Elasticsearch 8 and syslog-ng
General availability of Elasticsearch 8 was announced last week. There were quite a few rumors that it will break compatibility with third party tools. I tested it as soon as I had a little time: I am happy to share that anything I tested with the elasticsearch-http() destination of syslog-ng still seems to work perfectly well with the latest version of Elasticsearch.
You can read the rest of my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/elasticsearch-8-and-syslog-ng

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12 years of syslog-ng (and sudo)
Those who follow me on LinkedIn might have seen an automatic post about my work anniversary. Well, almost nothing of that post is true, but I still consider it to be my real starting date. However, the official date is also impressive: 11.5 years, almost three times the industry average spent at the same workplace.
So, why do I say that the LinkedIn post is not true? Well, because all its major facts are wrong. In reality, the 12 years as open source evangelist at One Identity means that:
- I started at Balabit, a Hungarian company. One Identity was born only seven years later, and bought Balabit a year later.
- I started as a QA engineer for syslog-ng. My open source evangelist job was born only two weeks later, when I resigned from my QA engineer job.
- My current full-time job started only half a year later.
Still, I consider myself to be a part of Balabit (now One Identity Hungary) for 12 years now. I started 12 years ago as a QA engineer. At that time working remotely was not that commonplace as it is now. I had to travel four hours (two hours to and from the office) each and every day. I loved my job, but still it was too much. So, after two weeks I handed in my resignation. Side note: these two weeks were the only period in my whole life when I worked in an office…
It was a Friday afternoon at the end of February. Balázs Scheidler, founder of Balabit and my line manager in the syslog-ng team told me: “Peter. It took you three difficult interviews to get into Balabit. It’s not that easy to escape from here either. I understand your concerns. However, by Monday, when we can do the paperwork, I’ll have another job for you.”. He kept his word: I quit Balabit, but I had a new job as an external consultant: working on syslog-ng Open Source Edition tasks which I could do remotely. Half a year later, I started to work on syslog-ng full time from the comfort of my home. I was the first remote worker at Balabit.
Balabit was acquired by One Identity in 2018. It turned out that sudo maintainer, Todd Miller, became my colleague through the acquisition. Until that – just like most sysadmins – I considered sudo to be just a simple prefix for administrative commands. But then I took a closer look at sudo, and I learned that it’s a lot more: session recording, plugins, LDAP support, and many more. And soon I was spreading the word about the lesser-known features of sudo.
12 years are a lot and I’m bombarded with job offers almost every day. With 20+ years of sysadmin experience, I could easily find something better paying, especially if I accepted one of the many offers I receive from banks. However, my current job is a lot more interesting and a lot more fun than managing systems. I am the public face, evangelist of a well-known open source software developed in Hungary, and for one of the best known security utilities in the Linux / UNIX world. As far as I know, it’s a completely unique position here in Hungary!

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Fugue Machine on the M8
Since the start of the year I've been doing weeklybeats. So far it's been possible mainly thanks to the Dirtywave M8's ability to be picked up, instantly turned on and creating. I have to admit to mostly composing in bed (and only occasionally waking up my better half by shaking to the beat).
I'm not going to be spamming the planet with every track, but I do want to share some that I feel worked out. This one is a jam done on the Digitakt (that I actually modified to run on a li-ion battery) and the M8 doing most of the heavy lifting. The track started by setting up Fugue Machine like sequence in the M8. A friend of mine suggested to spice the ambient with a bit of a beat, which I used a Digitakt for. I now map the mixer on the M8 onto the 8 encoders of the Digitakt, but for the jam I was still using the internal keypad.
I really enjoy stepping back into my tracking shoes after two decades, especially when I ran into the old Buzz crew on the Dirtywave Discord server. Shout out to Ilya and Noggin' who've made my re-entry to music super enjoyable.
Fugue Machine on the M8
Since the start of the year I’ve been doing weeklybeats. So far it’s been possible mainly thanks to the Dirtywave M8’s ability to be picked up, instantly turned on and creating. I have to admit to mostly composing in bed (and only occasionally waking up my better half by shaking to the beat).
I’m not going to be spamming the planet with every track, but I do want to share some that I feel worked out. This one is a jam done on the Digitakt (that I actually modified to run on a li-ion battery) and the M8 doing most of the heavy lifting. The track started by setting up Fugue Machine like sequence in the M8. A friend of mine suggested to spice the ambient with a bit of a beat, which I used a Digitakt for. I now map the mixer on the M8 onto the 8 encoders of the Digitakt, but for the jam I was still using the internal keypad.
I really enjoy stepping back into my tracking shoes after two decades, especially when I ran into the old Buzz crew on the Dirtywave Discord server. Shout out to Ilya and Noggin’ who’ve made my re-entry to music super enjoyable.
Droneman
Probably only a fraction of you had a chance to see Droneman in a theatre. It's available on Netflix, so perhaps not universally, but ever so slightly more available to a global audience. Why would I be plugging a movie? Because it's my only entry in IMDB and features a spectacular performance by my son, that's why!

Droneman
Probably only a fraction of you had a chance to see Droneman in a theatre. It’s available on Netflix, so perhaps not universally, but ever so slightly more available to a global audience. Why would I be plugging a movie? Because it’s my only entry in IMDB and features a spectacular performance by my son, that’s why!

Make Hibernation Great Again!
I have now put the fixes from the last two blogposts into a github repository: https://github.com/seife/make-hibernate-great-again so that you can just clone it, examine what it does and then run
sudo make install
followed by
sudo dracut -f
This should do the following:
- let resume actually work (by enabling the dracut resume module)
- make hibernate more verbose (switch to an empty text console and increase the kernel's log level before hibernation, restore after resume)
- make resume more verbose
"hibernation fix" part 2: verbose resume
openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/06
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
As we are used to by now, Tumbleweed keeps on rolling at a steady pace. Once again, we managed to publish 5 snapshots during the week (0203x 0204, 0205, 0206, and 0207); 0208 was not created (delays in build time, too much load) and 0209 was discarded due to failures around vagrant dependencies.
The most relevant changes shipped as part of those 5 snapshots were:
- KDE Gear 21.12.2
- KDE Plasma 5.24.0
- rpm no longer pulls glibc-locale, but only glibc-locale-base, See this discussion
- Mesa 21.3.5
- llvm 13.0.1
- systemd: drop SUSE specific sysv support. Generic, upstream based sysv support remains in place. See original announcement at Factory mailinglist
- Linux kernel 5.15.5
- zstd 1.5.2: introduces zstd-gzip, an alternative, faster implementation of gzip. It is not (yet) a drop-in replacement, as the command line parameters are not matching
That matches pretty well the announcements of last week – of course, the longer-lasting things are still pending and work in progress. Staging projects currently contain:
- Mesa 21.3.6
- Linux kernel 5.15.8 – with full drm support in earlyboot, see Mailinglist
- glibc 2.35
- Python 3.6 interpreter will be removed (We have roughly 75 python36-FOO packages left)
- Python 3.10 as the distro default interpreter (a bit down the line)
- GCC 12 introduction has started to be as ready as possible for when the upstream release happens.