Okay, so let me tell you about my doorbell, from a #networking perspective.

When you push the button by the door, it sends a message over the #zigbee wireless mesh network in my house. It probably goes through a few hops, getting relayed along the way by the various Zigbee light switches and "smart outlets" I have.

Once it makes it to my utility closet, it's received by a Zigbee-to-USB dongle, through a USB hub (a simple tree network) plugged into an SFF PC. From there, it gets fed into zigbee2mqtt, which, as the name implies, publishes it to my local #mqtt broker.

The mqtt broker is in the small #kubernetes cluster of #raspberrypi nodes I run in my utility closet. To get in (via a couple of #ethernet switch hops), it goes through #metallb, which is basically a proxy-ARP type service that advertises the IP address for the mqtt endpoint to the rest of my network, then passes the traffic to the appropriate container via a #linux veth device.

I have #HomeAssistant, running in the same Kubernetes cluster, subscribed to these events. Within Kubernetes, the message goes through the CNI plugin that I use, #flannel. If the message has to pass between hosts, Flannel encapsulates it in VXLAN, so that it can be directed to the correct veth on the destination host.

Because I like #NodeRed for automation tasks more than HomeAssistant, your press of the doorbell takes another hop within the Kubernetes cluster (via a REST call) so that NodeRed can decide whether it's within the time of day I want the doorbell to ring, etc. If we're all good, NodeRed publishes an mqtt message (more VXLANs, veths, etc.)

(Oh and it also sends a notification to my phone, which means another trip through the HomeAssistant container, and leaving my home network involves another soup of acronyms including VLANs, PoE, QoS, PPPoE, NAT or IPv6, DoH, and GPON. And maybe it goes over 5G depending on where my phone is.)

Of course something's got to actually make the "ding dong" sound, and that's another Raspberry Pi that sits on top of my grandmother clock. So to get *there* the message hops through a couple Ethernet switches and my home WiFi, where it gets received by a little custom daemon I wrote that plays the sound via an attached #HiFiBerry board. Oh but wait! We're not quite done with networking, because the sound gets played through PulseAudio, which is done through a UNIX domain socket.

SO ANYWAY, that's why my doorbell rarely works and why you've been standing outside in the snow for five minutes.

@bug yes, that sounds painful. Having worked with researchers and other academicians, I'm also aware that someone's entire life's work can get upturned by a single unexpected discovery, so I guess an afternoon of hacking on something is but a small price to pay. :)

I hate it when I implement something and then immediately think of a better way to do it.

#b4

Periodic reminder not to set your system hostname to "linux.com". I really don't want to see your cPanel alerts.

.plan files + finger = the original microblogging platform

Me: I'm not actually sending this via SMTP, so just parse and save this 8bit data on this perfectly 8-bit friendly medium.
Python (possessed by SMTP Elder Gods): *croaks and dies*
Me: *FFS*

Me: I just want to send this 8bit message, k?
SMTP Elder Gods: Repent, ye puny mortal.

@chrboe @axboe ... and you're using a protocol written to send 7bit messages that was later extended to handle 8bit data in 3 possible ways. :)

@axboe The latest master should hopefully fix it for you. At least I bloody well hope so. :) I'm grumpy at Python right now.

@axboe ok, it's probably the last couple of changes that aren't quite working out right (some due to Python bugs, grrr). I'll probably commit some fixes later today that will fix the problem for you.

@axboe which version is crashing? The current 0.11 dev?

Today is brought to you by an annoying email header corrupting bug in Python:
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/99927

@a1ba I don't think he ever got over G+ shutting down. I think the only way we can get him on fediverse is if I write an email-to-fedi bridge. :)

@heatinblack I guess that's one way to get rich through stock manipulation.

@brauner I wonder if I can make something like `b4 send --github-pr` 🤔

@brauner unfortunately, you can't push the branch description, as it exists only in your .git/config.

Before you ask, we'll be moving things over to RHEL 9 Very Soon Now (TM). It just required a lot of yaks to be shaved, and thankfully most of them are now looking pretty smooth. And likely very cold, because there's probably a good reason why yaks need all that fur.

Success, we can now fruitfully talk to the society.oftrolls.com instance! Thanks to @tbr for relaxing their config a little bit to allow jankier crypto versions. :)