Terry Poulin

Random things

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Powered on Stark to test a boot stick, and figured I’d let the system go update itself. Went downstairs to wash out my coffee cup, and coming back, the line of sight from down the hall to where I left it on my desk reminds me of one of the things I don’t miss about the old Latitude: the screen!

Stark was from a transient era. One in which more consumer oriented laptops began to adapt Intel’s concept of an “Ultrabook” and more business oriented laptops refused to give up their ports until you pry’em from their cold dead motherboards. But almost universally, they all agreed on having a shitty screen compared to basically everything else in computing at the time.

As such, while the laptop served me very well it wasn’t without compromises. The typical 1366×768 pixel screen was basically trash, but it did support external displays and that’s how I tended to use Stark. Onboard was a VGA port (ha!) and the size (mini)HDMI port that nothing else really adapted, but as it got older docking stations able to drive a pair of DisplayPort/HDMI outputs were cheaper than having one shipped off eBay, and the Intel chips back then maxed out at three display pipelines anyway. Ditto irksome things like having an eSATA at the price of a super speed port, having to dedicated a USB port to a Bluetooth dongle, and needing a fanny-pack type battery to get runtime that wasn’t a joke, and weighing almost a kilogram more than I wanted to lug around every day.

But the machine also had its upsides. Like a TPM for encryption, a modular slot that could be fitted with an OEM optical drive or a replacement fitting for a second 2.5″ SATA, and a Core i5 that actually served well up until the rise of Electron applications like Teams and Slack. It also helped that I had enough Latitude D/E series compatible chargers around to never worry, except when working away from an outlet.

All in all, Stark has the unique position of being a computer that managed to not piss me off more often than not. That’s not something many computers can say. So, I think Stark was a successful machine, even if it’s going to stay retired, lol.

Network evolutions

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Thus far, this is looking to be the evilicious plan.

  1. The ns1 VM on zeta will be converted from primary name server that is authoritative for home.arpa and forwards to external DNS, to being only authoritative for my LAN and providing nothing else.
  2. Cream will be unretired and converted into infrastructure.
    • DHCP services (v4/v6)
    • DNS services ala ns2: secondary for my LAN and forwarding to external DNS.
    • Add CNAME aliases for ns3 and dhcp because I’m silly that way.
  3. Reconfigure Eero to use my Raspberry Pi zero ns2 and Cream as its name servers.

The reasoning for this is while Zeta could provide DHCP services easily and the VM running name services has been effective, Zeta not a machine that I want as a single point of failure—but as a single point of truth, it’s convenient.

Notion here being if Zeta sees downtime, as long as it is less than ns2/ns3 take to expire the local zone information, the impact across my household is just the inconvenience of fixing a computer. That is to say, either transient enough of a failure not to cripple things, or epic enough to convert ns2 over into the authoritive using the already in place ready to swap over into master mode setup that I have. And that simply put, Cream wouldn’t be intended to be fucked with or rebooted, and would in tern have a similar failover of moving to Eero’s DHCPv4 and re-enabling forwarding on ns1.

Except for two pains in my ass:

  1. Cream’s CMOS battery has died in storage since its retirement.
  2. Cream is refusing to boot the install media.

Actually, I should probably just see if Magic (my old Raspberry Pi 2) is still laying around somewhere or donate Victory (my Raspberry Pi 3/8G) to the mission. I had intended to load RHEL9, but Debian and I are still on friendly terms :).

Plus, Cream’s tenor as my previous file server included a history of the NUC being a pain in my ass!

The Insane Engineering of the Gameboy

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Nice video giving an overview of the classic handheld’s architecture. The opening may be a little bit harsh IMHO, but also not unwarranted. At least, the way that I look at it the hardware is closer to what a microcomputer could have passed for just over a decade prior, and devices like the Apple II or TRS-80 were hardly portable and battery friendly devices.

That’s a trend that I think largely tends to continue with really portable devices. I remember looking at data about the first Raspberry Pi, and decided it would likely be on par with a ten year old PC — except closer in size to a credit card than a microwave oven, and pretty darn cheap. Likewise, while I find the Steam Deck’s graphics very unimpressive, I find it amazing that someone crammed an Xbox One level of horse power into such a portable package.

It’s pretty darn cool how that sort of evolution plays out, even if my wrist watch literally has an order of magnitude more computing power than my first Personal Computer….

A Rough Network Plan

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Now that the great network migration phase two is pretty stable, where I have the new Eero providing the backbone and a pair of name servers providing DNS with a hand managed zone, it’s time for planning the next phase of the operation. That is to say, DHCP services.

For the most part, I stick to IPv6 addresses now with an IPv6 Unique-Local providing the internal definition of my home.arpa environment. Eero seems to let clients SLAAC away but at some point, I need to snoop closer on its IPv6 support to see if it is doing any kind of goodness like RDNSS/DNSS, but it mostly does DHCPv4.

So, I’m seeing two points of interest here for my DNS arrangements.

Option A.) Ignore the IPv4 world totally and setup DHCPv6 services for my dynamic updates needs. After all, I mostly want AAAA-records not A-records.

Option B.) Set Eero to the good ol’ you’re on your own pal mode and setup both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 services.

Perhaps I will start with option A, since it is closer to DWIW and should get me what I want; which is IPv6 with dynamic updates to my local domain. But here’s a little thought for option B using Eeero’s default /22 network as a point of reference for the addressing scheme.

192.168.4.0/22      -> 192.168.4.1 - 192.168.7.254
192.168.4.1/22       -> gateway.home.arpa
192.168.7.255/22  -> broadcast
192.168.4.1-16       -> range for routing services; e.g. eero/ap.
192.168.4.17-254  -> deprecated, reserved for fallback to eero.
192.168.5.0-254    -> range for network services; e.g., dns, dhcp
192.168.6.0-255    -> DHCPv4 pool
192.168.7.0-254    -> | ~512 addresses, half the space.

This would effectively give a static space equal to the first /24 worth of the network that’s intended to be hands of for the oh-shit plan. While the DHCPv4 leasing is pretty aggressive on the Eero, I don’t think I’ve see any devices allocated higher than the first octet. The idea being nothing that’s not a router, an access point, or something getting a lease from switching from my server back to the Eero’s DHCP server should land in this portion of the network.

Following that would be a static space equal to the second /24 worth of the network, intended to be allocated for services. Either by static allocation or just making a static reservation. Let’s just say, as much as I like technology, I’ve managed long enough with a lone /24 for my entire household that I’m sure I’m not going to pull 254 static IPv4 addresses out of my ass anytime soon.

Meanwhile the portion of the network roughly equal to the last /23 of the network, effectively the back half of the network and least likely to be interfered with if the Eero ever happens to ‘forget’ its in static mode, would be client addresses. Which are very much intended to be “Don’t give a fuck about” addresses in the sense that the only IPv4 addresses I use are cases like using dig to poke one of my name servers and not wanting to type its IPv6.

One of the food for thought items on my plate is whether or not I want to ‘unretire’ my old file server, Cream, and turn it into a replacement for ns2. Right now, ns2 is running off a Raspberry Pi Zero W that was originally intended to be a RaSCSI drive for my PowerBook.

Ahh, well, I’ve got other things to do for the moment.

Menus, someday menus

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Finally taking sometime to go poking around with the system, I’ve finally figured out the process for converting my top bar into a proper set of menus. Which is in large, why my current website design has fewer pages than my old environment did.

But of course this raises the larger question, of just how I want these to be ordered. I suspect that the current two, will become part of a larger “About” and some semblance of order will follow for other things. Since this place serves as my journal, it is mostly blog posts; but there are other pieces of content that I tend to have an interest in maintaining, where it’s undesirable for it to be lost behind the great ‘when the heck did I post that?’ factor :P.

Ah, well, other things to get done.

Dreams and Ironies

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One of the staple backdrops that often appear in my dreams, is a derivative of the apartment where I lived from about age eleven or twelve into my early twenties. It’s actually been kind of an oddity, that I never, or almost never dreamt of the apartments that I lived in after that. I’ve wondered whether or not that would remain true for this house.

The other day, I had a dream involving my garage and an issue of garage door that kept trying to open itself, followed by chasing a box that literally ran off, until a cap leapt out of it. Ironically, this morning I was dreaming of discussing both this trend, and how much nightmare fuel the utility room had provided where it’s often been enlarged to like three times the size. And mentioned yesterday’s dream, get this? All while at that old apartment, and right outside of said utility room 😅

Aside from that old apartment’s style being a bit dated, since it had a fairly distinctive T-junction design, it’s a relatively easy to identify place. Especially when you lived there for like thirteen years of your life, and memorized things well enough to navigate in the dark well enough to find candles and flashlights, lol.

Scaling Done Right

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Before I undocked Shion, I had a desktop full of stuff, roughly in the form of three windows across the top of the display, two across the bottom, with a mini-player of music in the corner.

While I was undocked, I was mostly doing other things.

Coming upstairs and re-docking, I’m pleasantly happy that everything is effectively where I left it before transitioning from a 32″/2160p screen to my laptop’s 13.6″/1664p screen.

If anything, this is one of the reasons I’ve come to prefer one big-ass monitor over two proper sized monitors, and have come to appreciate macOS’s scaling methods being sane. That is to say, it’s not like going a dinner platter to a postage stamp, so much as roomy to cozy and back again. A far cry, from for example, eons ago having the problems of shifting a PC between 600p, 768p, and 1200p screens causing tons of ruckus and disorder.

Laptops > Desktops

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Working on a screen full of files, listening to music, yada, yada when I remember I should’ve started cooking half an hour previously, I’m reminded of one of the reasons I prefer laptops for things that aren’t rack mount friendly.

The big juicy monitor ™ provides a nice 32″ workspace, the thunderbolt docking station nets me my keyboard/mouse/etc and a gigabit link straight to my file server within two hops. Heck, I even like the speakers 😀.

Yet just the same, it’s rather convienant to be able to undock, grab my laptop and bring it downstairs. Since the speaker’s and battery life aren’t shit, it’s an easy matter to have my music continue in the background while I’m cooking, and then pick up where I left off for a bit while I’m waiting for the oven to finish it’s share of cooking duty.

Increasingly, I’m inclined to believe that owning a desktop will fade by the wade side. The big honking GPU is the key reason that I still own one, since the need for expansion cards and reconfigurable internal drives have become less necessary as more compact form factors have become more capable and external connectivity have become faster. Plus, despite my early interest in diskless virtualized workstations and remote desktops, nothing really beats a good client machine for doing client machine tasks just like nothing really beats a terminal for doing terminal oriented tasks.

Maybe I’m just getting old 😛