bash

I recently discovered the Time protocol, as defined by RFC 868. This delightfully simple RFC, if implemented, returns an unsigned 32-bit integer as bytes, then disconnects. That integer represents the number of seconds since 1900-01-01 00:00:00+00:00, the epoch stated in the RFC. That’s it. That’s the entire thing. NIST maintains this delightfully Web 1.0 page where they state that they service Time requests on port 37 (though they’d prefer you to use NTP)....

Because alliteration. Moving on. If you’re interacting with APIs of any kind regularly, you probably have the credentials saved somewhere. Maybe you’re already using a solution to securely store these, in which case congratulations, you’re better than most. I, for one, was not. I assuaged my guilt with the knowledge that my Mac’s disk encryption meant that they were protected, but the whole thing still felt icky. This was briefly discussed in Slack, and this method of dealing with the problem came up....

Anyone in the SRE/DevOps world is likely at least aware of Terraform, if not actively using it. While Pulumi’s ability to write IaC in Python seems lovely to me, my company uses Terraform, so HCL it is. If you aren’t familiar, I’ll give a brief overview. Terraform is an IaC (see link above) tool. You know how installing an OS from scratch requires human input? Everything from the partitioning scheme to what services to launch requires configuration....

For a school project, I had to install mongoDB. OK, no big deal, docker pull mongo. Since I run a home server, and the purpose of this mongo installation was to create an app that uses it, I figured installing it there and making it available to the rest of my group would be beneficial/helpful. Hmm, might want to also install some kind of GUI management tool - nosqlclient looks like it’ll work....

UPDATE: See the end of this post for a discussion on new revisions. Every Professional Computer Toucher has a just-so way they want their environment. When I was but a wee lad, that environment consisted of Windows XP with various arcane registry tweaks applied (I vaguely recall changing my TCP congestion control algorithm to Westwood solely because of Red Alert 2), and Notepad. Things improve with age. My current environment is a non-Retina Macbook Air, which suits me just fine....