CableSpaghetti

In the last couple of posts I went over my plans to overhaul my home network and separate off the machines I have hosting web-facing services from the private network used by my family. In this post I’ll outline the configuration of my new MikroTik router, as someone with a bit of networking know...

If you read my previous post, you’ll know that I’m giving my home network a bit of an overhaul brought on by the installation of a new “full fibre” Internet connection. The plan is to set things up so I can separate the machines I have hosting web-facing services from the rest of my LAN. I’m most...

History For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved tinkering with hardware; this often manifests in the form of installing Linux on computers which really should have been consigned to the bin a long time ago. In my teenage years I had a Pentium III machine with no case sat on a bookshelf running...

Amazon EKS launched in 2018 to the relief of many who had been managing their own Kubernetes clusters on AWS. However it wasn’t as fully featured as some had hoped out of the gate. One of the big improvements Amazon made was to release Managed Node Groups in 2019; this removed the need for people...

At work we have a number of fairly large Kubernetes clusters on Amazon EKS; some with 50 or 60 “xlarge” nodes. This amount of compute on AWS can cost a fortune every month, so of course we wanted to do what we could to reduce this. How do Spot Instances work? Spot Instances are essentially a wa...

The world of ARM processors has been getting very interesting over the last few years. Until fairly recently, for most people, ARM CPUs were reserved for their phone or maybe a Raspberry Pi running their home DNS. However now the Raspberry Pi 4 has a pretty decent quad-core CPU and up to 8GB RAM,...

I’m a big fan of Fortinet products; we’ve got a Fortigate firewall at work and it has always been completely reliable and easy (for a firewall) to configure. So when I had to implement a VPN for a handful of remote workers, I initially tried to use L2TP-IPSec which is supported by the Fortigate, ...

I haven’t posted since March which is pretty shameful. I’ve been extremely busy working on some web services magic that I can’t really share at this point if I value my pay check. However I had a sysadmin problem today that warranted some script writing which I thought I’d share. I’ve been tryin...

Yesterday I helped out at #CodeOff2015, an event that my employer Snowflake Software runs every year at the Electronics and Computer Science department at the University of Southampton (which also happens to be where I studied). We give students the day to write software to solve a problem that w...

I’m a Linux guy; I find it to be the most intuitive operating system for most tasks, even on a Laptop. At home I use Arch Linux and at work I’ve recently moved from the Windows 7 workstation I’ve been using for the last 10 months to Ubuntu GNOME on an old laptop that was feeling unwanted. A coupl...