duckland.org

So, I guess I have been busy with life recently, and I have checked-in a long time. Sorry about that. What have I been up to? Well, on the $JOB front, I was able to switch groups at work. I am not back in the Linux Engineering group, returning to something that I am much more comfortable and familiar with as apposed to what I had been doing. Also, for Christmas, I got a new toy, a 3D Printer. This is now my new hobby.

Returning back to the Linux Engineering has dramaticly improved my outlook on life. While my last group of coworkers were for the most part a good bunch of people, the work was not something I was very strong in, and as such was under a lot of pressure to not screw up. Due to the fact that I was working out of my core skill areas, I ended up being tasked in areas which I did not enjoy as they were far less technical, and much more frustrating for me to work on. In returning to a group which I used to belong to 10 years ago when I worked for my company before, I am very much at home. While I still have to learn the systems and the changes over the last decade, the work is familiar enough for me to start contributing right away. While most of the team is based in the UK, there are two others here in Houston, so I am not alone locally. However, I do not think there will be any trips to the UK any time in my future.

My Christmas present was an Easy Threed 3D K1 Printer. This is one of the cheapest 3D printers on the market right now. With the reduced price, it does come with some limitations which I quickly found. The print size is limited to 100x100x100 mm, so no larger prints. The other major limitation is that it is a closed system without much in the way of easy user repairability. While there are parts avaliable, they are only from Alie Express which means that parts have a 2-3 month lead time. However, it was a perfect platform to learn some basics. A few weeks ago, I upgraded to an Creality Ender 3 Pro. This is one of the most popular hobbist 3D printers which gives me many options to find parts, upgrades, and more important, documentation on how to do things with the printer.

So far, I have mainly printed little toy type things while getting comfortable with the process, but I have actually printed something for the house. I have more ideas of projects around the house, but I need to first learn how to design something before I can print it, which means I will need to figure out either a CAD or 3D modeling program.

Fall is finally here. There should be no more days over 90F for the rest of the year. Well, hopefully not. As with normal in Fall, school is back in session.

Well, life has been a bit busy since my last update with things like family and home upkeep and work.

Work

Ah, Fall. Smell the internal audits in the air! Enough to make one want to puke. Somehow, I have become the Compliance Person for my team which means I get to heard the cats trying to collect responses to Auditor questions about how we sling the bits and what documentation we have on said bit-slinging processes.

If this was something I wanted to grow up and do, I would have taken some training in the fine art of reading governmental regulations. Ug. I am an engineer/architect, not a regulation wonk.

Oh, and ThePowersThatBe(tm) still want us to go in at least 2 days a week, but with the fact that Spawn #3 does not have the vaccine yet, I am not going in unless it is to pick up Spawn #1 from the dorms for the weekend. So, not very often.

The Firewall

In an never ending saga, the firewall is still working. My two biggest complaints are the fact the UI only works for me in Firefox (odd, but easy to deal with) and the fact that the key players behind the firewall distro do not want to support either of the two VPN solutions (tinc and WireGuard) are crap and refuses to support them.

Given that attidue, I am going to be taking a spare box which has two NICs, and throwing down an distro I know and like, and changing that into my firewall. The second box is to make sure I know what I am doing before I subject the family to the new firewall.

Web Sites

Last week, I made a major change to how I was hosting my websites. No, I did not change the software (hugo), but rather how I was serving them out. I had been running a docker container with a small Go web server behind another docker container running a reverse proxy.

Whilst this set up was fast and easy to deal with, there were a couple of things I did not like. The first is that when I updated a site, I had to restart the docker container with web server to get it to pick up on the new files (all static content). The other is more of me not knowing docker well enough, but I did not feel comfortable running containers as root. This made scripting site updates harder/less secure, and I am sure my config was not the most secure.

So, I switched over to Podman to handle running the container without root privileges, and Caddy for the webserver. This all runs as my userm, the server does not have to be restarted when I update the websites, and with only one container, it is using less resources as an added bonus!

Other Projects

I have a few other things I am working on, or should be working on, but I have not found the time/motivation to work on. Sadly, photography is one of them. I am barely managing to post one photo a week, but recently they have not been super awesome (although, I do like last weeks’s). I know that when my $JOB is really dragging me down, my photography suffers. I need to change that.

July. More than half way through the year.

Well, it has been a bit since I have done one of these (like, back in March). I am not going to recap everything since then, just this month.

Based on the graph of traffic at the firewall:

it can be deduced that we took a mini-holiday. We rented a beach-house on Galveston Island south of Houston. It was the first family getaway in too long due to the Plague, school/work, and various health issues.

I got up early on the Saturday to try and get some sunrise photos. I got some, and a couple others. Most of my energy was with the family, so not too many other photos.

In addition to the photo walk last month, I managed to find my self at the Houston Graffiti Building again. I spent some time, and came away with some keepers:

So, the month has been good for photography and family time. The $JOB has been a bit…challenging. Whilst I have had some time to do some ‘real’ work (in this case, a bit of coding to automate a process) I got roped into the all-hands-on-deck-highest-priority project to upgrade the major applications clusters. Of course, the vendor has not tested the upgrade path they want us to follow, and random things have been breaking in new and odd ways. Oh, and through in the random server deciding it wanted to do its own thing, many long hours this week.

On to August!