Steve Parker

I hereby propose a new service: Microsoft Authenticator As A Service, or MSAaaS for short. This service will provide your password, deal with expired sessions, re-enter your password if that is apparently randomly needed, it will check for the MFA token, acknowledge it and enter the MFA token back into the service which created it in the first place.

https://steve-parker.org/articles/msaaas/

There is a principle[1] that talking to a "rubber duck" can help in debugging a problem. It is a theory that I subscribe to, and many other IT people do too. The idea is that you talk to the rubber duck and in explaining the problem, it helps you to understand the problem and come to a solution, even if no other expertise is available to you.

But even a rubber duck is no use if you keep putting off the problem, so I have decided I need to up the ante: My rubber duck has been upgraded with a label so that it reminds me that it does need me to address the problem itself!

In this case, it's a Nagios issue for a project called "p4lm" but I am sharing this expansion to the Rubber Duck methodology to the world, in the hope that we can extend Rubber Duck debugging into Rubber Duck Nagging!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Linux distro packaging is interesting, but I now have a Fedora/AWS and Debian/Ubuntu package of openssh which can store the passwords and SSH key fingerprints provided by anybody attempting to connect to a server.
Basically just an update to build the 9-yr-old "longtail" project for modern distros. The packaging was what took the time, I've done plenty of RPM before but as a Debian user, packaging the Ubuntu DEB was the most challenging part. (Why jump through all those hoops to add a *.patch file to the patches directory?!)
Still got a bit of tidying up to do, but I'm happy that I've made a decent start ahead of my MSc CS research project later this year.

Kept the same username, moved to BlueSky, will still check in here as sporadically as I have before!

https://bsky.app/profile/unixsteve.bsky.social

I've just realised why Microsoft called their operating system "Windows"

- because it's such a pane!

This took me longer than I would care to admit...

Just an observation that amused me so I made it into a thing

It's not new, but I just saw it again for the first time in a while. #vi #vim

Upgraded my Fedora 39 box to 40 today. Did *not* realise that meant upgrading Postgres which basically meant restoring database from backups.
Fortunately I do have twice-daily backups for this almost-never-changing database. Because without that it could have been a hell of a lot worse!

Just some street photography today - Cheshire, UK

Abney Park, Cheadle, today

Heron on Middlewood Way, near Poynton, Cheshire, UK

I'm not saying that online pressure sales are a scam, but here are two screenshots taken just as midnight passed... the same deal was about to end, but magically now survives for another two days!
I don't care about naming and shaming the website, because it's not about one website, it's just an observation of the tactic.

Revising Algorithms and Data Structures, and there's one detail which I just can't get seem to get stuck into my head. So for the next week, this will be prominently displayed on my desk, until it sinks in!
#bigOnotation

Just looking into what's available with Git for networking - storing Cisco configs and such (I am *such* fun to be around on a quiet Wednesday evening, honestly!) and realised that Git has been around for a while now (for non-geeks, Git is a Version Control System, not an insult!). A quick search confirmed that Git is now 18 years old.

... Git is old enough to buy itself a pint! 😮 (in the UK at least)

Twenty years ago this image would only be possible as a mock-up.
I cannot even begin to express how happy this makes me.
Microsoft spent the 1990s and 2000s fighting and maligning Linux, literally calling it "a cancer". The "Halloween Documents" are also well worth looking up.
And now, microsoft\.com contains an article entitled "How to download and install Linux"