This is kind of a horror story, with a happing ending. It contains a lot of gore images, and some porn. Very long story.

TL;DR Network upgrade

Once upon a time, there were two companies HA and HP, both owned by HC. Many years went by and the two companies worked along side each one another, but sometimes there were trouble, because they weren't sure who was supposed to bill the client for projects HA and HP had worked on together.

At HA there was an IT guy, an imbecile of such. He's very slow at doing his job, doesn't exactly understand what he's doing, nor security principles.

The IT guy at HA also did some IT work for HP from time to time when needed. But he was not in charge of the infrastructure for HP, that was the jobb for one developer who didn't really know what he was doing either.

Whenever a new server was set up at HP, the developer tried many solutions, until he landed on one, but he never removed the other tested solutions, and the config is scattered all around. And no documentation!!
Same goes with network, when something new was added, the old was never removed or reconfigured to something else.

One dark winter, a knight arrived at HP. He had many skills. Networking, server management, development, design and generally a fucking awesome viking.
This genius would often try to cleanse the network and servers, and begged his boss to let him buy new equipment to replace the old, to no prevail.
Whenever he would look in the server room, he would get shivers down his back.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/Ie9x3YC33C.j...)

One and a half year later, the powerful owners in HA, HP and HC decided it was finally time to merge HA and HP together to HS. The knight thought this was his moment, he should ask CEO if he could be in charge of migrating the network, and do a complete overhault so they could get 1Gb interwebz speeds.

The knight had to come up with a plan and some price estimates, as the IT guy also would do this.
The IT guy proposed his solution, a Sonicwall gateway to 22 000 NOK, and using a 3rd party company to manage it for 3000 NOK/month.
"This is absurd", said the knight to the CEO and CXO, "I can come up with a better solution that is a complete upgrade. And it will be super easy to manage."
The CEO and CXO gave the knight a thumbs up. The race was on. We're moving in 2 months, I got to have the equipment by then, so I need a plan by the end of the week.
He roamed the wide internet, looked at many solutions, and ended up with going for Ubiquiti's Unifi series. Cheap, reliable and pretty nice to look at.

The CXO had mentioned the WiFi at HA was pretty bad, as there was WLAN for each meeting room, and one for the desks, so the phone would constantly jump between networks.
So the knight ended up with this solution:
2x Unifi Securtiy Gateway Pro 4
2x Unifi 48port
1x Unifi 10G 16port
5x Unifi AP-AC-Lite
12x pairs of 10G unifi fibre modules
All with a price tag around the one Sonicwall for 22 000 NOK, not including patch cables, POE injectors and fibre cables.

The knight presented this to the CXO, whom is not very fond of the IT guy, and the CXO thought this was a great solution.
But the IT guy had to have a say at this too, so he was sent the solution and had 2 weeks to dispute the soltion.
Time went by, CXO started to get tired of the waiting, so he called in a meeting with the knight and the IT guy, this was the IT guys chance to dispute the solution.
All he had to say was he was familiar with the Sonicwall solution, and having a 3rd party company managing it is great.
He was given another 2 weeks to dispute the solution, yet nothing happened.

The CXO gave the thumbs up, and the knight orders the equipment.
At this time, the knight asks the IT guy for access to the server room at HA, and a key (which would take 2 months to get sorted, because IT guys is a slow imbecile)

The horrors, Oh the horrors, the knight had never seen anything like this before.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/hmOE2ZuQuE.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/4Flmkx6slQ.j...)

What are all these for, why is there a fan ductaped to on of the servers.
WHAT IS THIS!
Why are there cables tied in a knot.
WHY!
These are questions we never will know the answers too.

The knight needs access to the servers, and sonicwall to see how this is configured.
After 1.5 month he gains access to the sonicwall and one of the xserve.
What the knight discovers baffles him.
All ports are open, sonicwall is basically in bridge mode and handing out public IPs to every device connected to it.
No VLANs, everything, just open...

Continuation from :
https://devrant.io/rants/835693/...

Hi everybody! I am sorry that as a first time poster I am building 2 long stories, but I really like the idea of connecting with other people here!

Well, as I was mentioning before, I got a job in Android development and had a blast with it. Me and the developer clicked and would spend our time discussing PHP, the move to other stacks (I was making him love the idea of Django or Spring Java) games, bands and cool stuff like that. This dude was my hero, his own stack was developed in a similar MVC fashion that he had implemented from scratch before for many projects. It was through him that I learned how to use my own code (rather than frameworks and other libraries) to build what I wanted. I seriously thought that I had it made with a position that respected me and placed me in the lead mobile development position of the company. Then it happened. He had taken 2 weeks of unauthorized leave, which was ok since he was best friends with the owner of the company, those 2 along another asshole started it so they could do whatever they wanted. And I could not make much progress without him being there since there were things that he needed to do, that I was not allowed, for me to continue. When he came back I was quickly rushed to the owner of the company's office to discuss my lack of progress. The lead developer was livid, as if he knew that he had fucked up. He blamed the whole thing on me (literally told the owner that it was my fault before I was summoned) and that we lost 2 weeks of business time because I did not had the initiative to make progress on my own. I felt absolutely horrible, someone that I had trusted and befriended doing something like that, I really felt like shit. I had mad respect and love for this guy. It got heated, I showed the owner the text messages in which I showed him my pleas to led me finish the parts that were needed while he was away. Funny enough, he acted betrayed. After that it was 3 months of barely talking to one another except for work related stuff. He got cold and would barely let me touch the internal code that he was developing. It was painful. The owner kept complaining about progress and demanded that I do a document scanner for the company, which was to be attached to their mobile application. Not only that but it had to be done with OpenCV. Now, CV is great, but it is its own area, it takes a while to be able to develop something nice with it that is efficient and not a shitstorm.
I had two weeks.
Finished in one. After burning my brain and ensuring that the c++ code was not giving issues and the project was steady I turned it in...to their dismay. And I say so because I felt that they gave me such a huge project with the intention of firing me if it was not done. After that it was constant shit from the owner and the lead developer. I was asked then to port the code to the IOS version. I had some knowledge of it already so I started working on it. Progress was fast since the initial idea was already there and I really love working on Apple devices. And when I was 70% done the owner decided to cut me loose. At first he cited things such as lack of funding and him being unable to pay my salary. I was fine with that even though I knew it was not true. So at the time I just nodded and thanked the company for my time there. Before I left, he decided to blame it on me, stating that if they were not producing money that it was perhaps my fault. I lost my shit, and started using my military voice to explain to him how a software company is normally ran. Then I stormed out.
It was known to me, that the lead developer had actually argued against me being laid off. And that he was upset about it, we made amends, but the fact remains that I was laid off because the owner did not think of me as an asset, regardless of how many times I worked alongside the lead developer or how valuable I was actually to the company, their infrastructure did get better while we worked together, so I just assumed that he never actually did any mention of my value.

I lasted 2 months without a job, feeling horribly shitty because my wife had to work harder to ensure our stability whilst I was without any sort of salary. At this time I had already my degree, so all I had to do was look better. In the meantime I decided to study more about other technologies. I learn React, and got way better at JS and Node that I thought I could and was finally able to get another job as a full stack developer for another company.
I have been here since 2 months. It has been weird, we do classic ASP, which is completely pointless at this time, but meh. At this time though, I just don't really have the same motivation. Its really hard for me to trust the people that I work with and would like to connect with more developers.

I am part of a team running a rather big Discord bot. One day last year late in October some dude tried to tell us that he and his "team" had breached our infrastructure. I noticed he was full of shit and started trolling him back, and actually putting him under pressure to develop a solution for us, pretending to want to pay them for it. At the end, our bold hero ended up "losing their job" AND "their house burning down" to get out of it again, lol wat.
The whole resulting conversation is available as a set of screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/vczyX
Enjoy!

Umm... this is too bad...
Munich council is removing their Linux infrastructure in support for windows 10 by 2020...
https://theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/...

Quite hope this isn’t true 😕

Has been a long time since I'm appreciating working with GRPC.

Amazingly fast and full-featured protocol! No complaints at all.

Although I felt something was missing...
​

Back in the days of HTTP, we were all given very simple tools for making requests to verify behaviours and data of any of our HTTP endpoints, tools like curl, postman, wget and so on...

This toolset gives us definitely a nice and quick way to explore our HTTP services, debug them when necessary and be efficient.
​

This is probably what I miss the most from HTTP.
​

When you want to debug a remote endpoint with GRPC, you need to actually write a client by hand (in any of the supported language) then run it.
​

There are alternatives in the open source world, but those wants you to either configure the server to support Reflection or add a proxy in front of your services to be able to query them in a simpler way.
​

This is not how things work in 2018 almost 2019.
​

We want simple, quick and efficient tools that make our life easier and having problems more under control.
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I'm a developer my self and I feel this on my skin every day. I don't want to change my server or add an infrastructure component for the simple reason of being able to query it in a simpler way!

However, This exact problem has been solved many times from HTTP or other protocols, so we should do something about our beloved GRPC.
​

Fine! I've told to my self. Let's fix this.
​

A few weeks later...

I'm glad to announce the first Release of BloomRPC - The first GRPC Client GUI that is nice and simple,

It allows to query and explore your GRPC services with just a couple of clicks without any additional modification to what you have running right now! Just install the client and start making requests.
​

It has been built with the Electron technology so its a desktop app and it supports the 3 major platforms, Mac, Linux, Windows.
​

Check out the repository on GitHub: https://github.com/uw-labs/bloomrpc

This is the first step towards the goal of having a simple and efficient way of querying GRPC services!
​

Keep in mind that It is in its first release, so improvements will follow along with future releases.

Your feedback and contributions are very welcome.

If you have the same frustration with GRPC I hope BloomRPC will make you a bit happier!

*follow-up to https://devrant.com/rants/1887422*

The burnt remnants of my ID card's authentication information, waiting for the wind to come pick it up. It's stored in my password database now and committed to my git server, as it should be. Storing PIN and PUK codes on paper, whatever government cunt thought thought that that was a good idea...

If you've got identification papers containing authentication information like PIN and PUK codes, by all means add them to your password manager (if you're using Linux, I'd like to recommend GNU Pass) at once and burn the physical version. There's no reason why you'd want those on paper, unless you store your passwords on a post-it too.

At least that's as much as me and possibly you as citizens can do. Our governments are doomed anyway, given the shitty security policy they have, and likely the many COBOL mainframes still in use today. Honestly, the meddlings of Russia with the US elections doesn't seem too far-fetched, given this status quo. It actually surprises me that this kind of stuff doesn't happen more often, given that certain governments hire private pentesters yet can't secure their own infrastructure.

Microsoft has *officially* acquired GitHub: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/...

Points of interest:

- Acquisition for $7.58B USD.
- New CEO will be the former Xamarin CEO.
- They claim GitHub will stay an "open platform", and they explicitly said that deployment will still be available to any services, probably to ease fears of Azure lock-in.
- "we will accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub, with our direct sales and partner channels and access to Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure and services" <-- maybe an Azure + GitHub Enterprise bundle? That would be pretty awesome TBH.
- The presentation seems to hint at more direct cloud deployment services to Azure, AWS, and GCP.
- "we will bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences" <-- I'm honestly not sure what exactly they're going to do here.
- Looks like they're going to extend the Marketplace somehow.
- First-class GitHub integration in VS Code!
- Still pending regulatory approval from US and EU (I don't see any troubles here though).

Concerning my last post on the two Commodores, (https://devrant.com/rants/963917/...) here's the great story behind the boxed one.

So at the place where I interned over the summer, I helped the tech dept. (IT herein) move to a new bldg. We had to dismantle most of the network infrastructure stuff, so we were in the server room a lot. First day on the job, Boss shows me server room, I'm amazed and all because this is my first real server room lol.

We walk around, and there's a Commodore 64 box on a table, just kinda there. I ask, "Uh, is that actually a C64?" B: "Yeah, that's E's." Me: "E?" (name obfuscated) B: "Yeah, E's a little crazy." Me: "Is it actually in there?" B: "Absolutely, check it out!" *opens box and sees my jaw drop* Me: "Well, alrighty then!" So that lingers in my mind for a while until I meet E. He is a fuckin hilarious guy, personifying the C64, making obscure and professionally inappropriate references. Everyone loves him, until he pranks them. He always did.

We’re in the server room, wiping some Cisco switches or something, and we have some downtime, so I ask him about the 64, and he's like "Yeah, I haven't had time to diagnose her issues much. If you want her, go ahead, see if you can make it work!" Me: "You're kidding, right?" E: "Nah, not at all!"

That day I walked out with a server motherboard, 2 Xeon CPUs and some RAM for the server (all from an e-waste bin, approved for me to take home from boss) and a boxed C64. Did a multimeter test on the PSU pins, one of the 9vAC pins is effectively dead (1.25v fluctuating? No thanks.) but everything else is fine except for a loose heatsink and a blown fuse in each C64. Buying the parts tonight. I wanna see this thing work!