Category: Nerd Babel
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One Step Forward, ??? Steps Back
Networking used to be simple. It is unclear to me why I think that. Maybe because when I started all of this, it was simple. Networks are broken down into two major classes, Point-to-Point (P2P) or broadcast. When you transmit on a P2P port, the data goes to a dedicated port on the other side…
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Bad Hardware Design
I have had good luck with picking up discarded computers, upgrading them, and making them functional members of the computer or services farm. A computer consists of persistent storage (disk drives and SSD), dynamic storage (memory), a processor (CPU), and I/O devices. Data is read from disk into memory, the processor then either executes it…
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Two Factor Authentication
There are two parts to access control, the first is authentication, the second is authorization. Authentication is the process of proving you are who you claim to be. There are three ways to prove you are who you say you are, something you know, something you have, or something about you. When you hand your…
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Data Security
Data security is the protection of your data throughout its lifecycle. Let’s pretend you have a naughty image of yourself that you don’t want anybody else to see. The most secure way of protecting that image is to have never taken that image in the first place. It is too late now. If you put…
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Network Nerding
You might have heard the phrase, “He’s forgotten more than you will ever know.” When dealing with somebody who is quietly competent, that is almost always the case. I was there at the start of the Internet. I watched our campus get X.25 networking. Later, BITNET. I watched email get dumped into the UUCP queues…
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WYSIAYG vs WYSIWYG
I started my computer career with the command line, or as it is known today, the CLI. Almost everything I do is done via CLI. I’ve had clients that had hosts in China, Ukraine, and London. They all look the same to me because they are just another window next to the other windows on…
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Filler
I’m exhausted. I’ve been pulling fiber for the last two days. All part of an infrastructure upgrade. Normally, pulling cable in a modern datacenter is pretty easy. This is not a modern datacenter. The original cable runs were CAT6 with RJ45 connectors. When the cables were installed, the installation had to be nondestructive. No holes…
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Networking, interrelationships
Part of the task of making a High Availability system is to make sure there is no single point of failure. To this end, everything is supposed to be redundant. So let’s take the office infrastructure as a starting point. We need to have multiple compute nodes and multiple data storage systems. Every compute node…
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Docker Swarm?
There is this interesting point where you realize that you own a data center. My data center doesn’t look like that beautiful server farm in the picture, but I do have one. I have multiple servers, each with reasonable amounts of memory. I have independent nodes, capable of performing as ceph nodes and as docker…
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High Availability Services
People get very upset when they go to visit Amazon, Netflix, or just their favorite gun blog and the site is down. This happens when a site is not configured with high availability in mind. The gist is that we do not want to have a single point of failure, anywhere in the system. To…
