August 12, 2019

Who Are Macs For

Recently, I had several people, who know I am in IT, ask why not to get a Mac, for a non-computer person who were already in the Apple ecosystem. I was slightly taken back when most of my comments and critiques were “I like it that way!” or “that doesn’t really bother me!” It can be difficult trying to convince people who have bought into the cult of Apple to move away, to any other system, be it a *nix, Windoze, ChromeOS, or Android. So what are the big killers that people notice that you should point out to help people make up there minds?

July 22, 2019

Thoughts on Gentoo

Many people in and out of the Linux community have heard of Gentoo. There are a lot of different perceptions of the distribution. Some see it as the holy grail of customisability, some see it as a meme of bygone years after being told on countless forums to “install Gentoo” instead of dealing with whatever problem they were having. Well I installed Gentoo, and there’s a lot to unpack.

I’m not new to Linux, but I would not say I have a particularly long wizard beard. I’ve lived out of Arch for a few months, and manage some servers at home and work. I’ve troubleshooted a lot of issues, but there’s so much that goes into Linux that it takes years to properly master. But I installed, following the guide, and didn’t get stuck. I enjoyed the install process, which is much like the Arch one, and appreicated the options open to me. Do I want a hardended system by default, or not? Systemd? All of the choices were there, and then I complied. It was interesting setting flags for the kernel, and although I left most as default that’s because most are good enough for the average user. Since I was just testing the waters, I stuck with the CLI and just did some everyday tasks. Installed some software through every method (ports, binaries, etc) and removed some things. It all felt like it was there, just like any other Linux.

May 25, 2019

Learning Scripting

I should preface by saying I am in no way good, proficient, or authoritative about scripting in *nix or any other computing environments. But I have had an absolute blast getting started, and wanted to share my thoughts and discoveries. Anyone else who has already been here, feel free to call me a n00b.

It started out when I found myself installing webmin a lot on my new servers. I got tired of going through the whole things time after time, and I thought it made sense to finally start scripting things. I mean, it is very easy to just chain commands like that together into an executable script, so that way my first: a shell script to install webmin. I was hooked after that.

February 4, 2019

Learn Protocols

For someone first beginning the journey into IT or computing, in any discipline, the sheer amount of specialised knowledge that one needs to know can seem incredibly daunting. There is a lot to learn, and some of it really is complicated, but there is something that one can do to make the early steps easier: learn protocols.

Much of what people see in computers is built on frameworks, and those usually have a number of common, standard libraries and protocols. HTTP is a prime example; it can be really easy to make a quick web site with Google Sites or Wordpress, but it can be just as easy to write up a dirty file and serve it up with Apache. By seeing the series of steps that make a simple site, using the base protocols, it is easier to distinguish all the other layers that make up modern, complext sites, by adding in one at a time things like PHP or Ruby.

February 2, 2019

My First Linux Experiences

Like many of us out there, I did not start using Linux when I first started using computers, nor did I start using it when I first learned of it. Windows, what I had been using, worked fine and there seemed to little reason to want to switch over. The benefits were not explained properly to me, or I was too inexperience to need anything more than what the Windows desktop offered.

December 30, 2018

My Homelab

Intro

I have a lot of equipment in my lab, and not all of it runs all the time. It does however make it convienient for when I need to get something running or try something out: I have hardware ready to go. To this end however, most of my gear would not cut it in a production space. I bought cheap to get the good enough experience, so like I said previously, plan your deployments.

December 23, 2018

What Makes a Linux Distro

Linux, or GNU+Linux, has been around as an operating system for every type of device, phone, server, desktop, since the early nineties. Because of the free nature of the software, countless different distrobutions for all sorts of applications have sprung up over the years, some highly specialised, others more capable in different roles. Some popular ones today, such as Ubuntu or Red Hat, have a several concurrent releases at a time: a server and a desktop. Conversely, other projects like Debian and Arch produce a more generic release for end users to build up how they see fit, providing merely the framework. A Linux distrobution in general terms is a design philosophy behind a project; in technical terms it is the software suite included with the Linux kernel.

December 19, 2018

Building a Homelab

Intro

For those not already in the know, homelabs are a staple for those in IT: a place to build, test and play with technologies to improve understanding for use in a production or home deployment. There are somethings that people should know before getting into homelabbing, as it can be an expensive and draining hobby if done improperly. These are some of my notes and ideas from building my own enviornment.

December 17, 2018

What I learned running Linux Minecraft Servers

Intro

Running Minecraft servers on linux the manual way isn’t too bad: just execute the jar file with java and leave it running. What if you want to automate it, or need to send in commands? One needs to be able to easily access the run session easily, and the tools I used was screen.

Screen creates a vtty that can be attached and detached as the running tty locally or over and SSH tunnel, making it ideal for automation and remote management. Simply start the screen session, leave it running and forget. Using Debian, a systemd distro, I used screen, a systemctl service, and a bash script to get things running. This was an excellent chance to experiment with these tools for a useful application.

August 22, 2018

Welcome to Jekyll!

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext and includes the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.