Friday Feedback

WordPress Issues

For years the go-to source for consistent container images has been Bitnami. Bitnami is owned by Broadcom via its acquisition of VMware in 2023.

With over 200 different containers covering every part of the container infrastructure, developers and system administrators have gone to Bitnami images for consistent interfaces and methods.

Until last month, these container images were offered free of charge to the world.

Starting on the 1st of this month, only development containers are offered free of charge. This means that if you want tagged versions of WordPress, you need to buy a subscription for the Secure Containers from Bitnami.

I looked into this. Does anybody think paying $62,000/year is a good deal? I don’t.

This is not a long-term issue; it is a pain because I have to reconfigure all my WordPress clients to use a new source for images with different mounting points.

Wire Runs

There are times when it is so simple that you can’t find instructions.

When running redundant cable or fiber, you want to make sure that there are no single points of failure. I remember the great Internet outage of the early 90s. Some good old boys in a swamp down in the south took some potshots at something hanging on telephone poles.

They managed to sever a fiber optic bundle. This cut the US Internet in half because all the redundant fibers were in that same optic bundle.

The contracts for those fiber circuits had been let to different long-haul fiber networks. Those long-haul networks were picked because they had north, south, and mid-Atlantic routes heading west. When a new dark fiber vendor came on the market, offering better service with better prices, these long-haul networks purchased their dark fiber from the same vendor.

And all the circuits ended up in a single bundle, down south.

I currently have a star configuration for my network. I’m going to be adding a ring around the outside of the star. This allows better throughput between adjacent data closets. Instead of going to the hub then out to the data closet, we will be routing closet to closet.

While the “cost” of that extra hop isn’t really measurable, it does put some limits on the total cluster bandwidth.

Say you have to move 10 Gigabytes from Node 101 to Node 102 in the same closet. We move that at 10 gigabits, so around 15 seconds to move the data.

But say you want to move the same 10 Gigabytes from Node 101 to Node 103 in a different closet. It still takes around 15 seconds to move the data.

But what if you need to move 10 gigabytes from Node 101 in closet 3 to Node 103 in closet 2, plus 10 Gigabytes from Node 101 to Node 105 in closet 1, and 10 Gigabytes from Node 101 to Node 129 in closet 0? Each movement would only take 15 seconds, but the total time to move would be 3*15, or 45 seconds.

With the extra links in place, we can go directly from Closet 3 to Closets 1 and 2. This will reduce our total time to 30 seconds.

I have the hardware to do this ring. What I don’t have is the conduit. If I use the existing conduit, it is easy. But that means if that conduit is compromised, I lose access to that closet.

I figured out that I can run some conduit along the outside of the building with much shorter runs, much easier access, and with the level of redundancy I’m looking for.

When I finish pulling fiber, I will have three paths to every node.

OSPF/Multicast

In networking, we use broadcast packets when we want to reach every node on a network segment. In the old days there was a single IPv4 address for that, which was the host portion of the IPv4 address was all ones.

It turns out that there are other reasons to want to use a broadcast packet. Often for discovery purposes. OSPF uses this method to find other routers on the network segment.

Which leads to the issue of L3 managed switches. These things are not advertised as full routers, though they can act like them. In particular, each of these switches can run an OSPF process.

This means that the network topology is quickly updated when things change.

And these low cost managed switches don’t understand how to forward OSPF packets when they are running an OSPF process.

Another thing to figure out and fix.

Government Shutdown!!!

The world is wonderful. With the government shutdown, they are less likely to FA with me.

The reality is that the government barely notices when it is “shut down.”

It looks like the Democrats played into Trump’s agenda. J.D. Vance has stated that they will start firing people very shortly if the government isn’t started back up.

The government is shut down because the Democrats and the Republicans could not reach an agreement on a continuing funding resolution.

The Republicans have put forth a CR that funds the government at current levels but for VA housing, security for federal law enforcement, and security for the Supreme Court.

There is nothing in the CR that the Democrats object to.

The Democrats have put forth a proposal that adds more than 1 trillion dollars to the budget. They want to restore funding for healthcare for people that are unwilling to meet Medicaid work requirements. They also want to provide funding to states that are showing healthcare budget shortages because the state spent state money on providing healthcare to criminal illegal aliens.

The big word is “fungible.” Let’s say you want to buy a fancy dinner for your wife. You have $1,000 in the bank. You owe $700 for the mortgage, you owe $100 for Internet, and you owe $100 for water. This leaves you only $100 for food and other things. This means you can’t afford to take your wife out for a $100 dinner. There is no money in the budget.

You reach out to your parents and ask for help with the Mortgage. They agree to pay $500 for the mortgage but tell you that it can’t be used for “fun” things.

To make sure they send the $500 directly to the mortgage holder. You send your $200, the mortgage is paid for the month. None of your parents money went to fun things like dinner out with your wife.

You now have $600 for food and other things. You allocate $250 for food, spend $100 on other things. You have $150 of your money to take your wife to dinner.

Where did the money come from for that dinner? From you or your parents.

Fungible means that you can’t send any money to states that are spending money on criminal illegal aliens. You can’t send any money to organizations that spend money on abortions.

Question of the Week

What is your opinion of this government shutdown?