Hello! Tuesday was mostly consumed by setting up a new laptop so I’ll keep this pretty short.

Things in this post:

• setting up the new laptop (very boring honestly but I seem to have written a lot about it anyway)
• switching to vue.js
• a problem I’m having with my setup for proxying SSH connection

a new laptop arrived!

I bought a new laptop (a thinkpad t14s, the AMD one) and it arrived so of course I got super distracted and had to set it up immediately. It’s quite a bit faster than the old computer (a thinkpad x250) which is fun. I’m a bit mad that it has soldered RAM and that in general it’s harder to service myself but I went with it anyway.

how I set up a new computer

Here’s how I set up a new computer and how I do OS upgrades. I’ve done this 3-4 times in the last 3 years and it works pretty well. The main things are:

• I copy my entire home directory to the new computer, which is kind of a magical thing because it means all my settings are right there when I’m done
• I never upgrade Ubuntu, I always reinstall from scratch. (I tried breaking this rule and upgrading Ubuntu this year and it failed very spectacularly so I’m even more personally committed to this rule :) )

1. Go find my 1TB external drive in a box downstairs
2. Find a USB key and put the latest Ubuntu LTS installer on it

On the old computer: (or before rebooting, in the case of an upgrade)

1. Back up my home directory with cd /home; sudo tar -cf - bork | pv | /media/the_drive/homedir.tar. The pv is important to me because it takes a long time and I get impatient so it’s nice to have a progress indicator.
2. Run sudo dpkg -l > /media/the_drive/packages

on the new computer (or after rebooting)

1. Install Ubuntu with disk encryption, don’t bother setting up a partition table, format the whole drive
2. Unpackage my home directory from the external drive and put it back at /home/bork (cat /media/the_drive/homedir.tar | pv | tar -xf -)
3. Go through the list of packages from dpkg -l and manually pick out the ones I want to install and put them in a text file called to_install or something (usually there’s a bunch of crap I installed on the previous computer that I don’t necessarily need, so I find sorting through it manually is better)
4. Run cat to_install | sudo xargs apt install
5. Over the next few days/weeks, install everything I missed as I notice it

I don’t claim that this is the Best Way to do things, it’s just what I do and it works ok for me so far. I used to keep my home directory in a separate partition so I could easily reinstall my OS and leave my home directory alone but I don’t anymore for some reason that I don’t remember.

problems I still have with the new laptop

I have a bunch of the usual new computer problems:

• it doesn’t suspend when I close the lid yet
• something is a little wonky with my vim configuration and the top bar looks weird
• I got a new Yubikey Nano and I wanted to set PAM up so that I could sudo without typing in a password, but the instructions on their website aren’t working for me. I took this as an opportunity to learn a little about PAM so I bought Michael Lucas’s Pam Mastery book because I really like his writing. It helped me get more debugging information about the issue but I still don’t know what’s wrong.

switching to vue.js

I’d been using a tiny bit of stimulus.js for my site. I was dissatisfied with it because to conditionally show a div depending on the state I needed to add CSS styles myself to show / hide content, like this.pendingDiv.classList.add('hidden')

So I switched to vue.js which I’ve used for a few small projects before and like and I like it better.

a problem with my proxy server

While testing my new vue.js code, I noticed that my Javascript was working fine but that I was having a problem on the backend.

I use this Go proxy server (gotty) to proxy SSH connections to my VMs. The way it works right now is:

• I start gotty processes from my Rails app
• each SSH connection gets its own port
• I have another Go proxy (100 lines of Go) that proxies /proxy/SSH_CONNECTION_ID to the port of the right backend processes
• the second go proxy find outs port to use by querying an endpoint in the Rails app

I find this whole thing pretty messy and it’s also quite unreliable, the gotty processes sometimes don’t quite start up right and I’m always worried about them dying and I have no real way to manage them. So I think I’ll work on that next.