Better Ansible Playbooks and Roles

Ansible is one of those technologies that most SREs have come across at some point or the other. Despite the mindnumbing increase in abstraction layers in the past few years, trusty old Ansible does not go anywhere.¹ Ansible is based on a very simple idea: declarative management of the state of a computer. The implementation of this idea, and its final use-cases are fairly complex. Ansible is used for everything from setting up computers and servers, to deploying continuously to VMs. I have been using Ansible for the servers that I manage: DNS, RSS reader. I have also used Ansible for setting up my personal Linux computer. With both these approaches, I have found some limited success, but I am left with a list of pain points almost always. The pain points are indicative of the increase in complexity when it comes to setting up computers, installing software and keeping it up-to-date.

Adventures with Wireguard and MTU

This past weekend, I wanted to set up Miniflux, a browser-based RSS¹ reader. I have been using it locally for the past two weeks and it has been extremely worthwhile. It has the dual advantage of always being online and the ability to categorize feeds, which helps me group the feeds that I want to read (blogs) from those that I want to skim (news). I did not want to set up a Miniflux instance which would have ports open to the Internet. I wanted the instance to be available only inside a private network; I wanted to use Wireguard to set up the private network. I ran into a problem that looks extremely simple in hindsight: The packets which were being sent on the Wireguard interface were larger than the Max Transmission Unit of some router between the VPS² and my laptop. This is something that I have not run into before. It was interesting to delve through the various layers of Linux’ networking stack. What follows is an account of my investigation.

Using an iPhone Without Windows or Apple Computers

I bought an iPhone 5 years ago. Admittedly, it was a strange choice: I don’t like proprietary software that one can not customize. I knew that iPhones work well only if one was willing to pay for subscription services like iCloud and Apple Music. The fights that Epic Games and Spotify have started in court over Apple’s attempts to block their native integration into iOS is well-known. But I bought one anyway, because I could not get an unlocked Android phone (back then) in Japan, and I certainly did not want to buy a locked phone, pay for overpriced cellular network coverage for 2 years before the phone could be unlocked and I could switch to a different carrier. So, an iPhone was the least worst option. Over the years, I have struggled with iPhone’s software to do basic things, such as writing a text file, transferring photos to a hard drive, understanding how exactly WhatsApp and other such apps store their pictures within the phone, optimizing to never go past the 30% disk usage mark because flash memory becomes extremely slow beyond it and makes the phone unusable, and using browsers like Firefox without the ability to install ad or tracker blocking plugins. This post is a summary of some of the things that I have learned.

Notes and Review - White Noise (DeLillo)

Rating: 5/5

What if a novel was very funny? If every single sentence that came out of the protagonist’s mouth, only served to make him look progressively less important and more foolish than you thought? What if it was the author mocking the protagonist privately to the reader, without letting the protagonist in on the joke? That would be a great novel, and White Noise fits the bill. The protagonist is a man who walks around a college in long robes and dark glasses, because it makes him look important and unapproachable, because it gives him authority. He continues this pretense in his thoughts as well. The chaotic misinformation rallies that go around in the back of his car, as everyone is talking over each other, and no one is answering the question which sparked the conversation, are a treat to read. The level of ignorance is deliberately exaggerated to a comic level. I can’t wait to watch the movie adaptation. Meanwhile, here’s a review of the book.

Beyond 100 Megabits Per Second

After moving to a new apartment recently, I made a contract with an ISP offering a best effort 1 Gigabit connection. At both apartments I lived in previously in Japan, an Internet connection was bundled with the rental agreement. As these connections had a maximum bandwidth of 100 Megabit, I never looked at my peripherals to see whether they were capable of Gigabit. When I bought a computer, I noticed (without much interest) that the computer’s motherboard was capable of Gigabit ethernet. When I checked my Internet speed with a Gigabit connection, I noticed that it was only about 93 Mbps. This post is the story of understanding my home network, the various bottlenecks along the way, and finally, going beyond 100 Mbps.

Look Up

“Look up,” “Take it easy,” and “Keep it real.” What do these phrases mean? Their literal meaning is easy enough to grasp. But they are never used in the literal sense. They are touted as cures to our collective ills; metaphors for the actual processes which would make everyone less cynical and more attentive. I heard these phrases in the coda of an inane Hindi movie recently. The movie contained generic drivel about young people: the improbably rich MBA graduate in her 20s, the extremely hardworking gym trainer that luck does not favor, and the stand-up comedian who appears to be happy-go-lucky but is in fact hiding a dark part of his past. These characters are “finding their way” in the world; the typical plot of a “coming-of-age” movie. The lesson of this movie was to convince everyone to put their phone in a (stupid and futile) bowl, “look up,” and take notice of the world around them. One of the characters is told to stop stalking her ex-boyfriend on Instagram; “I don’t know [why]; I can’t stop.” It is ironic that it is this same character, a few minutes later in the movie, who recommends “keeping it real.” What was the great revelation?

A Chronicle of Predominant Conversations (2023)

A large number of articles, opinion pieces, blog posts, video essays, podcasts, television dramas, and movies saturate the information landscape. It is bad form to say that there is more out there than can be read by any one person. The dreaded information overload has arrived. A few acknowledge the existence of this swarm of multimedia. The majority beckon an Algorithm, entrusting it with the responsibility of collecting, filtering, and sorting them in the unknowable order that each component particle of the majority expects. Opting out is futile. Not knowing about something is superior to not knowing about its occurrence. What follows is a view of culture and society based on the contents of 3 issues of the WIRED magazine.

Review - God, Human, Animal, Machine (O'Gieblyn)

Rating: 5/5

I wanted to read a book which would delve into the philosophical underpinnings of the ongoing AI hype: What was the root of the idea that humans, with all their confusions and complexities, can ever be replaced by computers? O’Gieblyn’s column in the Wired magazine, Dear Cloud Support, is my favorite part of the magazine. Her writing is lucid and her references come from far and wide. I was not really prepared for the philosophical depth that is on display in this book: O’Gieblyn goes to the very beginning of the world and starts with the earliest philosophers (Plato, Aristotle) and ushers the reader through a series of “frames of mind.” She is not averse to religion or science; nor is she biased to any particular philosopher or their ideas; quoting from a huge variety of sources throughout the book to show the ways in which thinking has evolved. Her religious upbringing and her current vocation as a technology writer feature heavily throughout the book. After reading this book, I have a clear idea of where the foundation of the hype lies and how it has gotten this bad.

Review - Subprime Attention Crisis (Hwang)

Rating: 4/5

What would happen if all the free services that you use on the Internet, which are powered by advertisements, stop being free one day? This is the premise of the Subprime Attention Crisis. If you ask yourself this, you might realize that many of the services that we think of as free are powered by advertising. For me, the most frequently used services that are ostensible free are Google Maps, WhatsApp and YouTube. I use at least one of them almost every day. If they were to become paid services, or the hurdles to using them without giving up too much data increased, it would be mildly annoying. This calculus will be very different for an Internet user who uses Gmail and uses it to receive important communication. Hwang’s argument is sensible and easy to understand. He starts from the basics of advertising on the Internet and builds up to his myriad theses: Programmatic advertising is very similar to the financial markets. Ad networks claims that targeted advertising on the Internet is better than “spray everyone” advertising on TV. This claim is a lie and that banner ads don’t really change consumer behavior. Commercial interruptions are blocked by users using ad blocking plugins or because users reliably skip ads on video-only platforms in under half a second. To back all of this, he presents a lot of industry research and anecdotal evidence. This was a convincing case for being aware that free services could stop being free any day, and there would be nothing really surprising about it. (Just the other day, YouTube took a step towards blocking ad blockers.)

New Wireguard Peer in 10 Minutes

I have been using Wireguard for about 4 years now. I started with the basic Wireguard setup, where I did everything manually and used the ip link and ip addr commands to create new links and assign addresses to them. The wg-quick utility is open-source and has built-in SystemD support. So, I switched to using the configuration file that wg-quick requires. With an ad-blocking DNS server, I was able to use the setup for a long time without having to change anything at all. The client support was excellent on Linux, Android and (even) iOS. I never really noticed whether I had my VPN enabled. I kept it enabled at all times except when I needed to access some geofenced service. However, I was still writing the wg-quick configuration files manually and most of them were very similar. This caused me to put off adding new peers to my network as soon as I needed to. Recently, I wrote a Golang CLI tool which generates wg-quick compatible configurations for Wireguard peers, based on a simple JSON input file. Using this tool, I was able to add a new Wireguard peer and create a new network in less than 10 minutes. The path to that CLI tool is what this post is about.