Blogging... I'm glad I started in 2008, it is like having a diary that you can never misplace... and reading some old entries can bring back wonderful memories, as I recall and review the course of my life from this, albeit narrow, technology perspective.

Anyway, its been a good 4+ years since my last entry and the longest hiatus... glad and grateful to say that I am now working for Google.  My personal Linux passion is still very much alive and personal bias towards all things SUSE (more openSUSE since 2011).

Problem Statement:

So, it is May 2018 and I am little disappointed that openSUSE Leap did not make it to the out-of-the-box public images on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).  However, it is listed in the "Community supported images" category.

PS:  I'm placing my vain hope that Leap 15 will make it though...

This blog entry describes the steps to create a vanilla openSUSE Leap 42.3 VM on GCP and thereafter, create a custom image from this said VM so you can easily/quickly create openSUSE Leap 42.3 VMs for other workloads in the future through the GCP Web Console.

From this point on, I will assume you have a GCP account and therefore access to GCP consoles etc.  It is not difficult to start with Google Cloud Platform, just go to https://cloud.google.com/free/ to get a Free Tier account.

Create an openSUSE Leap 42.3 VM on GCP:

1. Login to your GCP console and your project (default or otherwise).
2. From Menu (top-left),  Compute Engine -> VM instances
3. Note that openSUSE is not listed as an Operating System image when you try to create a new VM.  This is well documented at the Images section of the Compute Engine topic.
   
4. Launch the Cloud Shell within the console, on the top-right.
   
5. Find the available community supported openSUSE Leap image with the following command input to the Cloud Shell. 
• gcloud compute images list --project opensuse-cloud --no-standard-images 
6. Create a VM with the openSUSE Leap 42.3 image in the Singapore datacenter (or any Zones that is closest to you)


•  gcloud compute instances create osleap423 --image-family opensuse-leap --image-project opensuse-cloud --zone asia-southeast1-a
• For Reference, the available parameters for gcloud compute instances create at this link - https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/compute/instances/create
• Verify that the VM has been created in the console 
  
7. SSH into your newly created openSUSE Leap 42.3 VM to download and apply the latest updates/patches.  Click the SSH button (see screenshot above).
• Once you SSH into your VM,  zypper up.
  
  
8. Reboot the VM to test all updates are working.
• Reboot:  sudo reboot.  You will lose SSH connection, naturally.
• Sign back in via SSH button... it may take a few tries as the VM is rebooting.
• Sign out of SSH:  exit
9. Shutdown the VM.  Select the VM (checkbox) from the Console and Click STOP.

Create a custom image in your GCP Project for Re-use later:

1. From the GCP console, navigate to Compute Engine -> Images
2. Click [+] CREATE IMAGE 
   
3. Put in the name of your new image (eg. my-opensuse-leap-423) and select Source as Disk and Source disk as the boot disk from the right VM (eg. osleap423).
   
• (Optional) You can click the command line link at the bottom to note the equivalent Cloud Shell command.  This is useful if you want to script actions for future re-use and not use the web-console.
4. Once your custom image is created, you will be able to select it for the next VM you wish to create.

Enjoy! :-)

My father got himself in a nice trap: he let his Lenovo notebook to update to Windows 10. Hard to blame him, as user interface was confusing on purpose.Now 2 out of 3 USB ports are non-functional (USB 2 port works USB 3 ports don't), and there's no way to fix that. And apparently, Microsoft knew about the problem. Congratulations, Microsoft...

Just because you are paying for internet service does not mean O2 will not try to replace web-pages with advertising. Ouch. Seems like everyone needs to use https, we need better network-neutrality laws, and probably also class-action lawsuits.

Got Jolla installed. Ok, it looks cool. But already some unnice things can be seen. You _need_ jolla account to install apps. You need to agree to nasty legaleese. You are asked for name and password, it looks like that's all, and then it wants to know real name, email address, birthday... Appstore looks cool... but does not list licenses for software being installed. Still better than Android. Miles away from Debian.

23.4.2018, around 12:34... I realized how unix ttys are sabotaging my attempts to send SMS.. and solved it. So now I have Motorola Droid 4, running 4.17-rc1 kernel, with voice calls working, SMSes, data connection, GPS working and have some basic GUIs to control the stuff. WIFI works. Screen locks, and keyboard map still could be improved. Battery life will probably will not be great. But hey, its a start -- I have GNU/Linux working on a cellphone. More precisely Maemo Leste, based on Devuan, based on Debian. Sure, some kernel patches are still needed, and there's a lot more work to do in userland... Today, Microsoft sold out last Windows Mobile phones. I guess that's just a coincidence.

Here’s something I didn’t know: The DEC VT100 turns 40 in August. This factlet comes courtesy of Wikipedia, as I’m not quite old and wise enough to have made its acquaintance outside of a museum. None the less, the VT100 and its extended family of hard-working office furniture has always been with me in terms of the ECMA-48 standard, better known as ANSI X3.64 or simply (and these days, probably as accurately as any formal descriptor) “ANSI codes“, which it helped pioneer.

This pinnacle of 1970s UX is somehow still going strong, and recent developments like lots and lots of colors, ubiquitous Unicode support, good monospace fonts, etc. have opened up some interesting possibilities for creative abuse in a rich tradition that dates all the way back to manual typewriters, if not further. Previous entrants in this category are the venerable aalib and libcaca, and more recently there’s timg and others that use the U+2580 half-block symbol.

I wrote a small tool to further improve on this. It combines a range of Unicode symbols in an attempt to minimize the squared error of the output, and has plenty of bells and whistles besides. Check it out.

After all the fun we had in part 1 of our FreeIPA + DNS series, we now come to a new chapter.

During the move of openSUSE to Let’s Encrypt we used the excellent tool from ssllabs to verify each server after we changed the certificate. One of our coworkers noted “Hey, why don’t you have a CAA record. It would give you an even better score”. CAA records allow the domain owner to specify which certificate authorities are allowed to create certificates for this domain. Which seems to be a nice benefit for little work. For a longer explanation see this blog post from Qualys.