2025–W25 #
PocketID continues to be one of the best things that I've learned about through OttawaSystems. I'm using it at work for a dummy OIDC provider when testing locally and for my homelab and for Colocataires to protect our monitoring. Have also figured out enough tinyauth to be dangerous, too, so I can protect random endpoints that are either static or just don't support OpenID Connect.
It's weak how Ansible has basically won config management, on the single server level. Cloud-fans went the "bake an AMI" / immutable infra route and Kubernetes encourages you to run the actual stuff that you care about inside containers, and the ecosystem for "people who keep servers for months and years" is just stuck in 2015.
(I'm on the train to Toronto ahead of a week in KCW, so I'm a little introspective).
Okay, it's kind of cool to have a laptop fast enough to play Forza 4 (with a wireless controller) on the train 😀
For Colocataires I don't think I'm happy with the state of routing, especially for v6. As we get actual customers those decisions will get harder to change so I suppose the time to work on them is now.
When I ran CloudStack at iWeb it used to deploy dedicated router VMs (tiny ones, like 128MiB/1vCPU) for each network. I don't recall the details exactly but I think that they were responsible for OSPFing and handling cross V(X)LAN routing. I remember shifting from VLAN to VXLAN so we didn't end up having to automate a bunch of switch configuration things, or hitting the 128 live VLAN limit in our HP ProCurve switches.
It'd be nice to not NAT people and give out public IPs to machines which needed or wanted a public IP, but then also that gets baked in to config which could be less than ideal. It's easy with IPv6 of course, this is only a problem caused by our lack of IPv4s.
I think doing VXLANs properly is also going to suggest jumbo packets so we don't lose MTU. That should be fine, but it needs to get applied everywhere.
Also this is my vacation and maybe I shouldn't be thinking about it 🙃
My brain is tired, I hope I'm not sick. I had some quiet time and a computer so I redid some HTML and CSS on insom.me.uk -- I wish I was up for more.
Fixed / implemented RSS for the Python version of this weeklog. This probably means that anyone following via RSS now has all of the history of the site marked as new in their feed reader, because it's not a 1:1 match to the old format of posts. But also: probably no one was reading this, so maybe we're just fine?
Reworked IPv6 for Colocataires -- I thought "why are we using private IPv4 space?" and the answer was: "we don't have enough public IPv4 space" and so I reached for the easy -- but probably incorrect answer -- of using private networks and NAT -- and not the much better answer: use IPv6.
Desktop environments on Linux are frustrating. I went through getting my desktop to use Wayland (by force) and I think that's better, but web browsers and sometimes even terminals slow down over time and generally I feel like my experience is just not as low latency as I would expect from a 12th Gen i5 and an Ultra 5 125H.