This is evident by searching the keyservers for my name, it’ll turn up a few rather idiotic and dubiously keys. None of them should be used except for one, 0x18D40820FA0EE03C. These failures with PGP are in part my fault for not correctly understanding what I was doing and part because of the horrendous UX of the gpg tools and the documentation that comes with it.

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In search of a new name for Puppet Community

update: We’ve settled on the name Vox Pupuli. It’s a play on the Latin “vox populi”, voice of the people, but in our case ends up meaning “voice of the puppets”. As quite a few of you know at PuppetConf 2014 we started a community collaboration effort on the maintenance of modules and tooling in the Puppet ecosystem. In our enthusiasm we baptised it Puppet Community. 20/20 hindsight The term Puppet Community (puppet-community) clashes in all kinds of ways with just the community around Puppet, the Puppet community.

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Puppet and IntelliJ

Part of the fun of Puppetconf is getting to talk to so many people and learning clever new tricks from each other. I knew IntelliJ had some support for writing Puppet code but as Travis showed me it’s been greatly improved. If you’re running IntelliJ you’ll need to install both the Ruby and the Puppet plugins. If you’re on RubyMine only the latter is needed. By default the Puppet plugin handles single modules really well and gives you things like code completion and refactoring support for your classes and (defined) types.

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Saying "they"

Based on a remark of a friend about preconceptions we have with regard to gender I started looking more carefully at how I use gender pronouns. Though I’m usually fairly diligent in writing I noticed I failed entirely in speech. This usually happens to me when I meet a new person because at that point I have no context to go on. My autopilot takes over and based on their physique, dress style and preconceptions around gender that have been drilled into me for over 20 years, I end up selecting a pronoun like “he” or “she”.

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Why I care about Pride

If you’re following me through social media it won’t have escaped your attention that my avatar turned rainbow and there was a distinct increase in rainbows throughout my feed as we were ramping up to Pride. Many people outside the LGBTQ community and even quite a few within don’t realise the importance of Pride and just see it as a shameless parade. It is far from that. After having helped organise our participation at Pride this year a few colleagues and I wrote a piece on the intranet about why we participated and what we did.

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Pupa

Bootstrapping a modern, r10k powered, masterless, Puppet 4 setup on Debian and Ubuntu. pupa is a toy project of mine. Essentially I decided to bring all my personal machines under full Puppet control. Inspired by how our Puppet setup works at my job I decided to go for a masterless setup. The problem really is to get Puppet on your machine. Once it’s there everything else is easy and as you’ll see if you look at the script I’m actually using Puppet to bootstrap part of itself.

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Eurovision 2015

Last night Europe went to war. No the Germans didn’t start it, we were just having a huge music contest followed by some political voting to decide who should win. I adore the Eurovision Song Contest It might not be a manly thing to admit to but it’s one of those things that just gets me ridiculously, over the rainbow to the moon, happy. It’s also been a fairly progressive contest with LGBTQ members participating and people in drag aren’t unfamiliar to the Eurovision either.

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