betabug... Sascha Welter (Einträge über web)

The Saga of IPv6

S. Welter — Fri, 13 May 2022 08:52:25 GMT

Last week in one of the cafes where I frequently have my #coffice, the IPv4 didn't work. In fact it works, but the DHCP server in their little plastic CPE router doesn't work. Been like that for a long time, so I habitually set myself up with a fixed IP... and my script that does that didn't work. But then, IPv6 worked fine, so I was able to ssh -6 to my server. A couple of http servers worked also, but it was impressive how much of the web was not reachable.

And a few days later I came across this page: The transition to IPv6: Are we there yet? That was a very interesting read. All those various incentives to do and not do things, the dragging of feet, the attemtps, and the slow-moving-glacier changes.

Now I'm sitting in another cafe, and no IPv6 at all here, but at least their DHCP for IPv4 works.

Resurected Matryoshka Code

S. Welter — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 16:15:58 GMT

Noticed today that there was some appreciation for one of the posts from my old blog. So I went and resurrected the text of that post at the right URL. In the process I found out how to put stuff into random places in Nikola, so I could actually selectively bring some of the old blog content back. Here is Matryoshka Code.

Fixing the meta type of the Nikola RSS feed in OpenBSD's httpd

S. Welter — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:24:37 GMT

In blog related news, keen observers might have noticed, that this weblog operates as a static site. That in turn is generated by a so-called "static-site generator". In this case this is Nikola. Nikola is written in Python (which makes it approachable to me, as I've a bit of Python experience). The user experience of operating the weblog with Nikola is also quite nice, especially if you like to work on the command line (and who doesn't?)

The first little snag I actually ran into, was when I was so nerdish as to validate the RSS feed. So it seems that the rss feed was served witih meta-type "application/octet-stream". There are two problems with that:

The rss validation tool complains. It says that most rss readers will cope, but still it is right to complain. Machine readable formats should be handled properly.
Clicking on the rss link in the browser offered to download the xml file. I'm not really reading rss feeds in the browser, but this behaviour is not correct anyway.

So, time to fix things. Looking around at what Nikola generates, there is a plain file on a file system. The meta-type header is not generated there.

Which means the OpenBSD httpd (web server) is not mapping the file extension '.xml' to the meta-type we want it to. Reading up on the httpd.conf(5) man page, I noticed that I can override meta-type definitions. At first I got it wrong, because I thought I can "override" that one meta-type I need different (setting it to application/xml xml)... but then everything else was served as the default "application/octet-stream". So I had to set up all those that are mentioned at being set by default in the man page. No biggie. And no more complaints about the meta-type in the RSS validator.

Making bad choices and new installs

S. Welter — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 12:32:24 GMT

There was a time

For a short while, I didn't have a website at all. That was quite a change, since I had a website for about 25 years. I reinstalled my server, now there wasn't anything anymore. That's how it goes.

But now there will be a site again. It will be very minimal, which is nice, it's kind of like moving back to the start. My first website was one page, everything on that one page. I'm not going that far back, but maybe I'll manage to go back to when my weblog was just a little collection of daily thoughts.

The old content... right now I think that I won't bring it back. Time to let the past be the past. It's all playing sandcastles with time and entropy anyway.