Notices by Felix Palmen :freebsd: :c64: (zirias@mastodon.bsd.cafe)

#Rooting a new #Xiaomi device is getting totally ridiculous these days.

I already jumped through the hoop to "request bootloader unlock permission" in one of Xiaomi's #bloatware apps at **EXACTLY** midnight beijing time, at least this worked. Now the second step would be to actually unlock the boot loader. On #FreeBSD, I can't use Xiaomi's unlocker tool (but I guess that's actually a good thing), so I found some python script that also works (after a bit of fiddling with it, patching shebang and removing some nonsense), and see what it tells me now.

Xiaomi, you used to be cool, a long time ago... 🙄

@jadi This "#OpenBSD is secure!" claim always annoyed me a lot, mainly because it doesn't tell anything: #Security in IT can only ever be defined in a context of #threat models. Without that, it's meaningless. Somewhat recently, I discovered this:

https://isopenbsdsecu.re/

I should warn it uses some sarcasm and other confrontative language in some parts, unfortunately. But it seems to be a pretty professional analysis and assessment of (mostly) the "mitigations" OpenBSD provides in an attempt to counter "typical" attacks by at least making them harder.

I should also add that I consider this a very interesting and helpful read, and still consider OpenBSD a great project that came up with lots of great stuff (I recently used their #bcrypt code after doing some research on password hashing, for example). And I don't agree with every single criticism on that page either. I just think it's important to build assessments whether something "is secure" on a serious analytical foundation.

I'm trying to add "genric" #signal handling to #poser. Ultimate goal is to provide a way for #swad to handle #SIGHUP, although signal handling must be done in poser's main event loop (signals are only ever unblocked while waiting for file descriptor events).

Okay, I could just add explicit handling for SIGHUP. But a generic solution would be nicer. Just for example, a consumer might be interested in #SIGINFO which doesn't even exist on all platforms ... 🤔

Now, #POSIX specs basically just say signal constants are "integer values". Not too helpful here. Is it safe to assume an upper bound for signal numbers on "real world" OS implementations, e.g. 64 like on #Linux? Should I check #NSIG and, if not defined, just define it to 64? 🙈

#C #coding #question

First change since #swad 0.2 will actually be a (huge?) improvement to my #poser lib. So far, it was hardwired to use the good old #POSIX #select call. This is perfectly fine for handling around up to 100 (or at least less than 1000, YMMV) clients.

Some #select implementations offer defining the upper limit for checked file descriptors. Added support for that.

POSIX also specifies #poll, which has very similar #scalability issues, but slightly different. Added support for this as well.

And then, I went on to add support for the #Linux-specific #epoll and #BSD-specific #kqueue (#FreeBSD, #NetBSD, #OpenBSD, ...) which are both designed to *solve* any scalability issues 🥳

A little thing that slightly annoyed me about kqueue was that there's no support for temporarily changing the signal mask, so I had to do the silly dance shown in the screenshot. OTOH, it offers changing event filters and getting events in a single call, which I might try to even further optimize ... 😎

#C #coding

Well, tried it. Works! 🥳

Accepting a whole list of changes (so you can buffer them during an event loop iteration) and then even submitting them in the same call that receives events (with the changes already applied) is *indeed* a pretty cool thing with #kqueue.

https://github.com/Zirias/poser/commit/4630d6a8b87284da21097c30ea8a6ba02cc40df6

@pertho The only little drawback compared to epoll is the lack of atomic signal mask setting, so you need a bit more code and a thoughtful structure to handle signals in the same loop. Apart from that, indeed much better than #epoll.

Unfortunately, it's not beter than inotify (for a completely different purpose, #file #monitoring ... kqueue covers them all). With #inotify, you can for example set a #watch by path, while #kqueue requires opened file descriptors. 😞

Am I the only person left on the planet who doesn't want their #browser in #fullscreen mode?

Thanks @stefano for upgrading the instance obviously without any issues! But a little boo to #mastodon for the new appearance that needlessly consumes even *more* horizontal space than before (using the "advanced" UI), which now prompted me to show it scaled to 90% in chromium 🙄

@stefano I've always used the "classic" one, now I tried the "bird" style just in case, but same issue. Sure, I could switch to the "simple" UI, but I actually like the columns, just why do they need so much space?

On the site previously known as twitter, I really enjoyed the classic "tweetdeck"...

@feld @stefano Oh! I'll have to keep an eye on that, whether this is the case for all the "missing" toots! Thanks for that idea. 👍

It seems #snac's simple Web UI doesn't show that property (or I'm being blind), but I can check on the mastodon instance of course 😉

@feld @stefano Unfortunately, it has to be a different issue, see this toot that also doesn't appear in my feed on mastodon:
https://snac.bsd.cafe/zirias/p/1727937709.648837

It's a reply (again without tagging in the content) to a *public* toot. 😞

@stefano something seems a bit strange with the #snac instance: I followed myself now (both directions), and quite some of my own toots on snac don't arrive in my feed here on #mastodon. But when looking at the snac profile from mastodon, I can read them... 🤷

@stefano Hm ... could it be related to whether something is an answer or not? I *think* it was answers I didn't see, and I'm pretty sure (?) Mastodon is showing me answers written by other people I follow. 🤔

@stefano Maybe I fundamentally misunderstood how the home feed works in #mastodon? I expected it would show me *every* toot from people I follow. Yet here's another one that doesn't appear:
https://snac.bsd.cafe/zirias/p/1727886222.245670

Yes, it's an answer again, without tagging anyone, but I wonder how that could be related, I mean I'm following this account (myself on the snac instance), not the "random" person I might or might not tag when answering. I'm confused 😂

One of the very few actually useful things #systemd has to offer is the #status report (systemctl status) on a service, including lots of info + latest #log messages. Except it completely spoils it by forcing you to scroll horizontally. 🤯

#TIL: You can easily fix it by putting SYSTEMD_LESS=FRXMK in your environment.

Next step testing #IPv6only operation in my local network, I wanted to give #dhcp "option 108" (IPv6-only preferred) a try.

I'm running #ISC #dhcpd on my #FreeBSD router/firewall, so I looked at the manuals:

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=dhcp-options

Ok, added "option option-108 00:00:00:00;" based on that, which dhcpd rejected 🤔

From finding random different examples for custom options and with some trial and error, I found I have instead to declare the option:

option v6only code 108 = integer 32;

... and then use it like this:

option v6only 0;

Ok, what's up with documentation here? 🙄

At least it works, verified on my phone running #Android 14. No #IPv4-address from my pool any more. Instead, 192.0.0.4 appeared, seems it automatically configures a #clat...