Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

Performed a ZSK rollover on dtschland.eu with delphinusdnsd

March 3rd, 2018

With the new tool "dddctl" I have performed the key rollover. delphinusdnsd had to be patched minutely to allow more dnskeys and less rrsigs at the same time. I'm very happy with this change. I'll be monitoring this for a bit and then I'M going to see if I can do a KSK or even an algorithm key rollover. Should be interesting.

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Starting new job tomorrow

February 28th, 2018

I start at my next job tomorrow. I'm curious how it'll go. The new employer is called ibcos, and they are a company that does AIX support among other things. I'll get trained a little on AIX so that's great. Wish me luck!

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Currently between jobs

February 27th, 2018

Yesterday was my last day as a contractor to Jive Communications. It was a bit emotional leaving the system that I nurtured for 7.5 years. But it's all over now. The only hints that I worked there is my encrypted sparse file that I had where all the ssh keys were stored and other company related things. I hope I never have to mount that again. I'll be "jobless" until march 1st, when I start at my new job. Looking forward to it. Right now I'm passing the time reconfiguring my work phone to a second SIP phone in the apartment. Joy. I'm also going to work a little bit on delphinusdnsd's dddctl which has prooved to not be complete yet (although it's committed).

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I'm leaving EOP, Jive/LogMeIn on monday

February 24th, 2018

I first joined EOP (easyofficephone.com) in June 2010 or so, shortly after the passing of my friend Dan. Dan founded EOP with Adam Simpson who then hired me to look after the FreeBSD and Linux servers. In August 2015 then, Adam decided to sell the startup to another startup that was much bigger, Jive Communications. And now I'm the first one of the original EOP crew to leave Jive.

I'm not really sad, I'm grateful to Adam for giving me this chance and I learned over the years that Dan was indeed smarter than me (I noticed this on his old files and configs). I'm also grateful to Jive to keep me there as long as they did. I'm now placing the network that I've nurtured for so long in the hands of a pair of system admins who will hopefully keep the lights on until the lights are turned off.

It wasn't always easy doing this job. I suffered a low wage (which is common for startups) and I had to give up on usergroup meets in the area because they conflicted with the working times that I worked (because I'm in Europe and EOP is in Canada). I saved most my money though and I'm in a much better position than I was in 2010 although a bit older too. Underpay has always been a problem for me in general though, and the highest wage I ever earned was $60K CAD in the year 2000. Life has taught me that things don't always work out and keep getting better, in fact I had to make a lot of compromises, in order to have a job at all.

I'm looking forward to my new job though, and in October or so I'm aiming for purchasing an electric car. It will cut down the travel time to work in the morning which is important because I'm actually going to an office again. That in itself is exciting and challenging at the same time. I'm gonna have to kick a few bad habits when I'm at the office :P something I grew accustomed to while being a home-office worker. Anyhow I'm really grateful to the entire EOP family that gave me a chance and in a way they are launching me into a new job with new possibilities and a new dream. Thanks EOP.

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Donated 20 EUR to F3 Netze

February 24th, 2018

F3 Netze is an organisation that looks after infrastructure at Freifunk Franken. I have donated 20 EUR so far this year including this donation.

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Recovered Zeta

February 24th, 2018

I have recovered zeta my ex-core router. When I lost venus my livingroom router last week (probably faulty power supply), I replaced that with a spare APU1 router I had offline. So then when programs started segfaulting on zeta I thought something was fishy with RAM. That didn't turn out to be true as I had messed with /etc/login.conf before that and must have entered wrong values to the size of the stack limit. That's what started segfaulting programs on zeta. Anyhow I had a pretty important day then and needed to get back up on the Internet via VDSL so that my phones work.

I actually had LTE backup still but can't use SIP over that is in the contract. So I put the APU1 from the livingroom into the core-router function. I lost 5 used ports and was only able to connect 3 ports, but it worked.

Today I reinstalled OpenBSD-current on zeta and it seems to function. I did it a bit different by installing on the internal flash card and not a USB stick. So I only have 4 GB of space. This seems to work nicely. And zeta is now in my livingroom. I already have 5 ports used up on it (out of 8). Venus my soekris router that was in the livingroom originally I'll have to put into an old case when I find the power supply to it. I'll lose a few ports but it's a good idea to have a backup router around in case APU1 (gamma) fails. Otherwise I'm considering buying a backup APU3 just in case.

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Downtimes

February 23rd, 2018

I didn't even notice that the webserver was down really because I was busy here at home fixing up my core router. I lost zeta my octeon core router I think. It started segfaulting in programs run internally. I'll have to check it tomorrow when I have some more time.

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FreeBSD's Internal Code of Conduct

February 21st, 2018

The code of conduct, short CoC is a code to protect individuals within FreeBSD. I think it's a great idea. I have however seen some negative comments regarding this here. In fact some derogatory comments were downright disgusting.

I have been confused with someone else before, I believe where people thought I was a woman, or a man with desires to be a woman. So let me put my stance out. As a 6 y.o. I once wanted to be a woman or at least have a sister. Thankfully neither happened because I grew to love to be a man. I respect others who want to change their gender, but I can't understand their disliking for that gender that they've been born with.

It's a very complicated topic for me because I don't want to tread over anyone. When I was faced with someone who wanted to be a woman we went shopping for boots in a womans shoe store together. I thought I was liberal about that, but I had trouble understanding it. When I asked if that person was gay and got a nay it was very difficult for me to swallow this. Anyhow let's keep it there.

Live your life, is what I want to say. The codex doesn't include only trans- genders but also the mentally ill or those with a mental challenge. To those that are in open source and have developed a mental illness I say "keep your head up" because noone knows what it's like to put everything on the line, for code. Only those that are mentally ill can understand this.

Thankfully there is medications to treat mental illness. You are faced with the biggest challenge in life and it's not physical or an object but it's psychological/mental and we have to use our brains to get to the glory. The act of taking on any mental challenge is very courageous and deserves extra credit. If something doesn't work out we break down and get ill if we try again and again. Some are immune to this others aren't. But everyone who has worked around difficult code and complex problems can relate to the point where they stop making sense of things because they tried so hard.

Overall I'm happy with this codex and I had to think about this a long time, because something in or about it didn't feel right. Maybe it's the fact that one would face restrictions in a free medium. My mother always said freedoms end where they restrict others freedoms. And I believe she's correct anything else would be selfish thinking.

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I do not want a war

February 19th, 2018

The EU is partially responsible for jealousy and anger toward europeans. It is because of our success of our union that makes neighouring states angry and jealous. Yet we are not strong militarily. And that is the problem in itself. There is a power vacuum and it's being filled with NATO arms. I personally don't want a war. I want everyone to think about what we can do to save ourselves before we call for arms. Britain has already left the EU so we are weakened, but that is not enough for the brutish forces that threaten us. I'm not gonna be a puppet either by lying to myself that I'm interested in a foreign woman. For peace? To be held hostage? Screw that. So what to do? The only historic answer is to build up our military in order to fill the power vacuum ourselves. Problem with that is that it's seen as aggression it is akin to fueling the flame of war. Perhaps we have to disband the union and watch our foes fall over the individual states that are weakened by this. This is the worst paradox I've lived through in my life and it's getting more dire as time progresses. If there is aliens out there with solutions now would be a good time to come to earth with a solution for peace.

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Bought three books

February 19th, 2018

I'm starting a new job where there is supposedly lots of shell programming and my literature on that dates back 22 years which in fact I left in Canada when I moved. So just to have something to fall back on I purchased these books:

Mastering Regular Expressions: E.F. Friedl, Jeffrey
Mastering Unix Shell Scripting: Bash, Bourne, and Korn Shell Scripting for Programmers, System Administrators, and UNIX Gurus: Michael, Randal K.
Bash Pocket Reference: Robbins, Arnold

Even if the new work switches and we don't use shell programming, I would really like a refresher and update on the korn shell particularily since OpenBSD uses this for rc.d scripts (they recently switched this from strict bourne shell mode).

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