/var/log/irl

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-05

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on converting AX.25 packets to the TNC2 format used by APRS-IS.

I fixed the path formatting to include the asterisks for used path entries. Before packets would always appear to APRS-IS to have been heard directly, which gave some impressive range statistics for packets that had in fact been through one or two digipeaters.

A little more filtering is now implemented for packets. The control field and PID are verified to ensure the packets are APRS packets.

Hetzner Dedicated Server Reverse DNS + Ansible

Continuing on the path towards all my stuff being managed by Ansible, I’ve figured out a method of managing the reverse DNS entries for subnets on the Hetzner Dedicated Server.

There’s a bunch of Ansible modules for handling Hetzner Cloud, but these servers are managed in Robot which the Cloud API doesn’t cover. Instead, you need to use the Robot Webservice.

Ansible does have a module for doing pretty arbitrary things with web APIs though, so using that I’ve got the following playbook figured out to keep the reverse DNS entries in sync:

Consolidation and simplification

I’ve been doing a lot of consolidation and simplification in an effort to reduce the amount of brain I have to expend on various tasks and responsibilities. I think it’s working.

Last week I wrote about Ansible for Tor Metrics. I’ve also been working on Ansible for my own stuff. Some of the things I’ve been working on include:

• consistent user account setup and synchronised SSH public keys
• consistent privilege escalation (doas on OpenBSD, sudo on Debian)
• all hosts are backed up via BackupPC
• all hosts are monitored in Nagios

If you want to check out this stuff as it evolves, I’ve pushed it to git.sr.ht (this link might break, I make no promises).

Contact

• iain@learmonth.me
• irlxyz
• irlxyz