#random (2024-05)

Props to @Joe Niland for calling my attention to this podcast!

Good share. Thank you. You going to OSS summit?

I believe this is the one they mentioned in the podcast: https://05f5.com/

This.

Now if we could just get more companies to offer a tier with pricing somewhere between free and “your firstborn child.”

Oh, you have one more user? That’ll be a 10,000% increase. Muahhahahah!

HubSpot

The sale was conducted under a prearranged 10b5-1 trading plan, which allows company insiders to set up a predetermined plan to sell stocks at a time when they are not in possession of material non-public information.

As HashiCorp’s Chief Marketing Officer Marc Holmes cashes in on his shares, investors might be curious about the company’s financial health and market performance. HashiCorp’s recent metrics from InvestingPro shed light on its current standing. With a market capitalization of $6.61 billion, the company holds a notable position in its sector. Despite a negative P/E ratio of -33.36, reflecting challenges in profitability over the last twelve months, HashiCorp boasts an impressive gross profit margin of 81.46%, indicating strong control over its cost of goods sold relative to its revenue, which stands at $583.14 million for the same period.

yeah, we can quote Lol

Most of the top executives at just about all companies have automatic share sales to avoid insider trading issues. Armon, Dave, Mitchell, Navam, etc, etc will often show up in these reports. This AI generated article also ignores the fact that he’s technically selling these shares at a “loss” because the IBM purchase price is $35/share.

If you’re going to grasp at straws, at least find sound ones.

you still don’t get what I mean, what you believe is not what is happening

I don’t know what you mean, you haven’t stated it.

the reason I quitted from #terraform channel is because I protested hashicorp license change, and you were in that thread, how did I not state it Lol

you’ve still got long career ahead, don’t follow up with these big companies, your career worth more than that

I appreciate the career advice, but I’ve gotten this far without it.

I’ve worked for the US Air Force, a number of smaller software firms (one that became much larger–HashiCorp), a union, a technology consultancy firm and Hewlett-Packard. I’ve grown in many ways from all of them. I didn’t think I’d like Hewlett-Packard, but working for them gave me a much greater scale of responsibilities I’d get from smaller firms. I was the principle Solutions Engineer for all of Asia Pacific for a particular product line and learned a tremendous amount from doing that.

Maybe more importantly is that I’ve seen a number of shifts in the last 28 years I’ve worked in tech and if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that nothing is static. Being able to adjust to change and do so with value to the industry is far more important than chasing “shiny new things”. The projects, products and processes will inevitably change. Knowing what brings true value to organizations is far more important to me than being a foot soldier in short term skirmishes.

Thanks for the replies. I know where you are from. You’ve got all my respects for what you’ve done for your country. Recent years, I said too many “You don’t see what I see”. I always appreciate the persons who opened my eyes. It is just the time I feel I need to stand up to show the supports to the people who are confused or not certain of what is happening :)

You could lead #confused and #not-certain-what-is-happening channels to be more helpful.

If there are such channels, I will give it a try Lol

what’s wrong with AWX/Ansible?

I’ve never tried AWX, we don’t use Ansible enough that I’ve ever thought it would be worth looking into.

Not really a direct competitor to rundeck in my understanding.

it is not an open place for LinkedIn suspended lots of accounts during pandemic

how about 6**

@Hao Wang http status codes ate are between 100 to 599 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status

oh I remember it wrong, it is SIP protocol

Nix doesn’t compete with other projects, they are not even in the same league

I see it as a potential snapd also got the potential to take over Redhat’s position after it is acquired by IBM, but snapd store is not open sourced, it is a failure finally

CoreOS is as well before acquired by redhat… that is the interesting part of open source

snapd/CoreOS/nix got a common part which is hashed package management

https://github.com/NixOS/nixops

Awesome! I’ve been meaning to check it out myself. What did you install nixOS on?

I think nix can be a competitive advantage for velocity for some tech forward organisations who have a nix ninja on hand.

But to go mainstream they need to make it easier to adopt. Last I checked, there’s a schism in the community between some VC-funded startups (e.g flox) trying to make it easier to adopt (flakes) versus some more theological elements in the nix community who have a slightly different vision.

https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/ https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-flakes-is-an-experiment-that-did-too-much-at-once/32707 https://flox.dev/

@venkata.mutyala I started with a couple of VMs. Nix can also manage multiple hosts, which gives more imaginations

@Eamon Keane thanks for the info! After I started this thread, found this, https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Applications. Nix can do more than I imagined L0l

I thought a lot but don’t know how to express them all, let us dive in, get hands dirty Lol

Nix is definitely highly recommended

DevOps engineers are shaking to be afraid of losing jobs if Nix engineers are imagining bigger…

@Eamon Keane after another look into Flox, it is the example for Nix to replace Ansible

Flox: from inside out (VM), Ansible: from outside of VM

yea flox looks promising! I think there’s still a chance you fall through flox’s nix abstraction and could be spending days trying to debug an install, so you do still need an expert on hand.

yeah, it is, Nix is a lang, similar to Ansible which is also interesting when troubleshooting

Nix with Flox similar projects can be more ambitious, e.g. if there is an integration between Opentofu and Nix… so Nix can not only set up packages in VM, but the whole infra

a helpful article to learn Nix, https://aldoborrero.com/posts/2022/12/02/learn-how-to-use-the-nix-repl-effectively/

a new item on competitor list: Crossplane

https://nix.dev is the official learning material

yeah, took a quick look, easy to learn

I work on this, so let me know about any questions or issues!

I’ll take a look into the git repo first

you know why I promote NixOS, because it can support Secure Boot, if you worked with it, you know it is not easy, and Ubuntu’s secure boot certificate depends on M$… which is a concern

seems M$ is there still, https://github.com/nix-community/lanzaboote/blob/2eb19b872bc0a5f336b9b934ba96ea029e4da8c2/docs/QUICK_START.md?plain=1#L17-L22, but not 100% hardwares

@proofconstruction do you know a good place to ask questions about packages of NixOS? starting with a quick one, how these packages are audited? for example, now opentofu package is not managed by someone else, how can I know the binary got no bad actor in it?

You can always ask questions in the Discourse, in a GitHub issue in the nixpkgs repo, or in rooms in the official matrix. Some other unofficial platforms are listed here

got it, thanks!

Just wanted to add my 2 cents: I generally agree that Nix is just a different beast than Ansible or other things. Probably a better comparison would be something like Nickel, https://nickel-lang.org/ … which is built to be more generalized than Nix

I tend to think of Nix as a methodology and toolkit for repeatable builds.

but you can absolutely extend that to include building instances. That is to say, if you can describe something as a ‘build target’… Nix will happily codify it

Nix is not built on Nickel; Nix is a language. Nickel is a later development which tries to address a similar space (configuration generally) with different ergonomics.

aha! I had always felt the two were related. Thanks for that clarification

Updated my remarks above

They’re pretty related! Spiritually siblings I guess. There’s some interest (or was a year or two ago) in trying to replace Nix with Nickel in some third-party codebases (not in the nix core projects of course), but I’m not aware of anybody who actually did so.

Today, Nix-the-idea is really the only available correct solution to dependency management. There are plenty of rough edges in the Nix program itself, the CLI, and the language, but no other approaches really come close to the same power and stability.

nixos is kinda combination of snapd/CoreOS + Ansible/Chef/Puppet

now got more insights into this eco

agentlessly run in VM

if NixOS can introduce AppArmor or SELinux, that would address security concerns as a potential mainstream distro

snapd uses AppArmor for access control, and it is very strictly done, which is good for IoT but a disaster for a normal OS as a package manager

Nix (and Nixpkgs, and of course NixOS which is a subproject of Nixpkgs and should really be thought of as a framework for building custom Linux distributions) has a LOT to offer in the devops space. You can build truly-minimal container images, define fully reproducible and portable dev environments, specify the entire systems those live and execute in, and more, all with the same language, and more. If you pin a particular nixpkgs revision, you can reasonably expect the same file to continue building exactly the same outputs forever.

a new item added on the competitor list: Hashicorp Packer

There are many security improvements underway, with many more in the pipeline. Last year we applied for and received funding from the STF to build a nixpkgs vulnerability tracker and other tooling.

yeah, i really felt surprised that Nix can run everywhere, windows/linux/mac

love to have the tracker, it is one of my big concerns after Centos is gone (suspecting there are bad actors in the packages already) and xz backdoor

For the most part, all package sources or prebuilt binaries are fetched from upstream, with their hashes checked, and this information committed to git. In rare cases there are patches to source to make things work better with nix, but these are also always in git and available for inspection.

got it

c++ engineers are seeing hope in devops world Lol

Open offer to anyone reading: I’m happy to help you get started onboarding your projects into Nix! I wrote the tutorial on packaging existing software, so I recommend reading that first (and https://nix.dev in general) to get an idea of what this process looks like. That tutorial walks through packaging C/C++ stuff, but packages in other languages typically make use of language-specific packaging infrastructure in nixpkgs, and usually have a preferred style/idioms for the package definitions.

steep learning curve though..