screaming in digital

dont discount the utility of running containers in an abstracted Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) away from your physical hardware. it expands your testing surfaces and sandboxes immeasurably.

“It has seen its job as explaining why we cannot instead of showing how we can, and that old way of thinking will lose on Tuesday. And frankly, it will lose in South Carolina and New Hampshire. It will fall short of 270 electoral votes, because the party of the past will not be what leads us into the future.”

the man is legitimately on fire.

depending on specs it will be a little power hungry, but a good virtualization platform.

yes, the power supplies are likely redundant and the server will complain if they are not both powered.

it will use a VGA connection, but you should be ale to find cheap VGA monitors or cheap adapters.

RAID controllerfor those drives? how many processors and cores? how much RAM? what OS are you planning on running on it? iDRAC included? (if so, likely idrac6, but still usable)

this hardware is very well supported by linux - I have used these older servers extensively. your boss was right to be excited for you. its a great exploration platform that you will be able to do lots of things with.

fire up a live linux distro and get detailed specs on the box - that will guide what you can play with right away.

If you’re skeptical that this feat is possible with a raw 4004, you’re right: The 4004 itself is far too limited to run Linux directly. Instead, Grinberg created a solution that is equally impressive: an emulator that runs on the 4004 and emulates a MIPS R3000 processor—the architecture used in the DECstation 2100 workstation that Linux was originally ported to. This emulator, along with minimal hardware emulation, allows a stripped-down Debian Linux to boot to a command prompt.

that is 2^8 levels of insane! and of course its Debian.

edit: 4bit data 12bit addressing make it an 8bit processor ; -)

I will slowly corrode on this hill.

ONE OF US! ONE OF US!

but seriously, modern FOSS distros (yes, debian is modern, damnit!) are amazingly good. you have an exceptionally high probablility of switching and staying switched.

tl;dw - individual containers isolated in HVMs with traditional container tooling.

I have been living under a rock and had not heard of this project before. it does seem to give a reasonable alternative to the manual VM[container] two-step for some workloads.

an older, but more complete intro lives at Kata Containers An introduction and overview [you tube]

• Lazy

the only honest answer.

creative is great, but sometimes you really just want your fleet of servers to do their fleet of servers thing. no fuss, no hassle. 100% solid and stable. learn the “debian way” and life is grand.

debian saved my marraige and raised my kids - ok, not really, but almost.

lots of debian. its debian all the way down.

exactly. I have been begging multiple ISPs for direct IPv6 allocations for 10+ years now. its always “we are internally testing - not available for distribution yet”. the most recent request from me was less than 3 months ago when I needed a IPv4 /29 for a remote site. figured I would see if I could also get a nice sized IPv6 allocation as well. nope. just gotta keep paying a premium for that dwindling IPv4 address space.

Hurricane Electric is to be commended for their public IPv6 tunnels, but without direct allocations from your immediate upstream, its just play.

10.0.0.0/8

172.16.0.0/12

192.168.0.0/16

🎶 a whole new wooorrrld… 🎶

there is no fix more permanent than a temporary one.

edit: as I literally sit here inspecting the nat tables on a couple of edge routers.

thanks for the excellent reply. will check out all of your links.

I do like built-in light weight threading, so Go is still on the to-play-with list and I am currently tracking a few Go projects to get my feet wet.

you have given me options and impetus to get out of my decades long rut and, honestly, that is the best gift any programmer can give to another. thank you, friend.

thanks for the reply. C++ never really clicked for me. I started out decades ago with C and enjoyed living on the edge with older hardware and OSes - when neither the OS nor the hardware will defend itself from an application, things get real fun, real fast.

as PC hardware matured, python filled in the safety spaces when needed and I eventually just used python with C bindings to balance speed and safety as needed for any particular project.

I have never seriously looked at ada, but your comment piqued my interest, so I may just play with it for a bit. Go… what can I say about Go… like C++ its just feels “odd” to me. cant really explain why, perhaps it just feels too… “google”?

I am going to be taking some time to really try groking Rust over the next 6 months… from what I have seen so far, Rust is the language that I wanted C++ to be so many years ago… fills in many more gaps and gives an expansive playground for various types of projects - many of the benefits of python-like and C-like languages in a nice, unified space.

would love to get your thoughts on that if you have time.

heh! so glad I intentionally avoided C++ from the get-go. C when I want to blow some fingers off quickly, python when I want to stroll down a country lane picking flowers. there is no in-between ;-)

heh, forgot about the standalone web server in certbot. thats a good ephemeral option.

if you are able to run a public web server, then certificate issuance via certbot http challenge works pretty well. the web server can serve a really simple static page with little to nothing on it - but of course its another potential vector into your network.

if your public domain DNS makes use of a supported dns provider or you run your own publically accessible dns server, then dns certbot challenges are great and more flexible than http.

others may suggest neat work arounds for the http challenge issue, but if you have access to a supported dns service I would look at that option. certbot has helpers for quite a few public services as well as support for self hosted dns servers. I run my own public dns servers, so thats the option I chose and use certbot hooks, cron and bash scripts to rsync the updated carts to the propr hosts for the various services I run privately and publicly.

if you are using http cert retrieval, certbot needs a place put the temp. token to authenticate your contrrol of the domain your are creating a certificate for. usually that will be the same webserver you want to serve the certificate from.

if you are not running an actual weberver on port 80 that certbot can insert a token for, certbot cannot complete.

this is, of course, in addition to other possible issues such as ISP port blocking - but without a web server listening on TCP/80, you will have to use other authorization methods (like DNS) to generate a cert.

are you actually running a web server on that host? iirc, certbot will place a temporary token to be served by your web server (Apache, etc.) to show that you actually control the domain you are requesting a cert for.

I switched to DNS based retrieval as soon as let’s encrypt offered it, so its been years since I retrieved certs via http.

a great share. thanks.