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ill0gicity

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syseng, neteng, devops, multirotors, outdoors.

https://johanna.walter.fm/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/jwalter; my proof: https://keybase.io/jwalter/sigs/J-BGoha3sO6YfktmzHBC8og3ifhlUQnLkwuPKSm_bV8 ]

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I've been using Mailu (https://mailu.io/) for years and have had no problems. I love that it has the concept of domain admins so that people can manage mailboxes for their own domains. DNS isn't automatic, but meh. Upgrading is easy (Docker + automatic migrations).

Once upon a time I wrote a DNS zone sync shell script. It was great, and terrible. Truth is, it should never have been a shell script. I used curl to make API calls to Oracle (then Dyn), awk to turn API output into the local zone format, sorted the local and remote zone data, diff'd them, then more curl'ing to make the updates. It was brilliant then-- now, not so much.

Most impactful? Wrote a Slack chatbot that allowed on-call operations engineers to leave their laptops in their cars. The bot could help investigate, diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve issues ranging from single-site slowness to service outages. It talked to databases, CDNs, caching layers, logging infrastructure, servers, load-balancers, and routers. Access was controlled using a tree permission scheme with user and group permissions. Informational commands were generally left open to all engineers and actions were tightly controlled.

I could say, "tell me something I don't know", and stop there. But where's the usefulness in that?

I began suffering from depression around age 8, but wasn't diagnosed until 32. To me it was normal. I didn't have the language to describe it and everyone wrote it off as me being an introvert. Re-processing my life with the understanding of not just that I was suffering from depression, but how I suffered from it, has been illuminating.

With regard to the topic at hand, it makes sense that I excelled working at a datacenter from 3a to 11a and 7p to 3a. It makes sense that a decade after leaving that job my body and mind still want to keep those hours. And it is a nasty feedback loop of depression, lack of (good) sleep, and poor self-care.

My solution was to use a single domain for everything, with different locations broken out under their own subdomains. My colocated rack is "fmt2". VPSs are under normal IATA 3-letter codes. Homes, not just mine, are under "<STREET_NUMBER><STREET_NAME_INITIAL>". Internal services available for all homes are under "int". And so on. There are a bunch of reserved names under each to provide consistent access to per-location devices and services... "network" for a jump-off point to other devices, "edge<N>" for internet-connected routers, "sw<N>" for switches, "svc<N>" for per-location services (Wireguard, DNS, DHCP, NTP, LDAP, RADIUS, BIRD, HTTP/HTTPS, Home Assistant, Home Bridge), "ap<N>" for access points, "print<N>" for document printers, "fdm<N>" for 3D printers, ad nauseum. It's worked great to keep things organized. It also simplifies certificates since I can use wildcards.

I created a notification gateway for services, jobs, and users to utilize. It accepts plain-text to send to a default channel or custom if the text contains a valid channel spec. It also accepts HTTP requests where the headers can control nearly every aspect of the message (channel, name, icon, etc). It's one of the simplest things I've written, but it's impact to level of communication is jarringly large.

Marty: Doc, you don't just walk into a store and ask for plutonium. Did you rip this off?

Doc: Of course, from a group of Libyan Nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn gave them a shiny bomb case full of used pinball machine parts.

Maybe?

    Apple LLVM version 9.0.0 (clang-900.0.39.2)
    Target: x86_64-apple-darwin16.7.0
    Thread model: posix
    InstalledDir: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin
    
    ProductName:    Mac OS X
    ProductVersion: 10.12.6
    BuildVersion:   16G1114

Consider for moment why the French are training eagles to take down drones: bombs. Now think about how the eagles are dealing with the drones... They knock them out of the sky. I can't be the only one seeing a problem with this.

"Use the 'interference gun'". If that works, and it's a BIG "if", the drone will either land or fall to the ground. Bombs away! Seriously, it's just as bad as an eagle crashing into it. Real gun? Same problem with the added bonus of a bullet going through the drone and continuing on its journey to who-knows-where.

So what's a government to do? The only solution I can see that removes the threat of a bomb going off is this: a much larger drone (650mm and above octocopter) armed with a net gun. The key here is to have the net tethered to the drone so it can carry the hostile drone away to a safe area. The drone-mounted net gun already exists (Excipio), just have to get the net tethered to the drone.

Control systems for drones typically run on 2.4GHz, but they don't have to. The 70cm band (433MHz typical) is available for people with amateur radio licenses (or people who don't care). There are also 3G chips (Particle Electron) that you can use to send telemetry commands if your drone has a GPS and a compatible auto-pilot flight controller.

Getting a video signal back is normally done on 5.8GHz, but there is hardware readily available for 900MHz, 1.2GHz, 2.4GHz, and 3.3GHz. And if you're an enterprising fellow you can send the video on any frequency (NTSC or PAL).

Basically, you can't block it all without serious collateral "damage".

Edit: I've been building and flying drones for over two years, both FPV racing types and larger photography/videography platforms.

Regardless of all the statistics, math, and you-live-longers in this I have to disagree. Maybe I'm just an incredibly lucky driver (zero collisions) and a disaster-magnet on a bicycle (40 year old woman driving an SUV (SF), 33 year old man driving delivery van (SF), drunk driver (Sunnyvale), 92 year old driving a van (Sunnyvale)), but I know where I feel safe. That said, I still love to ride my bike.

San Francisco does as well. I'm going to sound like a rich white male when I say this, and it's not intended that way, but who do you think takes out the trash at all the tech companies? Where do those tech bros eat their meals when not provided by said tech companies? Who builds out all the tech companies' new offices? Who-- Oh.

The problem San Francisco seems to have is all the low and medium wage jobs appear to support the tech companies. There are few artisans and craftsmen in SF.

My knee-jerk reaction was, "oh great, distributed ping... that won't ever be misused." I've never been happier to be wrong.

The range of tests available is quite impressive and rivals services like Pingdom and ThousandEyes. Granted, you'd have to write your own dashboard, but we're all coders here right? (I know we're not, but it's still fun to generalize at times)

One thing that is not immediately clear is how to get a free API key. You say "sign up" so I'm led to believe there's a link for me to click on and a form to fill out, but I'm not seeing any, on your site or mashape. Makes me sad.