I got Bazzite installed on my old desktop and it was so painless I decided to try another container focused OS since my homelab machine is exclusively using containers. I didn’t intentionally plan to predominantly use containers, and figured this would be a fun experiment. Since I’m experimenting on a spare machine (with a spinning disk!), I got Claude to inspect the current state and generate a butane config as a starting point....
tl;dr - my work was superceeded by Zoom releasing their own official repo. I successfully rolled my own unofficial Zoom repo, but it: didn’t automatically update, and wasn’t publicly accessible Which was problematic - #1 meant it didn’t work for me, and #2 meant it didn’t work for the friend that nerd sniped me into this. This post is me figuring things out, as well as a curveball that meant I could actually delete all of this....
tl;dr: Add xml:base=https://path/prefix to an RPM package location metadata to tell DNF where to download RPMs from. If you setup files on disk to match the URL structure on the download site, createrepo will include the file path in the repo metadata automatically. Kena nerd sniped I rarely need Zoom but when I need it, I need it. I’ve been conditioned to not use the web client for things like “I need to screenshare” and “I don’t like Chrome chewing up 100% of my CPU”....
tl;dr - it doesn’t exist. I’m not the first to have asked this. There’s 2 URLs listed in the XML metadata element: <metadata xmlns="http://linux.duke.edu/metadata/common" xmlns:rpm="http://linux.duke.edu/metadata/rpm" packages="5">, but both links are broken with a 404 error. Turning to the Internet Archive, I pulled up an old redirect in 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20081121070242/http://createrepo.baseurl.org/, which had the lovely FIXME The specification needs better and more current documentation and needs to be included here. :)...
After writing the archive comparisons, I stumbled across a Reddit post where someone argues that Deep Archive is actually pretty useful as a proper archive as long as you’re not downloading regularly. I’m inclined to agree, except I think you can do an end run around the egress cost because CloudFront allows 1 TB outbound to the Internet as part of the free tier. Setup I ran all this in us-east-2 to make sure this test was isolated from my normal use for billing purposes without creating a new account....
I subscribe to a loose interpretation of the 3-2-1 backup strategy for my essential files, mainly my photos. I have: The primary/working copy on disk in my computer Backblaze continuous local backup (to protect against local emergencies like fires, etc.), with their 1-year file history option A periodic sync to Google Drive since I’m already paying Google for my email A manually performed copy of my files on a portable drive left in a safety deposit box During my university days, my backup process was different....
I’ve had this war story-type draft for a few weeks, but it felt incomplete. Then an intern candidate asked me “What is the worst incident you were involved in, and what was the outcome?” For context, I’ve been in the SRE space since 2014. I’ve had accidents, and broken production a few times, but one incident stands out to me. Setting the stage An engineer joined my team as an internal transfer from another team within the company, and they were getting exposed to our systems by cleaning up the monitoring configs for our services....
Yes I’m copying Charlie Brooker’s show name. My 2021: Overall, worse than 2020 for me, but at least it ended on an upward note while 2020 ended flat. 2020 was mostly good for me: I got promoted to senior in February 2020 My capacity management project suddenly became a lot more important to my management chain when the lockdowns started I moved in with my partner 2 weeks before the lockdowns after 7+ years of a long-distance relationship We adopted a very cute dog I even bought a car (so we could take the dog to the dog park, and not subject the dog to plane trips when travelling) 2021 was shaping up to be a plateau from 2020....
The Reverse Proxy type of load balancer is probably the most common one - it is Good Enough for most applications. The differences between the L4 and L7 proxy variants come from which level of the OSI model they deal with. L4 load balancers deal with individual connection flows (think TCP/UDP packets, plain bytes), while L7 load balancers deal with individual requests (think HTTP requests, GETs or POSTs). In the proxy design, incoming connections are terminated on the load balancer, and the request passed on to one of the backend servers, either by opening a new connection or using an already established one....
This is a long form version of my talk at SRECon EMEA 2019 - Load Balancing Building Blocks. But it’s turned into a bit of a brain dump, writing down what I’ve learnt. My alternative title was “What I wish I knew about (Network) Load Balancing”. Why do we need Load Balancing? Load balancing essentially comes down to spreading requests across multiple servers. There are a few common reasons to do so:...