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Post-mortem review : DayOne sync outage and private data exposure

Post-mortem review : DayOne sync outage and private data exposure

I’m a long-term user of Day One, the premier journaling app for iOS/MacOS. In 2017, Day One introduced end-to-end encryption on user journals (which I use), to protect the journal data synced with their proprietary service (that became mandatory after Dropbox sync was dropped in v2) This morning,

AutoPirate : SABnzbd and friends in a docker swarm

AutoPirate : SABnzbd and friends in a docker swarm

In 2015, I published a docker-compose stack I’d developed to automate media discovery and management with SABnzbd and related tools (Radarr, CouchPotato, etc). I’ve just finished turning this stack into a recipe in my Geek’s Cookbook - here’s the introduction: Autopirate Once the cutting edge of

The geekiest thing I've done in 2017

The geekiest thing I've done in 2017

I was recently asked what the geekiest thing I’ve done recently is. My response: Ever. That’s a hard question. Probably the most challenging has been building an HA OpenStack cluster. The geekiest though, would be.. I use Home Assistant for my home automation platform. I bought a Xiaomi

NAT on pfsense with multiple OpenVPN instances

NAT on pfsense with multiple OpenVPN instances

I make use of pfSense in many of my network designs. It’s lightweight and versatile, and runs well as a VM under low-to-medium usage. I often connect networks together using a pfSense VM and OpenVPN, and this design usually involves NAT. As a result, I end up with a

Accessing older iDRAC virtual consoles on MacOS

Accessing older iDRAC virtual consoles on MacOS

I recently inherited some 2012-era Dell servers for development purposes. I wanted to use remote console to reinstall the OS, but ran into two problems: Problem #1 - “Launch console” downloads an unclickable shortcut In Chrome, when you click the link to launch a virtual console, Chrome downloads a file

Miniflux, lightweight self-hosted rss reader

Miniflux, lightweight self-hosted rss reader

Guys, I broke up with my RSS reader… Until recently, if you asked me to recommend a self-hosted RSS reader, I would have pointed you towards every geek’s favorite, Tiny Tiny RSS. For reasons I’ll explain below, it’s over. I’ve turned off my Tiny Tiny RSS

Archive blog to DayOne using RSS

I just finished reviewing my IFTTT recipies applets since the introduction of the “new IFTTT”. I discovered that it’s now a little more involved to create and share applets than the previous “recipe” metaphor. I setup archival of liked youtube videos, twitter tweets / favorites and spotify tracks using the

Getting started visualizing IOT data with Grafana

Getting started visualizing IOT data with Grafana

A friend asked for help getting his “IOT” sensor data into Grafana for visualization, so I wrote up this minimal, bare-bones process, which is applicable to CentOS6/7… Install influxDB Add the influxdb repository: cat <<EOF | tee /etc/yum.repos.d/influxdb.repo [influxdb] name = InfluxDB Repository -

Recovering from '_nova_to_osvif_vif_binding_failed'

Recovering from '_nova_to_osvif_vif_binding_failed'

I was showing off my OpenStack dev cluster to a co-worker, and spouting off about how easy and user-proof live-migration is. I challenged him to try it, and he subsequently broke my OpenStack, by trying to live-migrate instances to a compute node targets whose FQDN doesn’t exist (using client

Implicit 2TB limit breaks Instapaper for 31 hours

In Instapaper Outage Cause & Recovery – Making Instapaper – Medium, I read a painful reminder that not everything that fails is within your control: This is any web application developer’s worst nightmare. A filesystem-based limitation we weren’t aware of and had no visibility into rendered not only our production

Errors when installing OpenStack Newton on CentOS7 with packstack

While establishing a new OpenStack Newton installation on CentOS7 using packstack, I encountered the following error after running packstack --allinone (doing a multi-node install made no difference, though) Applying Puppet manifests [ ERROR ] ERROR : Error appeared during Puppet run: 172.16.83.2_controller.pp Error: Could not prefetch keystone_role

Openstack neutron could not load ... InterfaceDriver warnings are.. mostly harmless

I’ve been working on an OpenStack lab, and one of the (many) issues I encountered was that my instances (VMs) wouldn’t get their DHCP addresses from the neutron controller. This ended up being due to the fact that I’d built CentOS 7 off a security-focused kickstart which

DRBD on RHEL/CentOS 6 fails to sync with UnknownMandatoryTag error

We use DRBD as part of Linux HA designs. I was recently tasked with setting up DRBD 8.4 for a new customer installation. I chose a complicated, 64-character random string as my shared secret, and configured both nodes. Big mistake. DRBD appeared to start, but both nodes were in

Why you suffer from "attention residue"

Why you suffer from "attention residue"

The act of being interrupted in one’s work is likely to hurt performance not only on the interrupted activity but also, as indicated by the present studies, on the subsequent work activity. This paper calls for understanding the consequences of interruptions and fragmented time beyond their effects on only

Sabnzbd docker container updated, now includes sickbeard_mp4_automator

Table of Contents * Background * What will mp4_automator do for me? * How do I get it? * How to use mp4_automator with sabnzbd docker image Background I use the excellent linuxserver.io docker sabnzbd container for the sabnzbd component of the dockerized HTPC suite, my collection of tools and services

Putting in extra work is lazy and makes you less effective

Putting in extra work is lazy and makes you less effective

In Work/Life Balance Will Make You a Better Software Engineer · Code Without Rules, I read: The final benefit of work/life balance is attitude: the way you think about your job. If you work extra hours on your normal job you are training yourself to do your work with

Manual processes fail to scale.

Manual processes fail to scale.

In Linode Blog » The Twelve Days of Crisis – A Retrospective on Linode’s Holiday DDoS Attacks, I read about the scale of a DDOS attack on Linnode infrastructure: Of course, this was not the first time that our routers have been attacked directly. Typically, special measures are taken to send

Don't let your judgement be clouded

Don't let your judgement be clouded

In Buildkite’s Aug 22 outage post-mortem, I read the (refreshingly honest and transparent) story of a cascading set of failures with a root cause of poor change-management. An interesting takeaway from the story is that a large amount of the failures are unique to the “cloud” / IaaS platform design.

IT Monitoring lessons learned from FCC report into 911 outage

IEEE Spectrum highlighted an FCC report into a 911 outage in April 2014, which resulted in over 11 million Americans.. or about three and half percent of the population of the United States, being at risk of not being able to reach emergency help through 911. I found the report

MacBook Air recommendation for cost-conscious newlyweds

A friend who recently got married asked for advice (below) on purchasing a MacBook Air, and I thought it might be useful to record my response here: We are thinking of getting a MacBook Air as we liked the idea of a Mac Mini but with both of us still

Do less to be more productive

In “Your organization sucks at innovating”, Shane Parrish discusses innovation (or lack thereof) within an organisation: Want to kill innovation? Make people attend meetings all day. Send them emails every 30 seconds. Bombard them with too much work. Kill their enthusiasm. Make them write pages of pointless prose to justify

Engineers make poor managers

Update: after a back-and-forth with Lindsay, this post should more accurately be titled “Good engineer != good manager” In It’s not a promotion - it’s a career change, Lindsay Holmwood explains why so many engineers “promoted” to management do such a poor job.. The truth of the matter is

Working late (consistently) is a sign of failure

I recently enjoyed this article, in which Jeff Sutherland describes how working longer hours actually makes you less productive. Of note : He started telling people that working late wasn’t a sign of commitment—it was a sign of failure.

Bought a pebble watch, saved my brain

In “Buy a watch, save your brain”, I wrote about how I hoped to buy a wrist watch (at the time, it was the rumoured “iWatch”), and reduce the amount of distraction I caused myself each time I checked the time on my iPhone. Well, the “Apple Watch” announcement has

In defense of traditional work-life balance

I enjoyed Rian van der Merwe’s first column on A List Apart, in which he defends a traditional view of work-life balance. The following echoes my own policy - I try to be 100% at work during work hours, but afterwards, I’m 0% at work (crises and extraordinary