Geekices

Updates on Userrepository and Jarvis

brunomiguel On

Lately, I’ve been having some problems when building picom-ibhagwan-git and picom-tryone-git. The first one would build OK, but not the second one.

After a bit of debugging, I found out that it was a problem related to the way makepkg and git handle the cache when building these forks. This would also happen when adding the picom-git package: it would build because it’s the first package in alphabetical order and Jarvis builds the packages that way, but not the other two.

To fix this, the build() function no longer uses pushd and popd, allowing the script to work outside the package directory it’s building and delete some parts of the cache folder Jarvis uses.

This has the upside of allowing a better cache cleaning when building the packages. In a future commit, it will clean after itself better, up to a point it cleans every cache and artifact generated during a build.

And yes, $HOME/.npm and $HOME/.cargo I’m looking at you both.

There will be an exception, though: the makepkg.log file in every submodule folder because I use it as a log file for the package build.

Unrelated to this issue is the removal of the onivim2-git package. It takes some time to build and lately it would ask human intervention to confirm some steps, which is not compatible with the way Jarvis builds the packages and because the script is meant to be a tool to build the packages in an automated way.

One last thing: please become a Patron if you want to support userrepository.eu. Even €1 will help cover the monthly expenses, just over €15. If I get enough patrons, I’ll be able to upgrade the virtual machine to one with better specs, which will allow a higher package compression level, shorter build times and maybe even packaged kernels. Thank you!

Música

Mix the City

brunomiguel On

Há mais de um ano cruzei-me por acaso com dois trabalhos que o músico israelita Kutiman fez para o projeto Mix the City. Na altura, fiquei fascinado com o que ele criou e ouvi as músicas em loop durante algum tempo. Acabei, no entanto, por não ouvir as restantes criações deste projeto e nem sequer ver do que se tratava.

Hoje, no entanto, decidi ir ao Youtube pesquisar algumas músicas do Mix the City e deparei-me com a seguinte música: Ziggy Has Ardeur – Mix The City Mannheim. O trabalho feito é fantástico.

Já que estava com as mãos na massa, aproveitei para visitar o endereço do projeto e descobri que os utilizadores podem criar as suas músicas com os samples disponibilizados diretamente no próprio site. Acho que vou ter um entretém para os próximos dias, se as costas não chatearem muito. 🙂

Geekices

Some statistics for Userrepository

brunomiguel On

You might have noticed that Userrepository uses Cloudflare. I chose it for two main reasons: their ability to help mitigate (D)DoS attacks and to help hiding the IP address for the VM from script kiddies.

It’s not that I think Userrepository will ever be a target for a (D)DoS attack, but better safe than sorry. Also, I have more than enough automated failed SSH authentication attempts without revealing the IP: 441 blocked IPs and counting for one fail2ban ssh rule and 2 for another fail2ban ssh rule. I intend to tighten these rules in the near future.

A third (lesser) reason is their analytics. This allows me to evaluate, from time to time, if the repository is of interest for Arch and Arch-based Linux distribution users.

Although the analytics part is not the best-in-breed, it lets me take a look at the stats for the last 30 days. For example, in this time frame, at the time of writing of this blog post, I had 1486 unique visitors and 17622 total requests to userrepository.eu. I honestly expected around half that number at best.

Most of these unique visitors (and hopefully users), from first to last, come from France, Germany, Italy and USA. My country, Portugal, still hasn’t reached the 500 unique requests.

In terms of bandwidth statistics, the numbers are low: 10.14GB in the last 30 days, with only 878.35kB of cached content. This is expected because I doubt they would cache compressed files, but they’re probably caching the 01-README.txt file with the instructions to add the repository to your /etc/pacman.conf file.

The numbers, I must admit, are not what I wanted but they are more than I expected and that’s a strong motivation to keep the project running, hoping it will help other users.

One last thing: please become a Patron if you want to support userrepository.eu. Even €1 will help cover the monthly expenses, just over €15. If I get enough patrons, I’ll be able to upgrade the virtual machine to one with better specs, which will allow a higher package compression level, shorter build times and maybe even packaged kernels. Thank you!

Geekices

Um SMS estranho que me levou a um endereço que copia o site dos CTT

brunomiguel On

Caso tenham inserido os dados do vosso cartão de crédito, peçam o cancelamento da subscrição à VodMood através do endereço customersupport@vodmood.com

Hoje de manhã, ainda não eram 8h30, a esposa recebeu um SMS de um número estranho (5819PT). Ela pediu-me para ver a mensagem porque está a aguardar a receção de documentação através de uma transportadora e queria saber o estado do envio.

Quando vi a mensagem, reparei que o endereço é estranho e não é um que eu tenha visto ser usado pelos CTT ou alguma transportadora. Este endereço, ajoruc.com, é “coruja” escrito ao contrário e com um erro ortográfico. Isto pode ser apenas coincidência, mas fez-me desconfiar ainda mais.

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Geekices

Status on userrepository changes

brunomiguel On

It took me a while to update you about the latest changes to my Arch and Arch-compatible Linux distributions repository. But first, let me apologize for the delay: work, personal life and, for about 3 weeks now, a horrible back pain (that just doesn’t stop, even with an handful of medication) have kept me from doing this in the time frame I expected.

First on the “agenda”, I experimented with increasing the zstd compression level for the packages like I said I would do in my last post about the repository. The trade-off was not worth it: the increase in packaging time was far superior to the small decrease in package size. So, I’ll keep the zstd compression level to “-12” in the foreseeable future.

Also, up to a few days ago, I would manually update the packages and, from time to time, do a full build. Now, I’m using a cron job and pueue to manage the tasks and it always does a full build.

If you don’t know pueue, this application is a command-line task management tool for sequential and parallel execution of long-running tasks. Besides adding tasks, you can watch the logs for them, the exit codes and even follow what the task is doing (just like using “tail -f /destination/file“). But pueue can do much more. Go check it out at Github.

Userrepository.eu also has a few more packages. For example: vimtips, wego, wttr, plymouth and performance-tweaks. All of them are at AUR and at the Git repository where I have userrepository.eu sources, if you want to take a look at the commits (just ignore some of the commit messages, because I can be lazy with them at times ^^’).

One last thing: please become a Patron if you want to support userrepository.eu. Even €1 will help cover the monthly expenses, just over €15. If I get enough patrons, I’ll be able to upgrade the virtual machine to one with better specs, which will allow a higher package compression level, shorter build times and maybe even packaged kernels. Thank you!