2024–W23 #
I attended BSDCan last week. It was good! It felt like going to one of the FLOSS UK (UKUUG) Spring conferences in production quality and general level of good will towards others. I've basically only gone to commercial conferences for the past ~7 years (save one: Processing Day).
I learned a few BSD bits which will be useful, especially that I can cross-compile all of NetBSD from a Linux host! This is great because I have much more powerful Linux hosts to use, so if I do some kernel development, the cycle times will be much shorter. 👍
Possibly more importantly; I learned some bits about speaking BGP and running an autonomous system. FRR is the new Quagga (which was the new Zebra). Chelsio make cheap but good(enough) 10G NICs. There's a carve-out to get a /24 of IPv4 if you are using it to help transition to IPv6 (for your first allocation). Good stuff! Also it just elevated my excitement levels, tbh.
Other stuff:
- I made a stand for my webcam with a heavy weight at the bottom, a telescoping part and 1/4-20 threaded bits at both ends. It decouples my monitor from my webcam which gives me way better options for video conferencing -- something I stopped caring about when I left work but I've had to care about a little more recently as I meet some folks online.
- It feels like drilling and tapping 1/4-20 is one of the main things that I use my milling machine for?
- Used Blacksheep on Python to do some poking around an API and persisting to a database with SQLModel -- both very pleasant and quick. Makes me wince when I think how much pain it was to do basically the same thing in Rust.
- Added a dark-mode to Thymesheet and a noisy background. 🧑🎨
- Continued to noodle with virsh/libvirt and now have live migration between two hosts working (when the guest uses an nbd storage device).
- One important part was to select a subset of CPU features the heterogeneous hosts shared.
- It still feels like magic, after all of this time.
- Used my new VM host / guests to set up two BGP ASNs for internal testing.
- Blowing the dust off my Quagga knowledge (it's FRR now, as above).
- There's much more emphasis on allow-listing updates using route-maps than there was in the mid-2010s when I last did this stuff. (Good!)