“Forever loading” error with Jitsi and Google Meet

On By ManuLeave a comment

I had this issue preventing me to start a call, which happened on two different browsers. It turned out that the pulseaudio service was hung, and no audio devices were available for the browser to use.

In that case it makes sense to check:

  • if pulseaudio is running
systemctl status --user pulseaudio
  • if pulseaudio is running, that you have a list from input (sources) and output (sinks) audio devices in the Gnome Desktop Settings. You can also check from the command line with
pactl list sources
pactl list sinks

OpenShift vs. AWS product mapping

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If you know the Amazon Web Services portfolio, and you are interested in OpenShift or the OKD OpenShift community distribution, this is a table of corresponding technologies.

OpenShift is Red Hat’s Kubernetes distribution: it is basically the upstream Kubernetes delivered with monitoring, logging, CI/CD, underlying OS, tested upgrade paths not found with a manual kubernetes.io kubeadm install.

AWS OpenShift OpenShift upstream project
Cloud Trail Kubernetes API Server audit log Kubernetes
Cloud Watch OpenShift Monitoring Prometheus
AWS Artifact Compliance Operator OpenSCAP
AWS Trusted Advisor Insights
AWS Marketplace OpenShift Operator Hub
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Red Hat SSO Keycloack
AWS Elastisc Beanstalk OpenShift Source2Image (S2I) Source2Image (S2I)
AWS S3 ODF Rados Gateway Rook RGW
AWS Elastic Bloc Storage ODF Rados Block Device Rook RBD
AWS Elastic File System ODF Ceph FS Rook CephFS
Amazon Simple Notification Service OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka Apache Kafka
Amazon Guard Duty API Server audit log review, ACS Runtime detection Stackrox
Amazon Inspector Quay.io container scanner, ACS Vulnerability Assessment Clair, Stackrox
AWS Lambda Openshift Serverless* Knative
AWS Key Management System could be done with Hashicorp Vault Vault
AWS WAF NGINX Ingress Controller Operator with ModSecurity NGINX ModSecurity
Amazon Elasticache Redis Enterprise Operator Redis, memcached as alternative
AWS Relational Database Service Crunchy Data Operator PostgreSQL

* OpenShift Serverless requires the application to be packaged as a container, something AWS Lamda does not require.

Moving blog from blogger.com to wordpress.com

On By ManuLeave a comment

I switched from blogger.com the Google Blog platform to the hosted wordpress.com of Automaticc, the WordPress blog engine main authors.
I thus gain:

I lose:

  • free CNAME redirect using my own domain name
  • a bit of advertising-free space. The blog at wordpress.com has a prominent header indicating I am using the free plan, but I am OK so far with that.

What stays the same:

  • Blogger and WordPress.com offer both tag-based RSS feed exports, so I decided to keep for Debian Planet a feed containing only the posts related to free, libre and opensource software.

I was not ready to make the jump to a self hosted static blog generator, as I still wanted to have the possibility to comment, without me having to host the comment subsystem.

On the personal side, I also intend to pause twitter activity, as I notice current microblogging platforms tend to mostly contain flame wars, self promotion, or shared links I could find anyway with a good feed reader.

Investigating database replication in different availability zones

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Investigating today what is AWS Relational Database Service with two readable standbys

Considering your current read/write server is in Availability Zone AZ1, this is basically postgres 14 with synchronous_standby_names = ANY 1 (az2, az3) and synchronous_commit = on.

In regards to safety of data, it looks similar to the raft algorithm used by etcd with three members as a write is only ack’ed if it has been fsynced by two servers, the difference is that raft has a leader election, whereas in PostgreSQL the leader is set at startup and you have to build yourself the election mechanism.

There is no special cloud magic here, it is just database good practices paid by the minute.