8 ms·

1. GNU Name System to replace the DNS in a backwards-compatible manner, with delegation to cryptographic public keys (instead of IP addresses) and with strong g

1. GNU Name System to replace the DNS in a backwards-compatible manner, with delegation to cryptographic public keys (instead of IP addresses) and with strong guarantees against known attacks against the DNS (DNSSEC doesn't solve everything). https://gnunet.org/en/gns.html https://gnunet.org/en/gns.html 2. Semantic sysadmin to declare your intent in regards to your infrastructure no matter how it is implemented (i.e. with a standard specification, interoperability/migration becomes possible) https://ttm.sh/dVy.md https://ttm.sh/dVy.md 3. GUI/WebUI CMS for contributing to a shared versioned repository. Sort of what netlify is doing, but using a standard so you can use the client of your choice and we tech folks can hold onto our CLI while our less-techie friends can enjoy a great UI/UX for publishing articles to collective websites. 4. Structured shell for the masses. Powershell isn't the worst, but in my view nushell has a bright future ahead. For the people who don't need portability, it may well entirely replace bash, Python and perl for writing more maintainable and user-friendly shell scripts. https://nushell.sh/ https://nushell.sh/ 5. A desktop environment toolkit that focuses on empowering to build more opinionated desktops while mutualizing the burden of maintenance of core components. Most desktop environments should have a common base/library (freedesktop?) where features/bugs can be dealt with once and for all and we don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time. Last week i learnt some DE folks want to fork the whole of GTK because it's becoming too opinionated for their usage, and GNOME is nowadays really bloated and buggy thanks to javascript hell. Can't we have a user-friendly desktop with solid foundations and customizability?

joeyaiello 6y ago
PM lead for PowerShell here, thanks for the callout! I'll take "isn't the worst". ;) I'd love to get more of your thoughts around how PowerShell might be more useful for the kinds of scenarios you're thinking about. We see a lot of folks writing portable CI/CD build/test/deploy scripts for cross-platform apps (or to support cross-platform development), but we're always looking to lower the barrier of entry to get into PowerShell, as it can be quite jarring to someone who's used Bash their whole life (myself included). Structured shells have so much potential outside of that, though. I find myself using PowerShell to "explore" REST APIs, and then it's easy to translate that into something scripted and portable. But I'd love to get to a place one day where we could treat arbitrary datasets like that, sort of like a generalized SQL/JSON/whatever REPL. Plus, PS enables me to Google regex less :D
- zaat 6y ago
  Don't return everything, return what I specifically returned (yeah, I know about objects, talking about everywhere else). I know it will never happen, but one can dream. Painpoints aside, you and your team are doing excellent job. Thank you Edit: unless you are also responsible for DSC, than I'll take it back. It's terrible.
  - joeyaiello 6y ago
    Unfortunately, we can't ever change that one, or the whole world of existing stuff will break. It's intended as a shell semantic where anything bare on the command line just gets run, no matter your scope. However when we introduced classes, we thought it was a more "dev-oriented" semantic, so we changed return there. This will only return 'this will return': class foo { [string] ReturnTest() { 'this will not return' return 'this will return' } } ([foo]::new()).ReturnTest()
- BadInformatics 6y ago
  In case you haven't seen it already, I found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779580 to be a pretty succinct list of the biggest stumbling points (latency, telemetry and documentation). A couple of more specific points I'd like to add after experience writing non-trivial PS scripts: - Tooling is still spotty. Last I used the VS Code extension, it was flaky and provided little in the way of formatting, autocomplete or linting. AIUI PowerShell scripts should be easier to statically analyze than an average bash script, so something as rigorous as ShellCheck would be nice to have too. - Docs around .NET interop still appear to be few and far between. I recall having to do quite a bit of guesswork around type conversions, calling conventions and the like. It's nice to see the docs have had a major overhaul since I last dug into them though :)
  - haecceity 6y ago
    Tooling?? I write powershell scripts in notepad.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
FrontAid 6y ago
> 3. GUI/WebUI CMS for contributing to a shared versioned repository. Did you have some specific tool in mind? Because I completely agree that this is a great way of working with content. We have been doing that for a couple of months with our own tool. It uses Git and stores content in a pretty-printed JSON file. Techies can update that directly and push it manually. Content editors can use our tool to edit and commit to Git with a simple Web UI. Would that go into a direction you were thinking of?
- zoover2020 6y ago
  NetlifyCMS comes to mind!
- southerntofu 6y ago
  The closest i can think of is NetlifyCMS, but it's terrible because it's a bunch of JavaScript both server side and client side, and is really not intended to be selfhosted despite being open-source. If NetlifyCMS was a robust library for abstracting over versioning system and static site generator to build WebUI/TUI/GUI clients with, that would fit what i have in mind. I don't know of any such program yet, please let me know if you find something :)
  - FrontAid 6y ago
    OK, I see. The tool we are working on is similar but also not quite what you are looking for. In case you want to have a look, it is availale on <my-name> .io
readingnews 6y ago
I am a lifelong sysadmin, and have thought about #2 frequently. I am thinking seriously about making it a research project. Who is behind this document you linked to? Is it tildeverse? Parts of that document are pretty up to date, so it does not seem very old. I am not really familiar with the null pointer site, or even how to find things on it (as in, every now and then I am surprised). I am surprised I have not seen this before.
- southerntofu 6y ago
  Hello, i'm the author of this document although it's just a draft for the moment (lots of TODOs in there) which is why it's not on my blog yet. nullpointer is just a file upload system of which ttm.sh is an instance residing in the tildeverse. I sometimes use it to publish drafts to collect thoughts/feedbacks on ideas i have. I'm also part of the tildeverse. I reside on thunix.net and do sysadmin for fr.tild3.org. I'm often around on #thunix, #selfhosting (etc) on tilde.chat in case you're also around :) > I am a lifelong sysadmin, and have thought about #2 frequently. I am thinking seriously about making it a research project. I think a lot of us have been obsessed with this idea for a while, but nobody to my knowledge has done it yet. If you feel like exploring this idea, amazing! It is in my view a complex-yet-solvable problem that many projects have failed to deal with because they've been too focused on narrow use-cases and not on the broader conception of a standardized specification ecosystem for selfhosting. If you feel like exploring this idea collectively (for example by cooperating on a standard for which you would contribute a specific implementation), count me in. I think a lot of brilliant people will be glad to board the ship once it's sailing! If you'd like to see where this idea has taken me so far, take a look at the joinjabber.org project. The entire infrastructure is described in a single, (hopefully) human-meaningful configuration file, with Ansible roles implementing it: https://codeberg.org/joinjabber/infra https://codeberg.org/joinjabber/infra Wish you the best, please keep me updated if you have more thoughts on this topic or would like to actively start a such project
KronisLV 6y ago
In case the nushell link doesn't work for anyone else, consider prefixing it with www: https://www.nushell.sh/ https://www.nushell.sh/ Admittedly, i have no idea why we even need to do that nowadays, but that seemed to work.
- ryanianian 6y ago
  It's because the bare TLD isn't setup to accept requests, but the `www` subdomain is (it's DNSed to a different IP): $ curl -v --head https://nushell.sh/ * Trying 162.255.119.254... * TCP_NODELAY set * Connection failed * connect to 162.255.119.254 port 443 failed: Connection refused $ curl -v --head https://www.nushell.sh/ * Trying 185.199.108.153... * TCP_NODELAY set * Connected to www.nushell.sh (185.199.108.153) port 443 (#0) Most hosts will alias or redirect away the www subdomain, but that's just a convenience. Of course technically foo.com and www.foo.com can have different DNS entries.
  - macintux 6y ago
    My first IT gig, 25 (sigh) years ago, I tried to set up <ourdomain> as an alias for www.<ourdomain>. Seemed to work ok, but somehow I noticed that I had broken email delivery through our firewall, so I reverted the change. Couldn't figure out exactly what was going on, and set it aside. A few months after I left, I sent an email to a friend who still worked there, and it bounced exactly the same way. Called up my friend in a hurry, and sure enough, they had just finished deploying the same change.
    - KronisLV 6y ago
      Why even have www.<ourdomain>.<tld> in the first place then, if <ourdomain>.<tld> is entirely sufficient on its own? It does appear that it's mostly done for historical reasons and sometimes you need CNAME records[1], but overall it feels like it probably introduces unnecessarily complexity, because the www. prefix doesn't really seem to be all that useful apart from the mentioned situation with CNAMEs. That's kind of why i asked the question above - maybe someone can comment on additional use cases or reasons for sticking to the www convention, which aren't covered in the linked page. When i last asked the question to a company who only had their website available with wwww but didn't without, i got an unsatisfactory and non-specific answer where spam was mentioned. I'm not sure whether there's any truth to that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web#WWW_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web#WWW_prefix
fuzzer37 6y ago
Serious question: Who is the target audience of Nushell? I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone like my parents or my girlfriend to use something like that day to day, and if you need a shell to work more efficiently, why not just learn bash? The learning curve for the 2 seems pretty much exactly the same, and bash has the benefit of being installed on almost every Linux/Unix system, even Macs (I think they actually use zsh now, but still)
- southerntofu 6y ago
  > I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone (...) to use something like that day to day I know for a fact the opposite is true for me. A simple shell syntax with an amazing documentation is all it takes for people to write useful scripts. I'm confident i can teach basic programming to a total newbie using a structured shell in a few minutes. Explaining quirks of conditionals and loops in usual shells is trickier: should i use "-eq" or "=" or "=="? why am i iterating over a non-matching globset? etc. > why not just learn bash? I have a love-hate relationship with bash. It's good, but full of inconsistencies, and writing reliable, fail-safe scripts is really hard. I much prefer a language in which i'm less productive, but doesn't take me hours of debugging every time i'm reaching an edge case. Also, bash has very little embedded tooling, compared to nushell. In many cases, you have to learn more tools (languages) like awk, jq. In nushell, such features are built-in. > being installed on almost every Linux/Unix system Well, bash is definitely very portable. But at this game, nothing can beat a standard POSIX /bin/sh. Who knows? It may outlive us all :)
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Who is the target audience of Nushell? People who a) are trying to escape from the insanity of traditional shells and use something that works with structured data, and b) want something other than PowerShell.
spullara 6y ago
> 4. Structured shell for the masses. I wonder if shell stuff would work better in a notebook like environment. Edit: At least one exists: https://shellnotebook.com/ https://shellnotebook.com/
tootie 6y ago
There was a time I did all my shell commands just directly in Perl. If you have it all in your head you can do crazy stuff pretty quickly. Especially by having libraries that you can import and invoke in one line.
- southerntofu 6y ago
  That's really nice. I never really got into perl but i was moved by some sysadmin friends back in the days playing crazy tricks right in front of my eyes... doing the same in bash would have taken me minutes or even hours, so i always felt like this was some kind of great wizardry. But perl is not really the most user-friendly language to learn in my opinion. I think raku is much better in this regard, but unfortunately is not deployed widely (yet?).
closeparen 6y ago
Declarative is awesome for bootstrapping an infrastructure from nothing, but once it’s running and people are depending on it, it actually matters a lot which operations are done to it, in what order, and with what dispersion in time. Doubly so if it’s stateful. In the real world we see either hints in the “declarative” config to tweak execution order, or procedural workflows expressed ad hoc as a sequence of goal states. I think the future of sysadmin will be more explicitly procedural. Services managing services through the normal building blocks of services: endpoints, workers, databases, etc.
- southerntofu 6y ago
  > I think the future of sysadmin will be more explicitly procedural. I think that's true for the lower levels of abstraction because sysadmin is a finite list of steps. Being able to program your infrastructure in a type-safe, fail-safe way is very important. In the grandparent comment, i was arguing for building higher-level abstractions (semantic sysadmin) on top of that to make it easier to understand how your infrastructure is configured, and make it reproducible/forkable. Think of it like there's two kinds of state stored on your system: useful state (eg user data) and infrastructure byproducts (eg TLS certificates). The former must be included in backups, the latter can be regenerated on the go from server config. The kind of declarativeness i'm interested in is that which enables any member/customer to fork the entire infrastructure by editing a single config file if they're not happy with provided services, and from there they can import their own useful state (eg a website/mailbox backup). Hypothetically, the scenario would be like "is Google Reader closing down? Let's just fork their infra, edit the config file, and import our our feeds and all we have to do is use a different URL to access the very same services".
elric 6y ago
> GNU Name System Really? Can you elaborate a bit on the why? As far as I can tell, GNS has been around as a proposal for years and has gained no traction.
- southerntofu 6y ago
  > Really? Can you elaborate a bit on the why? It's the only serious proposal i've seen to replace the DNS protocol. It's backwards-compatible with existing zones (same RR types plus a few new ones like PKEY), with existing governance (the protocol has a notion of global root, which is very likely to be ICANN), and replacing traditional DNS recursive resolution with GNS recursive resolution is not such a challenge.. and in any case most devices don't even do recursive resolution but act as a stub for a recursive resolver further on the network (a somewhat-worrying trend). So, the fact that GNS can live alongside the DNS for as long as people need is for me a very appealing argument. Also, GNS uses proven p2p schemes (DHT) in a clever way instead of reinventing the wheel or yet another crypto-ponzi-scheme. "crypto" in GNS equals cryptographic properties to ensure security/privacy of the system, not tech-startup cryptocoin bullshit, and i truly appreciate that. Then, looking at the security properties of GNS, it looks great on paper. I'm no cryptographer so i can't vet the design of it, but ensuring query privacy and preventing zone enumeration at the same time sounds like a useful property to build a global decentralized database, which is what the DNS protocol is about despite having many problems. Building on such properties, re:claimID is a clever proposal for decentralized identity. I'm very much not a fan of digital identity systems, but that one resembles something that would be respectful of its users as persons. There's FOSDEM/CCC talks about that if you'd like to know more. > GNS has been around as a proposal for years and has gained no traction I wouldn't exactly say that. I'm not involved in the GNUNet project so i don't know the specifics, but GNS was at least presented at an ICANN panel as an "emerging identifier", that is one of the possible future replacements for DNS. I'd consider being recognized by ICANN as a potential DNS replacement some "traction" (more than i expected). If you can find the video from that ICANN session where both GNS and Handshake are introduced, that'll probably do a better job than me explaining why GNS is very fitted to replace DNS. URL used to be https://icann.zoom.us/rec/play/tJErIuCs-mg3E4GXtgSDB_UqW464f6isgyAb__sFnkqwVHQFZ1TwY7QVNrY25_9nvJkhoCe39EVRg4W5?startTime=1572978711000&_x_zm_rtaid=KqZrXR8SQGaR0SFWxRE8Tg.1587294037707.3fd6d5c80ded3ec1c4acf6ab81e26b5f&_x_zm_rhtaid=854 https://icann.zoom.us/rec/play/tJErIuCs-mg3E4GXtgSDB_UqW464f... but now that's not loading for me anymore.

joeyaiello 6y ago

PM lead for PowerShell here, thanks for the callout! I'll take "isn't the worst". ;) I'd love to get more of your thoughts around how PowerShell might be more useful for the kinds of scenarios you're thinking about. We see a lot of folks writing portable CI/CD build/test/deploy scripts for cross-platform apps (or to support cross-platform development), but we're always looking to lower the barrier of entry to get into PowerShell, as it can be quite jarring to someone who's used Bash their whole life (myself included). Structured shells have so much potential outside of that, though. I find myself using PowerShell to "explore" REST APIs, and then it's easy to translate that into something scripted and portable. But I'd love to get to a place one day where we could treat arbitrary datasets like that, sort of like a generalized SQL/JSON/whatever REPL. Plus, PS enables me to Google regex less :D

zaat 6y ago
Don't return everything, return what I specifically returned (yeah, I know about objects, talking about everywhere else). I know it will never happen, but one can dream. Painpoints aside, you and your team are doing excellent job. Thank you Edit: unless you are also responsible for DSC, than I'll take it back. It's terrible.
- joeyaiello 6y ago
  Unfortunately, we can't ever change that one, or the whole world of existing stuff will break. It's intended as a shell semantic where anything bare on the command line just gets run, no matter your scope. However when we introduced classes, we thought it was a more "dev-oriented" semantic, so we changed return there. This will only return 'this will return': class foo { [string] ReturnTest() { 'this will not return' return 'this will return' } } ([foo]::new()).ReturnTest()
BadInformatics 6y ago
In case you haven't seen it already, I found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779580 to be a pretty succinct list of the biggest stumbling points (latency, telemetry and documentation). A couple of more specific points I'd like to add after experience writing non-trivial PS scripts: - Tooling is still spotty. Last I used the VS Code extension, it was flaky and provided little in the way of formatting, autocomplete or linting. AIUI PowerShell scripts should be easier to statically analyze than an average bash script, so something as rigorous as ShellCheck would be nice to have too. - Docs around .NET interop still appear to be few and far between. I recall having to do quite a bit of guesswork around type conversions, calling conventions and the like. It's nice to see the docs have had a major overhaul since I last dug into them though :)
- haecceity 6y ago
  Tooling?? I write powershell scripts in notepad.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

FrontAid 6y ago

> 3. GUI/WebUI CMS for contributing to a shared versioned repository. Did you have some specific tool in mind? Because I completely agree that this is a great way of working with content. We have been doing that for a couple of months with our own tool. It uses Git and stores content in a pretty-printed JSON file. Techies can update that directly and push it manually. Content editors can use our tool to edit and commit to Git with a simple Web UI. Would that go into a direction you were thinking of?

zoover2020 6y ago
NetlifyCMS comes to mind!
southerntofu 6y ago
The closest i can think of is NetlifyCMS, but it's terrible because it's a bunch of JavaScript both server side and client side, and is really not intended to be selfhosted despite being open-source. If NetlifyCMS was a robust library for abstracting over versioning system and static site generator to build WebUI/TUI/GUI clients with, that would fit what i have in mind. I don't know of any such program yet, please let me know if you find something :)
- FrontAid 6y ago
  OK, I see. The tool we are working on is similar but also not quite what you are looking for. In case you want to have a look, it is availale on <my-name> .io

readingnews 6y ago

I am a lifelong sysadmin, and have thought about #2 frequently. I am thinking seriously about making it a research project. Who is behind this document you linked to? Is it tildeverse? Parts of that document are pretty up to date, so it does not seem very old. I am not really familiar with the null pointer site, or even how to find things on it (as in, every now and then I am surprised). I am surprised I have not seen this before.

southerntofu 6y ago
Hello, i'm the author of this document although it's just a draft for the moment (lots of TODOs in there) which is why it's not on my blog yet. nullpointer is just a file upload system of which ttm.sh is an instance residing in the tildeverse. I sometimes use it to publish drafts to collect thoughts/feedbacks on ideas i have. I'm also part of the tildeverse. I reside on thunix.net and do sysadmin for fr.tild3.org. I'm often around on #thunix, #selfhosting (etc) on tilde.chat in case you're also around :) > I am a lifelong sysadmin, and have thought about #2 frequently. I am thinking seriously about making it a research project. I think a lot of us have been obsessed with this idea for a while, but nobody to my knowledge has done it yet. If you feel like exploring this idea, amazing! It is in my view a complex-yet-solvable problem that many projects have failed to deal with because they've been too focused on narrow use-cases and not on the broader conception of a standardized specification ecosystem for selfhosting. If you feel like exploring this idea collectively (for example by cooperating on a standard for which you would contribute a specific implementation), count me in. I think a lot of brilliant people will be glad to board the ship once it's sailing! If you'd like to see where this idea has taken me so far, take a look at the joinjabber.org project. The entire infrastructure is described in a single, (hopefully) human-meaningful configuration file, with Ansible roles implementing it: https://codeberg.org/joinjabber/infra https://codeberg.org/joinjabber/infra Wish you the best, please keep me updated if you have more thoughts on this topic or would like to actively start a such project

KronisLV 6y ago

In case the nushell link doesn't work for anyone else, consider prefixing it with www: https://www.nushell.sh/ https://www.nushell.sh/ Admittedly, i have no idea why we even need to do that nowadays, but that seemed to work.

ryanianian 6y ago
It's because the bare TLD isn't setup to accept requests, but the `www` subdomain is (it's DNSed to a different IP): $ curl -v --head https://nushell.sh/ * Trying 162.255.119.254... * TCP_NODELAY set * Connection failed * connect to 162.255.119.254 port 443 failed: Connection refused $ curl -v --head https://www.nushell.sh/ * Trying 185.199.108.153... * TCP_NODELAY set * Connected to www.nushell.sh (185.199.108.153) port 443 (#0) Most hosts will alias or redirect away the www subdomain, but that's just a convenience. Of course technically foo.com and www.foo.com can have different DNS entries.
- macintux 6y ago
  My first IT gig, 25 (sigh) years ago, I tried to set up <ourdomain> as an alias for www.<ourdomain>. Seemed to work ok, but somehow I noticed that I had broken email delivery through our firewall, so I reverted the change. Couldn't figure out exactly what was going on, and set it aside. A few months after I left, I sent an email to a friend who still worked there, and it bounced exactly the same way. Called up my friend in a hurry, and sure enough, they had just finished deploying the same change.
  - KronisLV 6y ago
    Why even have www.<ourdomain>.<tld> in the first place then, if <ourdomain>.<tld> is entirely sufficient on its own? It does appear that it's mostly done for historical reasons and sometimes you need CNAME records[1], but overall it feels like it probably introduces unnecessarily complexity, because the www. prefix doesn't really seem to be all that useful apart from the mentioned situation with CNAMEs. That's kind of why i asked the question above - maybe someone can comment on additional use cases or reasons for sticking to the www convention, which aren't covered in the linked page. When i last asked the question to a company who only had their website available with wwww but didn't without, i got an unsatisfactory and non-specific answer where spam was mentioned. I'm not sure whether there's any truth to that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web#WWW_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web#WWW_prefix

fuzzer37 6y ago

Serious question: Who is the target audience of Nushell? I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone like my parents or my girlfriend to use something like that day to day, and if you need a shell to work more efficiently, why not just learn bash? The learning curve for the 2 seems pretty much exactly the same, and bash has the benefit of being installed on almost every Linux/Unix system, even Macs (I think they actually use zsh now, but still)

southerntofu 6y ago
> I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone (...) to use something like that day to day I know for a fact the opposite is true for me. A simple shell syntax with an amazing documentation is all it takes for people to write useful scripts. I'm confident i can teach basic programming to a total newbie using a structured shell in a few minutes. Explaining quirks of conditionals and loops in usual shells is trickier: should i use "-eq" or "=" or "=="? why am i iterating over a non-matching globset? etc. > why not just learn bash? I have a love-hate relationship with bash. It's good, but full of inconsistencies, and writing reliable, fail-safe scripts is really hard. I much prefer a language in which i'm less productive, but doesn't take me hours of debugging every time i'm reaching an edge case. Also, bash has very little embedded tooling, compared to nushell. In many cases, you have to learn more tools (languages) like awk, jq. In nushell, such features are built-in. > being installed on almost every Linux/Unix system Well, bash is definitely very portable. But at this game, nothing can beat a standard POSIX /bin/sh. Who knows? It may outlive us all :)
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Who is the target audience of Nushell? People who a) are trying to escape from the insanity of traditional shells and use something that works with structured data, and b) want something other than PowerShell.

spullara 6y ago

> 4. Structured shell for the masses. I wonder if shell stuff would work better in a notebook like environment. Edit: At least one exists: https://shellnotebook.com/ https://shellnotebook.com/

tootie 6y ago

There was a time I did all my shell commands just directly in Perl. If you have it all in your head you can do crazy stuff pretty quickly. Especially by having libraries that you can import and invoke in one line.

southerntofu 6y ago
That's really nice. I never really got into perl but i was moved by some sysadmin friends back in the days playing crazy tricks right in front of my eyes... doing the same in bash would have taken me minutes or even hours, so i always felt like this was some kind of great wizardry. But perl is not really the most user-friendly language to learn in my opinion. I think raku is much better in this regard, but unfortunately is not deployed widely (yet?).

closeparen 6y ago

Declarative is awesome for bootstrapping an infrastructure from nothing, but once it’s running and people are depending on it, it actually matters a lot which operations are done to it, in what order, and with what dispersion in time. Doubly so if it’s stateful. In the real world we see either hints in the “declarative” config to tweak execution order, or procedural workflows expressed ad hoc as a sequence of goal states. I think the future of sysadmin will be more explicitly procedural. Services managing services through the normal building blocks of services: endpoints, workers, databases, etc.

southerntofu 6y ago
> I think the future of sysadmin will be more explicitly procedural. I think that's true for the lower levels of abstraction because sysadmin is a finite list of steps. Being able to program your infrastructure in a type-safe, fail-safe way is very important. In the grandparent comment, i was arguing for building higher-level abstractions (semantic sysadmin) on top of that to make it easier to understand how your infrastructure is configured, and make it reproducible/forkable. Think of it like there's two kinds of state stored on your system: useful state (eg user data) and infrastructure byproducts (eg TLS certificates). The former must be included in backups, the latter can be regenerated on the go from server config. The kind of declarativeness i'm interested in is that which enables any member/customer to fork the entire infrastructure by editing a single config file if they're not happy with provided services, and from there they can import their own useful state (eg a website/mailbox backup). Hypothetically, the scenario would be like "is Google Reader closing down? Let's just fork their infra, edit the config file, and import our our feeds and all we have to do is use a different URL to access the very same services".

elric 6y ago

> GNU Name System Really? Can you elaborate a bit on the why? As far as I can tell, GNS has been around as a proposal for years and has gained no traction.

southerntofu 6y ago
> Really? Can you elaborate a bit on the why? It's the only serious proposal i've seen to replace the DNS protocol. It's backwards-compatible with existing zones (same RR types plus a few new ones like PKEY), with existing governance (the protocol has a notion of global root, which is very likely to be ICANN), and replacing traditional DNS recursive resolution with GNS recursive resolution is not such a challenge.. and in any case most devices don't even do recursive resolution but act as a stub for a recursive resolver further on the network (a somewhat-worrying trend). So, the fact that GNS can live alongside the DNS for as long as people need is for me a very appealing argument. Also, GNS uses proven p2p schemes (DHT) in a clever way instead of reinventing the wheel or yet another crypto-ponzi-scheme. "crypto" in GNS equals cryptographic properties to ensure security/privacy of the system, not tech-startup cryptocoin bullshit, and i truly appreciate that. Then, looking at the security properties of GNS, it looks great on paper. I'm no cryptographer so i can't vet the design of it, but ensuring query privacy and preventing zone enumeration at the same time sounds like a useful property to build a global decentralized database, which is what the DNS protocol is about despite having many problems. Building on such properties, re:claimID is a clever proposal for decentralized identity. I'm very much not a fan of digital identity systems, but that one resembles something that would be respectful of its users as persons. There's FOSDEM/CCC talks about that if you'd like to know more. > GNS has been around as a proposal for years and has gained no traction I wouldn't exactly say that. I'm not involved in the GNUNet project so i don't know the specifics, but GNS was at least presented at an ICANN panel as an "emerging identifier", that is one of the possible future replacements for DNS. I'd consider being recognized by ICANN as a potential DNS replacement some "traction" (more than i expected). If you can find the video from that ICANN session where both GNS and Handshake are introduced, that'll probably do a better job than me explaining why GNS is very fitted to replace DNS. URL used to be https://icann.zoom.us/rec/play/tJErIuCs-mg3E4GXtgSDB_UqW464f6isgyAb__sFnkqwVHQFZ1TwY7QVNrY25_9nvJkhoCe39EVRg4W5?startTime=1572978711000&_x_zm_rtaid=KqZrXR8SQGaR0SFWxRE8Tg.1587294037707.3fd6d5c80ded3ec1c4acf6ab81e26b5f&_x_zm_rhtaid=854 https://icann.zoom.us/rec/play/tJErIuCs-mg3E4GXtgSDB_UqW464f... but now that's not loading for me anymore.