September 7, 2021

Next Certs

With a new move fresh under my belt and a sense of relief in my new locale and life, I t may be time to approach a new certification. I have some ideas of paths to follow, but as I climb the cert ladder, they all start to get pricey, which is daunting while self funding. Still cheaper than the college I self-funded, however.

I’m looking at going up to CCNP as my next network cert; I don’t know if CompTIA does a higher than Network+, and anything I learn there is applicable to most other vendors. Going with another bottom tier cert seems silly, and I like learning about complex networks that I have not been able to touch myself.

August 30, 2021

Books Git

Brief annoucement, I have added a git repo to https//git.bootingup.net that has a record of my books read and in progress. It only starts from the beginning of August roughly, so despite the many books I have read before, it is a short list so far. I guess now I have an incentive to re-read some things!

August 30, 2021

OpnSense Build

For the past few years I have been using Mikrotik routers, a Hex then a CRS, but I have built and installed Opnsense on an amd64 Pentium board. Using VLANs and a switch behind it, I have started to get more serious about my home network.

Essentially, its time in my mind to get some more practice in with security in WAN settings, but also eperate out my traffic so I am not getting any bleedover that could be dangerous. Currently, nothing is really open, but the firewall is easier on Opnsense than Mikrotik, and I can load the firewall (which is beefy for a firewall) up with some other things like IPS and traffic sniffing.

August 14, 2021

Terrain Building

I recently got back into terrain building for miniatures and miniature wargaming. While I started to played 40k back in middle school, this time around of getting back into the hobby I find myself more drawn to historics. In that vein, I found a copy of Wargames Illustrated with a “How To” guide on building terrain, and I have gotten pretty into it again, although to a better degree I think than my previous terrain.

May 5, 2021

The Next Step: Virt Builder

I have been using Debian/Ubuntu preseed files for a while now, automating installation of machines as defined by a preseeded config file, which works great (don’t get me started on how much I hate 20.04 though). While discussing the merits of images versus automated installation, I looked at and like the libguestfs suite of tools, notably the virt-builder tools for standing up a VM in less time.

It was to my surprise that virt-builder builds its images from pressed and kickstart files, then just anonymises those disks to be used as templates. That was exactly what I wanted; a means of building images that works great and is easy to use, and a way to put those into templates that are virtually on tap.

March 8, 2021

Test Enviornment

When gearing up to make changes on a production network, there’s almost always something that would be great to just try first; it could be because one is unsure on the exact behaviour, or there’s some ambiguity over what the best approach is. Keeping those tests away from a network that matters is important, and while having a separate VLAN is a pretty good approach, one of my favourite domains is to build a virtualisation host, and to use it as a router for a self-contained network segment.

January 25, 2021

PXE Booting

One of my latest projects has been to get PXE booting auto installation working in a more dynamic way. This was sparked when reading the iPXE website, where they mention dynamic booting, using a webserver with PHP to select the install files based off hardware information. I don’t know PHP, but I do know how to tweak a config file, so I set about trying to do this using just the iPXE stack.

January 11, 2021

Preseeding and Autoinstall

I have been using a script on my git site (git.bootingup.net) for headless VM installations, and it has been working so well for me, I missed the functionallity at work, where VM installs have been manual. At home I use Debian, work Ubuntu, so I wanted to port my preseed configs over. This went smoothly (after I worked out that Ubuntu shipped their netinstall kernelwith different permissions than Debian) for 18.04 and older, but 20.04 moved away from the preseed architecture, towards a new system called autoinstall.

January 4, 2021

Going Full Circle

One year ago, I did some testing to get to grips with containers versus VMS. I spun some things up, worked on some composing and automation, and came up with conclusions. I realised what I wanted, and LXC was it; but somehow, I kept working with KVM vms. Coming back to it, once again (but with a sharper eye) I looked at Docker, LXC, and KVM, and for what I want, LXC wins again. Now I need to actually use it ;)

December 5, 2020

Open Source Organisation Usage

Open source applications are great, and they are truly an equaliser when it comes to productivity, efficency, and dependability. It is strange, however, to see the landscape that exists for the usage of open source applications: it is used more, generally, by small organisations and very large organisations, and I think that that is worth commenting on, in some degree, if only for my own sake.

I’ve primarily worked in small organisations (my own infrastructure being one of them), and open source applications are appealing. There’s no cost but time, which is the primary currency that small organisations have; there’s no capital or they would be larger, and having the best bang for ones buck only gets you one place. Small shops are run by small teams, so they are much more flexible and able to not only have the server cattle as pets, but configure little as usually the use cases are few. As the organisation starts to grow, IT teams start to struggle; their focus gets split or skill pool polluted, there’s a bit more capital that can provide quick wins to band aid over the problem of cattle as pets, and the IT team is never quite on top of things enough to get everything they need done. Big organisations have time and money, and can usually wait for something to be built for exactly what they need, or can pay someone who can do get it done. They have their own expertise in house, and can demystify any anspect of a problem if they need to, or even expand something if it helps them. These organisations can refactor and shift and be more agile in the specifics because of the abstractation that comes from their size, where a smaller one would be more direct and could become more stuck.