I ran into a hiccup today - provisioning a new Ubuntu VPS, the ansible playbook to apply our security hardening failed.

 ~/Developer/ansible_hl % ansible-playbook ssh-harden.yml --ask-vault-pass -e @vault.yml               
Vault password: 

PLAY [Copy the hardened SSHD_CONFIG file to the remote server] ****************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ********************************************************************************************
[ERROR]: Task failed: Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt:
fatal: [<redacted IP>]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Task failed: Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt:", "unreachable": true}

My routine is to run Ubuntu LTS, and when I was provisioning the server, I selected Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 without thinking. This LTS dropped in April, and excitingly the new versions of Ubuntu have Rust coreutils including sudo.

It’s been exciting to see some of the modern language features in Swift - it’s a real joy to work in when I think back to my C++ days which was some of the last commercial programming I did.

The buzz about Carbon got me wondering about other new languages and what might be going on with them. Rust seems to keep popping up in conversations so I thought I’d have a quick look.