technotes.seastrom.com

I won't bore you with a rehash of Dieselgate except to note that as a finale Volkswagen paid a couple billion dollars as fines and further committed to spend $2 billion for clean-emissions infrastructure.

Gaige and I have been using Let's Encrypt for creating certificates for use with SSL/TLS services since Lets Encrypt was an invite-only beta.

In the DC area, surplus Class 5 and 6 GSA security containers are often available through the usual channels (DRMO, craigslist, etc).

You only really appreciate just how much you've come to rely on a particular tool in your bag of tricks when you're suddenly deprived of it.

As I've previously mentioned, Gaige and I have an assortment of Polycom VVX and old Cisco 7960 phones floating around which we do VoIP on.

I was in a hurry and "didn't have time to properly clean out all sensitive data" from a work in progress, so I handed Gaige a tarball.

Hating on systemd is widely considered good sport.

At ClueTrust we have had good experiences running from high quality USB sticks, for software that is designed to run off USB or SD cards such as ESXi and SmartOS.

I recently bought a server from techmikeny.com after seeing an unboxing photoset on Reddit.

We put our nice knives (Wusthof and Henckels stainless) in the dishwasher like the barbarians we are.

I always forget this and just spent a half hour looking for it and googling online.

I recently became aware of a couple of interesting resources for getting good quality tools without going broke.

In August 2011, fresh off buying a house and needing something to look after the yard I went tractor shopping.

Continuing on with the theme of electric car chargers, most electric car manufacturers include one with the car.

I installed my electric car charger (EVSE) at the end of 2013.

I've previously written about choosing an electric car charger (EVSE) and thinking about it in terms of how long someone stays at a location and how much of a charge they can expect to get during their visit.

As previously mentioned, ClueTrust has a standard SmartOS server deployment of a DL160g6 with 2 x Intel L5520 Nehalem EP CPUs, 72gb of RAM in the form of 18 x 4gb ECC DDR3 sticks, and 4 x WD Red drives of various sizes depending on when we installed the p…

Yesterday, Gaige brought to my attention that dnssec-keygen(1) seems to be deprecated for TSIG purposes.

I've long been a fan of LetsEncrypt, though not as early an adopter as I could have been since early tooling was extremely Linux-centric and that's not where we're at, at least in our shop.

Unlike most parts of MacOS, er, sorry, macOS...

If you follow the evolution of hard drive technology much at all you're probably aware of something called "AF" ( Advanced Format, not to be confused with "af" as the kids say in text messages or tweets).

How things stand now For the past few years my home storage setup has been basically a clone of what I have in colo, albeit with larger drives - SmartOS on a DL160g6 with 72gb of RAM, four 8TB WD Reds (WD80EFZX) on the built-in AHCI controller, configured…

Quick cheat sheet for mirroring a port to a span port: {% highlight c %} rs@woodburn-bigswitch> show configuration ethernet-switching-options analyzer spanport { ratio 1; input { ingress { interface ge-0/0/0.0; } egress { interface ge-0/0/0.0; } } output {

Lately, I've been playing around with FastNetMon, to wit their community edition on GitHub.

Recently, my espresso machine extracted a little bit of maintenance budget from me.

A week ago we took delivery on a par of appliances - a washer and a dryer.

In the wake of previously noted successes with Cheetah Mounts when it came time to mount a TV at my mother-in-law's new house, we bought her an updated and improved version of the articulated mount I bought in 2017 for us How do you improve on a mount upon

Triumph of Amazon APIs here - I recently learned of diskprices.com which apparently populates itself automatically with best prices per unit stored and lets you search based on various simple criteria.

For those of you who might have been wondering, the toll cameras on the ICC do in fact work.

One of the things I encountered in $DAYJOB is that my predecessors seemed oddly preoccupied with speccing Cat6 cable rather than Cat5e cable, for all applications.

We've been doing a lot of ZFS work around here lately, partially motivated by a sick (but not failed!)

A couple of months ago my friend Bryan sent me a screen shot of the status page on his cablemodem (often available at http://192.168.100.1 depending on the manufacturer and model of your cablemodem) and asked for my thoughts.

For about a decade, Gaige and I have run Astlinux as our preferred phone system, with upstream VoIP service from voip.ms, who asr told us about back in 2008 when they were his customer.

Sorry to disappoint if you thought this was about beer and not the package manager for macOS.

Back in April, I had an opportunity to upgrade a friend and colleague's home network.

Recently, we've been rolling out a bunch of Ubiquiti Networks UAP-AC-PRO-E Access Points, first to $CTO's, $CEO's, and my house, and once we were satisfied that they worked OK, $DAYJOB's offices and datacenters.

Been trying to track down exactly what an intermittently super noisy host is doing.

The folks at Dengarden have a lot of conduit bending resources.

That moment when you break out a fresh can of the "kills wasps, hornets, and other hymenoptera with a 15 foot stream" stuff... and realize that it's nowhere near as effective as WD-40, brake cleaner, inverted cans of dust-off, and whatever other field-exp…

I made a batch of homemade Kahlua recently (like you do when you have a commercial espresso machine sitting on your kitchen counter).

For as long as I've owned my '89 F250, I've been annoyed by the fact that it seems to run warmer than it ought to in the cabin.

Melody goes to Burning Man and she told me about a trick people use to keep tents from blowing away on the playa.

One of the things that Apple design paradigms pride themselves on is the Principle of Least Astonishment - designs that match users' experience and expectations, as well as their mental models.

It's been a little more than two and a half years since I set up an experimental drain for my plumbed-in Rancilio S26 (commercial espresso machine), and I can report that it's working out well.

I run a personal instance of Splunk behind a client cert protected NGiNX proxy.

Some years ago I wrote about using zfs send with netcat (only across trusted networks!

Back when I wrote about Schedule EV and why it didn't make sense for me, I made reference to the Dominion Blue Book - our local power company's provisioning manual.

I recently wrote about almost accidentally overloading my basement slab with a huge pile of tile that we're storing.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post that included a brief introduction to systemd that included the following instructions: {% raw %} sudo cp autossh.service /etc/systemd/system/ ; sudo systemctl enable autossh.service ; sudo reboot "The first report is…

Mrs.