Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

I have ordered three books

March 21st, 2018

This brings my books to eight this year so far. I usually try to stay under 15 per year, so this is half way. I have ordered:

Linux Kernel Development (Developer's Library) - Love, Robert
AIX 7.2, PowerVM - UNIX, Virtualization, and Security. An administrator's guide. - Biedron, Sebastian
Linux Device Drivers - Corbet, Jonathan,Rubini, Alessandro,Kroah-Hartman, Greg

This will keep me busy for a while. The AIX book is interesting because I'm currently learning this OS.

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Tomorrow is Equinox

March 19th, 2018

Tomorrow is the march equinox. This marks officialy the start of spring in the northern hemisphere. In Germany we have snow on teh ground still. This is interesting.

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Today in America, is Pi day. Because I'm on the Internet it's hard to avoid it, even though I live in Germany. I even saw a guy with a pirate hat this morning. That's when it dawned on me that it was Pi day.

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dd-convert has been replaced with dddctl

March 3rd, 2018

The signing tool dd-convert in delphinusdnsd has been replaced with the tool dddctl. The particular signing function can be achieved with dddctl sign ... Goodbye dd-convert, thanks for a great time! All makefiles should be updated to make dddctl as of tonights snapshot.

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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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