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.

November 24, 2020

Privacy Focused Organisations

The recent trend of organisations moving towards SaaS as their desired goal for all infrastructure, from identity provision to WiFi access, is a troubling development for those who become associated through work, education, or other means but who must submit to their terms and policies with no recourse of action. The FSF has been campaigning against this, primarily against video confrencing, such as Zoom, but they offer little alternatives. Most if not all of these things are built on open source projects of some form or another, but these organisations see the vendor as a quick and safe way to a) deploy a ready for use application, and b) take care of all their needs and security compliance obligations. I can understand the second, as security should keep everyone up at night, but these mid to small sized organisations are unwilling to spend the time to get the right self hosted application for their organisation taken care of internally before shopping around.

November 23, 2020

Infrastructure: A question of scale

Its easy to get caught up in the intracacies of servers and deployment, overbuilding for a given problem, but it is just as easy to not plan enough, and be left with something that is unworkable and unsustainable. In general, it is better to overbuild than under, but not when building the infrastructure creates paralysis that prevents things from being done. Building a whole automated provisioning stack just to get a single web page up is too much, but where does one draw the line?

October 23, 2020

Ryzen Woes

First gen Ryzen seems like great value for money, even when compared to the Xeon builds that have been floating around the market for a few years now. I upgraded my storage server with a Ryzen 1600, but then had cpu lockup issues. Somehow, these seemed to only occur on my build on Linux while running ZFS; this turned out to be a red herring, as I found the issue (after my system has been stable after a few days) to be to do with cstate instructions.

October 12, 2020

Enterprise and Fun

I noticed lately how sometimes at work the pursuit of stability, reliability, and repeatability took some of the fun out of servers and networking. There’s a lot of reassurance and calm that comes from these things, but that doesn’t make it fun all of the time. Having a very fast time to production and trying several different solutions is a bit of a hacker’s thrill, but can get lost the larger the enterprise. This should not be a surprise to anyone, but something that they need to consider when moving up a bracket.

October 9, 2020

World of Warcraft Servers

For better or for worse, I have always like World of Warcraft as a game, especially the 1.12 version, known as “vanilla.” I found the CMANGOS project after playing on private servers for years, and was excited by what I saw. CMANGOS is an emulator for running a WoW server privately, requiring basically just a SQL database. I fired a server up with little fuss and saw I had found a new potential long term project.

October 1, 2020

Community Servers

Recently, I created a new server for my small online community of friends: a small file storage server, only meant to server temporary files over SSH. During the installation, I really got to tailor the setup to the needs of the community; putting user restrictions in, building tooling good for future developments, and doing some development for exact needs. While the systems I have been creating for this community have been growing over time, I am starting to reach the size where I would like the full infrastructure I am used to. Version control, monitoring and logging, centralised user management, automated deployments and infrastructure as code, to name what immediately springs to mind, are some of the tools of the trade I would I like to have in place for comfortable management. But these things take time to build up, money to maintain, and ultimately I would end up with more work long-term.

September 2, 2020

Other Things

It has been a long time since I have updated this blog, and some of you may have noticed a lack of posts for a few months. I deleted my Github account, which included the hosting for this page, and have only just gotten around to hosting the site myself. For anyone curious, my software projects can also be found now at git.bootingup.lan.

There has been much else that I have been working on. I have a few new certifications I could add to the about me page, most of my networking/computer stacks have remained the same (although I don’t want it to stay that way for too long), and I have been fixing up some airsoft guns. For anyone considering it, although it is a stunning looking replica, the ICS L85 is not a fun gun to work on or fix up. I’m wanting to sell another of my weapons, the Knight’s Armament Stoner LMG in order to buy a Classic Army M249 Gen 1, as I love the Minimi look. There will be nothing stopping me for looking straight out of Bravo Two Zero.

June 8, 2020

Working From Home

I, like many other people have been working from home more recently, and likely running into the same problems and benefits that others are.

I’m a fan of working from home for the most part; I defintely feel much more able to get some tasks done. Being able to crank some music while hacking away has usually been only I thing I could do while working on my own projects, but now I can whenever I like! Additionally, I feel much more able to pick and choose what and when to do any given project, without the pressures of someone nearby checking in too closely.

May 28, 2020

Inspiration to Hack

Sometimes, one gets the idea of a way to solve a problem, through means of a series of logic that seek to address all of the branching paths that one can anticpate and hope to successfully deal with. The most recent series all involve the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game, and way to streamline the experience of a player. Such ideas have struck me as ways to automatically roll the dice needed to resolve a combat or shooting step, or to total all of the point neccesary to create an “army” to play with. Things such as an easy utility to search and view the stats and rules of a unit or character are equally as useful, and require just as much attention.