SASL auth with python-irc

I maintain a couple of IRC bots that help out with Wikimedia devops tasks. Jouncebot was a bot I started helping with when @mattofak moved on to other projects. Later I developed Stashbot as a replacement for using the Logstash that collected data for my SAL tool in Tool Labs.

Both bots are built using the awesome irc python library from Jason Coombs. I've copied various core irc behaviors from one bot to the other as I've discovered and fixed various bugs in how I was using the library. I finally got around to extracting these core parts into a Python library of it's own that I have named "IRC Bot Behavior Bundle" or IB3 for short.

more ...


Puppet file recurse pitfall

Puppet has become my go to system management tool in no small part because it is the tool that the operations group at $DAYJOB has standardized on for our production infrastructure management. It took quite a while for me to get the hang of how Puppet does what it does, but today I'd say I'm a fairly decent Puppet programmer. Every once in a while however I stumble on something new and surprising.

more ...

GnuPG key transition statement

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1,SHA512

I am transitioning GPG keys from an old 1024-bit DSA key to a new
4096-bit RSA key.  The old key will continue to be valid for some time,
but I prefer all new correspondence to be encrypted to the new key, and
will …
more ...