Following on from last year's round-up of my reading, here's a look at the fiction I enjoyed in 2021. I managed to read 42 books in 2021, up from 31 last year. That's partly to do with buying an ereader: 33/36% of my reading (by pages/by books) was ebooks. I think this demonstrates that ebooks have mostly complemented paper books for me, rather than replacing them. My book of the year (although it was published in 2019) was This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: A short epistolary love story between warring time travellers and quite unlike anything else I've read for a long time. Other notables were The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel and Robot by Adam Wi niewski-Snerg. The biggest disappointment for me was The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), which I haven't even finished. I love KSRs writing: I've written about him many times on this blog, at least in 2002, 2006 and 2009, I think I've read every other novel he's published and most of his short stories. But this one was too much of something for me. He's described this novel a the end-point of a particular journey and approach to writing he's taken, which I felt relieved to learn, assuming he writes any more novels (and I really hope that he does) they will likely be in a different "mode". My "new author discovery" for 2021 was Chris Beckett: I tore through Two Tribes and America City before promptly buying all his other work. He fits roughly into the same bracket as Adam Roberts and Christopher Priest, two of my other favourite authors. 5 of the books I read (12%) were from my "backlog" of already-purchased physical books. I'd like to try and reduce my Backlog further so I hope to push this figure up next year. I made a small effort to read more diverse authors this year. 24% of the books I read (by book count and page count) were by women. 15% by page count were (loosely) BAME (19% by book count). Again I'd like to increase these numbers modestly in 2022. Unlike 2020, I didn't complete any short story collections in 2021! This is partly because there was only one issue of Interzone published in all of 2021, a double-issue which I haven't yet finished. This is probably a sad date point in terms of Interzone's continued existence, but it's not dead yet.

Debian LTS November marked the 20th month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 8 hours allocated which I used by:

• some rather quiet frontdesk days
• updating icedove to 45.5.1 resulting in DLA-752-1 fixing 7 CVEs
• looking whether Wheezy is affected by xsa-202, xsa-203, xsa-204 and handling the communication with credativ for these (update not yet released)
• Assessing cURL/libcURL CVE-2016-9586
• Assessing whether Wheezy's QEMU is affeced by security issues in 9pfs "proxy" and "handle" code
• Releasing DLA-776-1 for samba fixing CVE-2016-2125

Other Debian stuff

• Allow travis.debian.net to start services when running autopkgtests
• Usual bunch of libvirt and related uploads
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.8 and 0.8.9 to unstable (list of changes)

Some other Free Software activites

• Some fixes to libvirt's configure.ac for merged /usr
• Made some progress on getting the merkur board clones to life. The first stage bootloader and contiki are working now.
• Some ansible_spec fixes for roles in non default directories and robustness
• Due to excessive XMPP spam started a jabber-spam-blacklist
• Unbroke ansible-module-foreman
• Added support to configure Foreman settings via ansible-module-foreman and python-foreman
• Speed up VM removal with Foreman and VMware ESX
• Started foreman_serverspec a Foreman plugin to store serverspec reports in the Foreman. This is in a very early stage.

Debian LTS November marked the nineteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 7 hours allocated which I used completely by:

• Being at LTS frontdesk twice (at the beginning and end of November) triaging about ~30 CVEs.
• Preparing and releasing DLA-698-1 for QEMU fixing 9 CVEs
• Putting out DLA-699-1 for xen, the acutal xen update was prepared by Bastian Blank

Other Debian stuff

• Usual bunch of libvirt and related uploads (osinfo-db-tools, libvirt-python, libosinfo)
• Sponsored svn2git upload
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.7 to unstable (list of changes)

Some other Free Software activites

• Created foreman_influxdb: a plugin to forward foreman metrics to influxdb
• Released of first version of ldapsp: a Foreman realm smartproxy to create arbitrary LDAP entries
• Fixed updating compute resources in ansible-module-foreman
• Fixed a bug in fog-vsphere that would make massive parallel vm creation in Foreman fail
• Helped to update influxdb-rails so the gem is compatible with influxdb-ruby again.

Debian LTS September marked the seventeenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I spent 6 hours (out of 7) working on

• updating Icedove to 45.3 resulting in DLA-640-1
• finishing my work on bringing rails into shape security wise resulting in DLA-641-1 for ruby-activesupport-3.2 and DLA-642-1 for ruby-activerecord-3.2.
• enhancing the autopkgtests for qemu a bit

Other Debian stuff

• Uploaded libvirt 2.3.0~rc1 to experimental
• Uploaded whatmaps to 0.0.12 in unstable.
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.4 to unstable.

Other Free Software activities

• Ansible: got the foreman callback plugin needed for foreman_ansible merged upstream.
• Made several improvements to foreman_ansible_inventory (a ansible dynamic inventory querying Foreman): Fixing an endless loop when Foreman would miscalculate the number of hosts to process, flake8 cleaniness and some work on python3 support
• ansible-module-foreman:
  • unbreak defining subnets by setting the default boot mode.
  • add support for configuring realms
• Foreman: add some robustness to the nice rebuild host feature when DNS entries are already there
• Released whatmaps 0.0.12.
  • Errors related to a single package don't abort the whole program but rather skip over it now.
  • Systemd user sessions are filtered out
  • The codebase is now checked with flake8.

Gathering from some recent discussions it seems to be not that well known that Foreman (a lifecycle tool for your virtual machines) does not only integrate well with Puppet but also with ansible. This is a list of tools I find useful in this regard:

• The ansible-module-foreman ansible module allows you to setup all kinds of resources like images, compute resources, hostgroups, subnets, domains within Foreman itself via ansible using Foreman's REST API. E.g. creating a hostgroup looks like:

  - foreman_hostgroup:
      name: AHostGroup
      architecture: x86_64
      domain: a.domain.example.com
      foreman_host: "  foreman_host  "
      foreman_user: "  foreman_user  "
      foreman_pass: "  foreman_pw  "
  

• The foreman_ansible plugin for Foreman allows you to collect reports and facts from ansible provisioned hosts. This requires an additional hook in your ansible config like:

  [defaults]
  callback_plugins = path/to/foreman_ansible/extras/
  

  The hook will report to Foreman back after a playbook finished.
• There are several options for creating hosts in Foreman via the ansible API. I'm currently using ansible_foreman_module tailored for image based installs. This looks in a playbook like:

  - name: Build 10 hosts
    foremanhost:
      name: "  item  "
      hostgroup: "a/host/group"
      compute_resource: "hopefully_not_esx"
      subnet: "webservernet"
      environment: "  env default(omit)  "
      ipv4addr:   from_ipam default(omit)  "
      # Additional params to tag on the host
      params:
          app: varnish
          tier: web
          color: green
      api_user: "  foreman_user  "
      api_password: "  foreman_pw  "
      api_url: "  foreman_url  "
    with_sequence:  start=1 end=10 format="newhost%02d"
  

• The foreman_ansible_inventory is a dynamic inventory script for ansible that fetches all your hosts and groups via the Foreman REST APIs. It automatically groups hosts in ansible from Foreman's hostgroups, environments, organizations and locations and allows you to build additional groups based on any available host parameter (and combinations thereof). So using the above example and this configuration:

  [ansible]
  group_patterns = [" app - tier ",
                    " color "]
  

  it would build the additional ansible groups varnish-web, green and put the above hosts into them. This way you can easily select the hosts for e.g. blue green deployments. You don't have to pass the parameters during host creation, if you have parameters on e.g. domains or hostgroups these are available too for grouping via group_patterns.
• If you're grouping your hosts via the above inventory script and you use lots of parameters than having these displayed in the detail page can be useful. You can use the foreman_params_tab plugin for that.

There's also support for triggering ansible runs from within Foreman itself but I've not used that so far.