Hacker's ramblings

That's it. I've done IRCing.

Since 1993 I was there pretty much all the time. Initially on and off, but somewhere around -95 I discovered GNU Screen and its capability of detaching from the terminal allowing me to persist on the LUT's HP-UX perpetually. Thus, I had one IRC screen running all the time.

No more. In 2021 there is nobody there anymore to chat with. I'm turning off the lights after 28 years of service. I've shut down my Eggdrop bots and be on my way.

Thank you! Goodbye! Godspeed!

Back in 2018 RHEL 8 had their future-binoculars set to transitioning over deprecated Python 2 into 3 and were the first ones not to have a python. Obviously the distro had Python, but the command didn't exist. See What, No Python in RHEL 8 Beta? for more info.

Last week 8.4 was officially out. RHEL has the history of being "stuck" in the past. They do move into newer versions rarely generating the feeling of obsoletion, staleness and being stable to the point of RedHat supporting otherwise obsoleted software themselves.

The only problem with that approach is the trouble of getting newer versions. If you talk about any rapid-moving piece of softare like GCC or NodeJS or Python or MariaDB or ... any. The price to pay for stableness is pretty steep with RHEL. Finally they have a solution for this and have made different versions of stable software available. I wonder why it took them that many years.

Seeing the alternatives:

# alternatives --list
ifup      auto    /usr/libexec/nm-ifup
ld        auto    /usr/bin/ld.bfd
python    auto    /usr/libexec/no-python
python3   auto    /usr/bin/python3.6

As promised, there is no python, but there is python3. However, officially support for 3.6 will end in 7 months. See PEP 494 -- Python 3.6 Release Schedule for more. As mentioned, RedHat is likely to offer their own support after that end-of-life.

Easy fix. First, dnf install python39. Then:

# alternatives --set python3 /usr/bin/python3.9
# python3 --version
Python 3.9.2

For options, see output of dnf list python3*. You can choose between existing 3.6 or install 3.8 or 3.9 to the side.

Now you're set!

Seven years ago I moved to a new house with FTTH. Actually it was one of the criteria I had for a new place. It needs to have fiber-connection. I had cable-TV -Internet for 11 years before that and I was fed up with all the problems a shared medium has.

Today, we're here:

Last month my Telco, Elisa Finland, made 1 Gig connection available in this region and me being me, there is no real option for not getting it. I had no issues with previous one, connection wasn't slow or buggy, but faster IS better. Price is actually 8€ cheaper than my previous 250 Mbit connection. To make this absolutely clear: I'm paying 42€ / month for above connection.

To verify result, same with Python-based testing speedtest-cli --server 22669:

Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Testing from Elisa Oyj (62.248.128.0)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Retrieving information for the selected server...
Hosted by Elisa Oyj (Helsinki) [204.66 km]: 4.433 ms
Testing download speed.....................
Download: 860.23 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed.......................
Upload: 382.10 Mbit/s

Nice. Huh!

What happens when IT-operations are run by incompetent idiots?

For reference, I've written about State of Ubisoft and failures with top level domain handling.

I'm an avid gamer. I play games on daily basis. It is not possible to avoid bumping into games by giant corporations like Activision or Ubisoft. They have existed since 80s, have the personnel, money and resources. They also keep publishing games I occasionally love playing.

How one accesses their games is via software called Ubisoft Connect:

You need to log into the software with your Ubisoft-account. As one will expect, creating such account requires you to verify your email address so, the commercial company can target their marketing towards you. No surprises there.

Based on my previous blog posts, you might guess my email isn't your average gmail.com or something similar. I have multiple domains in my portfolio and am using them as my email address. With Ubisoft, initially everything goes smoothly. At some point the idiots at Ubisoft decided, that I needed to re-verify my email. Sure thing. Let's do that. I kept clicking the Verify my email address -button on Ubisoft Connect for years. Nothing happened, though. I could click the button but the promised verification email never arrived.

In 2019 I had enough of this annoyance and approached Ubisoft support regarding the failure to deliver the email.

Their response was:

I would still advise you to use a regularly known e-mail domain such as G-mail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook as they have been known to cause no problems.

Ok. They didn't like my own Linux box as mailserver.

Luckily Google Apps / G Suite / Google Workspace (whatever their name is this week) does support custom domains (Set up Gmail with your business address (@your-company)). I did that. Now they couldn't complain for my server to be non-standard or causing problems.

Still no joy.

As the operation was run by incompetent idiots, I could easily send and receive email back and forth with: Ubisoft support, Ubisoft Store and Ubisoft marketing-spam. The ONLY kind of emails I could not receive was their email address verification. Until Apri 23rd 2021. Some jack-ass saw the light and realized "Whoa! There exists TLDs which are longer than 4 characters!" In reality I guess they changed their email service provider into Amazon SES and were able to deliver the mails.

This in insane!