So I’ve had a lot of GPG issues over the last few months, and part of that has been me not bothering particularly to ensure I’ve got a consistent setup across my machines. Part of the issue is that I’m using a yubikey, and keep having to look at external references to make sure it works consistently. I’m going to keep this as a reference for what I’ve used recently to make everything work. …

I finally fell into the dd trap. I dd’d a FreeBSD Beaglebone black image to /dev/sdb, where my home directory lives. It should have been /dev/mmcblk0, but I trusted tab completion and didn’t check dmesg. After a quick check of gparted, it was obvious what had happened. I’ve nuked the partition table on the drive. Well done. The data in /home/hibby was intact, however. My home directory was still responding, I could load new files ith no corruption. A quick check of mtab tells me ~ lived at /dev/sdb6. It turns out the first ~200GB of data on the drive were taken up by an old windows install or something. So, I had to work out how best to recover that partition and that one alone. I didn’t care about the rest. Step 1: Do not turn the computer off, as it still works. …

I’ve been running FreeBSD on my primary server for a while. There’s a number of things I like, and I’m enjoying the challenge of getting to grips with how the system is put together. It’s been a good challenge so far, with many highlights. The idea of the server was to be VM host - bhyve is a lovely hypervisor to interact with, and I’ve tried a few management tools for it. Initially, i used iohyve which was lovely. It’s a really nice command syntax for interacting with VMs, and understands zfs which makes snapshotting dead easy. My favourite thing I managed was accessing the UEFI frame buffer over VNC - that was super cool. Granted, this is a bhyve thing and not restricted to iohyve, but it was still cool. …

I tried to set this up so I could use my yubikey as a portable authenticator following the Debian guide, and ran in to a bit of an issue. Despite what I was doing, ssh-agent would auto start, set environment variables and give me lots of trouble. Killing ssh-agent and manually setting the $SSH_AUTH_SOCK to my gnupgp socket fixed the issue, however I couldn’t get ssh-agent to stop starting and setting that variable on login. …

So i was recently at a convention run by friends. I tend to align myself to the position of least uselessness, so I like to be helpful. Somehow this lead to my good nature being exploited for mediocre software1. One of the problems at these things is that while we go to great effort to produce a lovely convention booklet, no one actually reads it until the week after. Having the event schedule in there feels like a bit of a waste of time. …