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’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. …

Following on from yesterday’s post, it’s probably worth thinking about sanitising more than my phone. I’m getting quite tired of travelling with 2 laptops - one for work, one for personal. Sometimes I travel with 3 - work, personal and restricted site (specific softwre/hardware requirements depending on the… sensitivity of where I am). Carrying that many machines gets annoying. I also get a little stressed taking my personal laptop through customs in some of the countries I go to. There exists a worry that the more extreme states like the UK won’t take kindly to “Asylum for Snowden”, Anti GCHQ stickers and other hacker-related nonsense. Mixed with my regular browsing habits, who I talk to, and the media collection on my laptop, I’m happier if it doesn’t come to the Middle East. …

I’m pretty fond of my OnePlus X - it’s the first phone I’ve owned that has performance I’m happy to call “adequate”. It runs along nicely, no questions asked. It never really stutters or has a little moan at me. Battery life is a little weak for my use case, but that’s fine. I’m almost always near electricity. I do a lot of work in the Middle East, and before I go I like to clear out my phone, study what I use it for and return it to being a lean device. My standard target has been CyanogenMod, which I’ve been running since it started. That’s no longer developed, so I need to take a little look at alternatives. The OPX mod scene is a little slow these days - the phone is discontinued and never had the biggest sales figures, so there isn’t the most motivated talent pool to keep it up. …