Main
This is my site, look at posts for blogs which most people already know about.
full for full featured content, this will be for living documents that I will try to maintain. My SSL/TLS article will be here as will others like the document describing my dotfiles.
I am Kevin, a "devops" "sysadmin" who really enjoy's "engineering".
I try to document difficult points in technology. I'm mostly self taught, I have met very interesting and cool people along the way and I really like hanging out with them still.
I spent a good amount of time learning Golang (Go, but since using two letters in any form of a search usually is an exercise in futility). My goal was fairly simple, I wanted to display some system statistics via HTTP by reading them directly from /proc. I saw that Golang had a module in the standard library call "syscall" and I decided that it might be fun to give that a try.
I’m very excited that GNUTLS has support for ed25519 keys, these keys are faster, smaller, and more secure than RSA keys. I found this out from a developer’s blog while doing research and messing around with CA’s in December. The reason I’m writing this is that GNUTLS 3.6 has been made available in Fedora 28, therefore can all use this. Additionally and perhaps more importantly we gain the the ability to use TLS 1.
I have a workstation that I have built, it contains a multi-disk Large Form Factor ZFS array. There have been multiple posts in the past about some of my disk related problems that I’ve handled, you should be able to find them with a ‘zfs’ or ‘disk’ tag. Well I had several issues, that I hope should be calming down; going back to January, where I decided to move from 4x3TB RAID-Z (software RAID 5) to 4x4TB 7200RPM RAID 10 setup.
I really enjoyed SouthEast LinuxFest this year, probably more this year than I did last year. Mostly because I made a point of being more outgoing and interacting with more people. Last year I attended I had tried talking to a few people but didn’t really have a good feel for things, and volunteered for the FSF booth and tried to take the Ham radio exam. This year I attended many presentations, had an opportunity to go to a Birds Of a Feather meeting on containers put on by Michael at RedHat.
After a few issues that almost perfectly lined up to steal momentum I’m going to resume blogging. If you follow this (I doubt many were/are), I apologize for the lack of updates. I’ll try to briefly run down some of the events that lead to the large (almost year delay): The Prior Events Before SouthEast Linux Fest my Wife’s mother very unexpectedly died. After SELF I had some motivation and tried to look into interesting topics, generally Software Defined Radio (I liked the LimeSDR) and followed some crypto currency investigation which lead to Zcash.
After having to generate a SHA1 certifcate and other people on my team did not understand the cert process, I make a video on it
====== urxvt vs Eterm ====== So I was trying different terminals so that I can keep on terminal just for a screencast sessions. I want to keep screencasting clean and partitioned. Additionally I have admitted to myself (now everyone else) that I need to know more about profiling the system, I got [http://www.brendangregg.com/books.html](Breddan Gregg’s book ) on system performance, so far its very through. One complaint is that as a Solaris guy and even regarding many of his Linux presentations and writings is that he really favors dtrace, for obvious reasons; its a fantastic tracing tool.
As rain falls from Hurricane Matthew, I can’t split wood or I have started to work on some items, and have recorded various thoughts.
I started to look at the failure of the btrfs volume, this truly appears that the failure was not hardware related; instead it is just corrupt checksums. I ran two SMART tests on all of my hard drives, none of them (I paid particular attention to the drives mentioned that were corrupt) had failed any tests.
====== options, arguments, or parameters ======
Where I am currently employed there has been, in my opinion, an over application of the term “parameter”. Or at least from where I have been in the past. I have always thought that for example:
example -x test.txt -x would be a switch, and the option after -x, test.txt, would be argument. But it seems here or recently we apply the term parameter to everything.
====== Standardization ====== I am sure many of us have seen the xkcd comic “Standrads", if not check it out, its kinda funny. I have been thinking about the debate and later burden that we seem to impose on ourselves through well intended standardization. This came around when there was a discussion at my full time employer about standardizing a spaces around the text and brackets only_if {node.fqdn.upcase =~ 'PROD'} compared to only_if { node.
