Until a couple of weeks ago I assumed that RISC-V was still an experimental architecture that one would have to customize in VHDL or Verilog and use on an FPGA. So when Debian announced official support for the new architecture, I decided to have a closer look. It turns out there are several Raspberry Pi-class boards with RISC-V processors that run some flavor of Linux, and not surprisingly most vendors offer a Debian-based image for their boards.
More …Two years ago, I was tasked to write a program that generates RPM package repositories from a large pool of packages. The pool is a set of directories that contain all packages that were ever built for a given Miracle Linux release, and the program would be used to pick specific packages from the pool and generate repositories for yum and dnf. The existing program had hard-coded rules for package selection that made it require frequent repairs, and it didn’t play nice with modularity packages. Since the new solution should be an improvement over the old one, I decided to separate the rules from the code, and for this I needed a small domain-specific language. I had already written a lot of absurd things in Bash at the time, so naturally I had to see if a parser could be another of those things.
More …In the previous two articles, I explained how scripts can communicate with point-to-point and publish-subscribe messaging. There are different ways how the two mechanisms can be used, so this time we’re going to have a look at the Request-Reply Pattern. In this pattern, there are two parties. The first one, the requestor, sends a request to the replier, which sends a response back to the requestor, as shown in the following figure. If this reminds you of client-server communication, you got the idea.
More …When I first wrote toolbox, my goal was to remove boilerplate code from my scripts and improve code-reuse. Because my scripts became more robust and maintainable, I felt more comfortable writing long-running processes like daemons in bash, which led to the development of the ipc module for message-based communication. Because the module uses GPG for message signing, it can be tricky to set up, so I added the uipc module, which does mostly the same thing, but without message signing.
More …In the last article, I have explained how to implement the Point-to-Point Channel and Competing Consumers patterns with toolbox to process messages in parallel. When employing the Competing Consumers pattern, every message on the channel will be received by only one process. But what if we wanted to broadcast messages so that each process receives a copy? This is where Publish-Subscribe Channels enter the stage.
More …Around the time when I was implementing queues in toolbox, I was reading Enterprise Integration Patterns, a book about messaging patterns, written by Gregor Hohpe (whom I worked with more than a decade ago) and Bobby Woolf. While reading the book, I thought how awesome it would be if I could use my queues to implement messaging in Bash — and that’s how I got inspired to write the uipc module. Because there is no documentation but an API reference, I decided to write a few articles about how the uipc module can be used to implement some of the messaging patterns from the book.
More …As I was adding the finishing touches to the last article of a series I have been writing for the German monthly Linux-Magazin, I decided to write more stuff to put on here. Not necessarily at the same pace or with the same depth, but we’ll see.
More …I have a VPS that is hosting a mail server, CalDAV/CardDAV for calendar and contacts, and some other daily necessities. Because I like to keep my attack surface small (and having temporal wiggle space for deploying security updates), most of the services on this VPS are only accessible from inside a VPN. Because the VPS is one of those semi-virtualized ones where all VPSes share the host kernel, I can’t just go ahead and load kernel modules as I see fit. Or in other words, I cannot use a VPN that needs more than a TUN/TAP interface from the kernel, such as IPsec VPNs. So for a lack of other options, I have been using OpenVPN for the past several years, and it has been working okay-ish, except I never got it to work on my iPhone. Like on Android, there is no native OpenVPN support on iOS, meaning you have to use an app for it, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get it to connect to my server. Luckily, I got another VPS in the meanwhile, and it allows me to load kernel modules, which means the IPsec VPN option is back on the table – so I decided to have a closer look at strongswan one more time. In the end, it took me several evenings to figure out a configuration that uses certificates for mutual authentication and works reasonably well on Linux as well as iOS clients. This post explains how I got it all to work.
More …I promised that we’re going to build a distributed system in bash, but the mutex that we’ve written in the last part is still pretty far way from that goal. This time, let’s build something more tangible: a queue!
More …When you need a piece of glue-code, a wrapper, or you want to execute a few commands in succession, Shell is the natural choice. However, Shell is almost never chosen for the implementation of larger applications. While there are some good reasons for that, there are also a number of good reasons in favor of shell.
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