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vladak

52 karma · joined January 24, 2020

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vladak··on OpenBSD 7.2
Another piece of advice I received from an OpenBSD contributor is to lurk on the mailing lists and see what the OpenBSD developers (esp. those that hack on networking code) actually use themselves and get that if you care about stability and performance.
vladak··on Made in America is back, leaving US factories scrambling to find workers
Closed cities, like those in Russia/Soviet union are exception. Either people were forced to come or the incentives were too high to refuse.
vladak··on Integrating with Fastmail
I contemplated the move from Google services and at one point I went ahead and was very pleasantly surprised how easy the move to Fastmail [1] was.

[1] with the domain managed by Cloudflare

vladak··on Maybe you should do less 'work'
https://archive.org/download/the-unwritten-laws-of-engineeri...

I had a colleague that can be considered brilliant engineer and I believe could be doing all kinds of exciting hard projects and work in the top tier companies. When our manager decided to leave the company, he went along, for a job which in my view is nowhere near his maximum abilities (although he might argue otherwise), quoting the 'Be as particular as you can in the selection of your supervisor.' rule from the above book (which is relevant to the other thread in this topic).

vladak··on Ask HN: What is your home networking setup?
https://pcpartpicker.com/b/8hgJ7P
vladak··on Ask HN: What is your home networking setup?
- Ethernet from local ISP that is fed into Ubiquity EdgeRouter Lite running OpenBSD (octeon platform) with extensive PF setup

- 8 port managed switch connected to the router with a number of VLANs (IoT network, general/guest Wifi, trusted local network + Wifi, NAS Service Processor, DMZ network, externally accessible services network etc.)

- 3 Apple AirPort Extreme WiFi access points (for various VLANs) + 1 in another room for extension via Ethernet. These run in bridge mode.

- 2 more unmanaged Netgear 4/5 port switches (16 port managed switch is hard to get these days due to chip shortages and also significantly more expensive than the current solution) connected to the managed switch

- another Netgear switch in the closet to connect the in wall Ethernet sockets from several rooms together

- handful of Raspberry Pi boxes running Raspbian (Pihole/NTP server, another for Weather/environment monitoring, another for Docker to host some Wordpress - via Cloudflare tunnel, another for displaying weather information on eInk display, another for monitoring my working habits)

- NAS running TrueNAS in Fractal design Node 304 case with 6 drives, PCIe SAS card (for redundancy/more robust checksumming), beeper for alerting. Backups done to Backblaze and also to internally strapped USB drive.

Some of the stuff has alerting setup via PagerDuty (esp. the NAS and environment monitoring). General monitoring done by Grafana.

Most of the stuff is located on the top of a large bookshelf.

Except the NAS everything is fanless and the NAS was modded to be as quiet as possible (large silicone feet, large+slow fans)

The network is double NAT and there is no IPv6 which sucks.

Would like to buy Intel NUC for learning K8s however these are hard to get these days, at least in the spec I want.

vladak··on Faking a Positive Covid Test
Here, such devices are used for testing kids at basic school. I heard a story from one of our managers that some kid in his kids' class wanted to fake his test to read positive (to evade school duties) so he used a pen marker however this attempt was discovered :-)
vladak··on There's been a big rise in monitoring workers at home
Incidentally: after working from home since the start of the pandemics, I feel the need to actually monitor myself as I often lose track of my working hours and I have a suspicion that I work longer hours than previously. Related to that, less amount of movement/exercise. My plan is to monitor the situation with simple Raspberry Pi zero based project - add a current sensor (to sense if my main display is on/off) and a distance sensor (to see if my standing desk is up/down), store the data in local time series database and present in local Grafana (no way I am going to put this outside my home network) with the possibility of alerting via PagerDuty.
vladak··on Go 1.18 will embed source version information into binaries
I wonder what other languages/ecosystems embed the versioning into the binaries.

This reminds me of the mcs(1) command (Manipulate Comment Section) used for some Solaris 10 binaries to display the patch level information:

# /usr/ccs/bin/mcs -p /kernel/crypto/sparcv9/aes

/kernel/crypto/sparcv9/aes:

@(#)SunOS 5.10 Generic 150400-64 Dec 2018

vladak··on Why is standing more tiring than walking? [audio]
This. Reading about 0 gravity setup immediately reminded me of the suspensors used by Vladimir Harkonnen in the Dune.

I have been using standing desk for a year, trying to switch sitting and standing frequently, in my case at least every hour. Why ? Firstly, my physiotherapist said her stance on the long term standing is negative since it can lead to imbalances - humans tend to put more weight on one feet, for instance. Secondly, there was a long article in local weekly magazine about sitting and standing, basically saying that the human body will adapt to whatever condition there is. For sitting, this means the muscles etc. will eventually "freeze"; the only way how to fight that is constantly subject the body to change in posture.

vladak··on Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
Whenever seeing the staggering number of Wikipedia articles it reminds me of my own recent experience with creating an article. To centralize some of the knowledge of now niche set of keyboards (manufactured by what used to be one of the FAANGs of its time) I set to create a page. After adding some - what I thought - useful and interesting data, the page got deleted as it was not "notable" enough, i.e. lacking sufficient number of external references. These keyboards did exist and are used until this day however are not as popular (and therefore not as commented/described) like Apple's keyboards (which do have their own page on Wikipedia) so the line was drawn there. In the end I found it funny and also interesting to see how Wikipedia works. If the editors were not so strictly bound to the set of rules there would be probably tens of millions of articles/pages now.

Another experience I had was watching a video on YouTube from Japan where a guy was brewing coffee which reminded me that the brand of the coffee equipment used in the video is sometimes sold in coffee shops in Europe. I wanted to know a little bit more about the company so I went to Wikipedia - the English page got deleted because there was little information about the company on the English speaking part of the Internet. This does not say anything about the company (which seems to be hugely popular in Japan and certain social circles in Europe), rather it demonstrates the limit of the model Wikipedia uses for curating the articles.

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