This begs for a rant... [too bad I can't post actual screenshots :/ ]

Me: He k8s team! We're having trouble with our k8s cluster. After scaling up and running h/c and Sanity tests environment was confirmed as Healthy and Stable. But once we'd started our load tests k8s cluster went out for a walk: most of the replicas got stoped and restarted and I cannot find in events' log WHY that happened. Could you please have a look?

k8s team [india]: Hello, thank you for reaching out to k8s support. We will check and let you know.

Me: Oh, you're welcome! I'll be just sitting here quietly and eagerly waiting for your reply. TIA! :slightly_smiling_face:

<5 minutes later>

k8s team India: Hi. Could you give me a list of replicas that were failing?

Me: I gave you a Grafana link with a timeframe filter. Look there -- almost all apps show instability at k8s layer. For instance APP_1 and APP_2 were OK. But APP_3, APP_4 and APP_5 were crashing all over the place

k8s team India: ok I will check.

<My shift has ended. k8s team works in different timezone. I've opened up Slack this morning>

k8s team India: HI. APP_1 and APP_2 are fine. I don't even see any errors from logs, no restarts. All response codes are 200.

Me: 🤦‍♂️ .... Man, isn't that what I've said? ... 🤦‍♂️

Oh noes... My password on localhost:8080 has been leaked :( what to do.. what to doooo..... :(((

Oh FFS google! Get yourself together!

A global pandemic - it's the time of the year when you can legally enter Bank premises wearing a mask w/o drawing any attention.

It's the time of the year when every crime is carried out by "criminals wearing a mask"

Participating in a non-profit project related to corona outbreak. It should help thousands of people to say at home, have a peace of mind and stay healthy.

Our project should go Live this/next week and we already have a blessing from our government. They are already making some legal exceptions to us.

That feels good!

## Building my own router

IT HAS ALREADY PAID OFF!!!!!

So I (with my fam) have evacuated from the capital of Lithuania into a distant place - much smaller, where average age is prolly >30 or even >40 years. I live in a village now. In a house with very good neighbours. In fact these neighbours own that house :D

Back to the point.

So these neighbours used to share their wifi (w/ internet) between the two houses. They have the line, the mian router has quite a strong antenna and that other house has 2 repeaters: 1 on the outside wall and another one -- indoors. Sepeaters are connected sequentially, i.e. the indoors one is repeating the outdoors one. ikr....?

The first day was alright. We settled in, got everything set up wifi-wise. Peachy.

The second day repeaters refused to issue a DHCP IP. That's something, right? Alright, nvm - I don't mind setting up static IPs. In fact I prefer them over the DHCP magic!

And by the noon both repeaters were connectable but neither of them could provide internet connection... We that sucks! I restarted both of them a few times, neighbours restarted their main router -- still no luck.

Here comes my router [God am I happy with this purchase and the whole idea of a customized router!!! Thanks @hakx20!].

I brought it outside, plugged it in. Connected to it through it's hotspot, used nmcli to connect to neighbours' main router with an internal wifi card (that shitty mPCIe operating in USB mode. yes, the same one, manufactured in 2003. Yes, in g mode.). A couple of iptables rules for traffic forwarding et voila! I have built my own repeater! And tomorrow I can WFH w/o any issues.

Yes, hardware routers are faster and easier to maintain. Yes, hardware routers are cheaper and usually have nicer bells and whistles. But when hardware fails you and the last thing you want is going to the public (shop), soldering rod won't help you. A software solution becomes the easiest to set up, considering you know how to.

Boi am I so happy about my purchase! CentOS router FTW!

P.S. even though we've fled the city we are responsible citizens and we've self-quarantined ourselves for the 14 days period. No local person any closer than 10 meters for the whole period until we're cleared. Being away from the city gives us sooo much freedom! Especialy now, when cities are shitting bricks in fear.

that awesome feeling when you run

iptables -F

and ssh just freezes.. And then you notice that last iptables -S printed: -P INPUT DROP

And it's someone else's server you have borrowed :D

Debugging in PROD are we?

Why does everyone enjoy being pantless? I for one find it uncomfortable. One of the reasons I also struggle with wearing shorts at summer time.

Do you really work pantless? Sit on a couch/chair but in your undies?

Srsly....?

A shoutout to all the cool guys and gals who are not afraid of covid-19 and see no reason to be careful or take all (any) the safety measures available...

A shoutout to all the cool kids who claim to believe that this is "just a flu".

Feast your eyes on this comparison. We have that low deaths rate (so far) ONLY because we are taking this shit seriously and we take all the precautions we can. Now imagine if the Infected numbers were as high as the Spanish flu -- 33% of the population? Numbers start to get real scarry when you start making conversions to absolute values. considering mortality rates this "just a flu" is the most lethal of all the major flu pandemics since late 19th century (according to this ref.)

Guys, gals, non-binaries, stay safe. Care for yourselves and peeps around you.

src: https://wikiwand.com/en/...

God damn it! I've already bumped your limits to 5x the initial value! What the fuck you you want again!! Piss of you WMI-retard-host!

Hey, @google! I found a bug. The last 3 choices are missing.
The lack of balance is disturbing me.

## Building my own router

So after poor luck with mPCIe in my miniPC I decided to go with USB wifi solutions. So I got the https://aliexpress.com/item/... , hooked it up and started setting things up. Took me a day to figure out that firewalld (CentOS7/8 firewall) is not directly compatible with raw iptables commands. Damn it! But hey, a lesson learnt is time well spent!

Installed named, dhcpd, hostapd, disabled NetworkManager for my wifi card, etc.. And had to learn another lesson -- if a netowrk interface is bridged then iptables sees the bridge rather than the raw interface. That's another 2 hours well spent :)

In the end I have a working AP!!! It's still hooked in to my router via RJ45, but it does work and does work quite well!

Here's some comparison for now:
via router (2.4): https://speedtest.net/result/...
via router (5): https://speedtest.net/result/...

via miniPC (2.4): https://speedtest.net/result/...
via miniPC (5): <TBD>

Not that bad, aye?

All in all I'm happy with my decision to build a miniPC based router. Now I have the modularity I wanted so mush and a complete control on my networking! Can't wait for wifi6 USB dongles to be released :)

We have been strongly adviced to be working from home until further notice. Schools are closed, so if employees have have who are now to stay at home rather than at school AND if WFH is going to be too much of a trouble, these employees can either take vacation days OR get a med cert from a doctor and stay at home w/o having to work (yes, considering the situation our govmt allows legal slacking for parents).

Normally I'd be excited to be told to WFH. But nowdays it just feels so.. normal... everyone's got that privilege.

hmm..

1. coronavirus is threatening the world
2. food delivery companies have no free slots for the next 3 days at least
3. the winds are so strong that they make windows seriously bend. Spooky stuff - haven't seen anything like this before in my life. Feels like one more gust and the window will break (wind speed -- 33+m/s)

well.. time to charge all the batteries in the house and find my zombie-apocalypse survival kit

P.S. any chance Corona is what's gonna make zombies?

P.P.S. tomorrow is Friday, the 13th and a full moon. Yiippeee!!!

Coronavirus is the new Eurovision. Italy is winning so far!

Every time I move the cursor in a file or press alt+tab I hear bed springs squeaking. It's getting annoying :/

Interviewer: Why do you want to work for Facebook?

Me: I'm keen on protecting people's data and want them to have a good user experience

Interviewer:

Me:

Interviewer:

Me: haha I'm joking I don't give a shit

Interviewer: haha omg I was like whaaatttt lmao

src: https://twitter.com/ArfMeasures/...

Note to self: keep not trusting online tutorials and ALWAYS, A.L.W.A.Y.S take them with a grain of salt.

Now why do you fine lads think `nmcli networking off && nmcli networking on` over ssh is a bad idea? And how to quickly make it suitable for over-ssh-execution? Let's see who knows shell! [HINT: see tags for an almost-answer]

... when people not sure what shell characters mean are writing tutorials... FUCK!

AMQ cluster is misbehaving.. Master is constantly dying, slave is starting under root rather than app account, connection to AMQ DB takes 20-40 seconds (while queries execute in <0.1sec and TCP probe takes <0.01sec to succeed), monitoring is down,...

I mean it's gotta be the virus - what else could it be.

## Building my own router

Damn it! I've got to read more before making decisions :) I already do that, but I need yet *MORE* reading.

So I bought a miniPC which I'm planning to turn into a router. I wanted to install AX200 (wifi6) card in it but it could only see the bluetooth part of it (using btusb kernel module).

What I did NOT know about wifi cards and mPCIe slots

M2 is only a form-factor. It defines what the connector looks like. Over that connector multiple different protocols could be used. m2 (NGFF) WIFI cards are usually using PCIe proto. And USB.
https://delock.com/infothek/M.2/...

My so-desired AX200 uses both PCIe and USB protocols: USB for BT and PCIe for the actual wifi.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/.... The same spec applies to both: m2 and mPCIe card versions.

Now my mini PC has a mPCIe slot but the label on the board says "USB wifi". Which suggests that it only accepts the USB-related pins of mPCIe (as wiki says about mPCIe: "The host device supports both PCI Express and USB 2.0 connectivity, and each card may use either standard.").

So I guess that means I'm stuck with a useless mPCIe port :D shit..

Now my best bet is to wait for USB dongles supporting wifi6 and use usb AC adapters until then. Well... It's not an optimal outcome. But still IMO a better solution than an embedded router from the shelf!

(No, I'm not giving up and buying another used/new PC :) )

At last I can calm down and stop searching for magical pcie-to-usb adapters :) Phew... That's a relief!

## building my own router

I hoped things would go more smoothly :)
Anyway, my new miniPC easily accepted CentOS 8 - no fuss here. And I've got to say - I love CentOS8 so far! Shell has amazing nifty tricks, UI (gnome3) is also snappy, video/audio/ethernet,.. everything works.

What I did NOT expect is hardware being off. Well okay, the price was low - it was obvious smth is not right. But still.. I decided to build my own router so that I could swap wifi card whenever I want. So that I could run my own network services in there. Turns out - the card swapping is not as easy as one might think.

I got the AX200 WiFi6 card for that very purpose. But once plugged in the OS can only see it's bluetooth module. Weird... What's even weirder is that even though the card is PCIe, the OS uses btusb module to talk to that device. What? USB?? emm.. What??

And there it is. After opening it up again I noticed that the mPCIe area is marked with a label: "USB WIFI / WWAN". USB? Does that mean this PCIe slot is wired into the USB bus? Not impossible I guess.

Googling for a "pcie wifi over usb" or smth like that brought me to one reddit (I think?) where someone wanted to build a DIY wifi mPCIe -> USB adapter and someone else adviced hime that (for some reason) at best he could only get bluetooth working (hey! just like me!). It's got to do smth with pcie channels and USB being too weak to handle all that load, or smth.. IDK, I'm not a HW guy.

Well that sucks then! I have a mPCIe slot that does not work as a PCIe. Shit! So I guess the best I could do is to plug back in the same wifi card that came with the device. It smells like 2003 - supports only g protocol. Fine, let's try that. Maybe I'll find a way to work around this mPCIe limitation later on (USB adapter or smth... except there are no USB WIFI6 dongles yet :( ). So I plug it back in and start turning it into a router. Disable NetworkManager, configure static NCs' settings, install dhcpd, hostapd, bind and others. Looks like all is done! Now it's time to start it all. systemctl start hostapd --> FAILED. wtf? journalctl says it could not initialize a driver. umm okay? Why? Forums say I should airodump-ng check and kill whatever's using that device. Fine. airodumo reveals avahi and wpa_suppl are still using it. kill, kill, GOTTA KILL 'EM ALL!! Starting hostapd again -- same shit... wtf?

iw list

My gawd... That shitty network card does not even support AP mode :( I mean.. My USB wifi dongle for 2€ supports 2x more modes, is faster, has better range and is easier to work with than this old tart!

Yeah. That was an interesting day. When enfironment engineers break my testing environments at work I'm glad I have where to spend my time now.

BTW any ideas how to bypass this mPCIe nonsense? Come on, there are USB GPUs out there.. Why can't they make a USB (or dual-USB if they really need to) mPCIe adapter?

You know this amazing Windows feature where you can log in with MS email?

Q: Guess what happens if you have flaky WIFI at home and boot up windows10.

A: the boot process takes at least half an hour. Still waiting for the login window to appear...

When your minipc finally arrives, you're all excited to finally get your hands on pfsense/bsd, and you find out bsd is still struggling with wifi5, not to mention wifi6 which you've bought to have high-end networking at home..

Bummer

You think arrays starting with 1 are annoying?

HA!

How about time in a day starting with 12?

12:00, 12:45, 1:00, 1:45,...,11:45, 12:00, 12:45, 1:00, 1:45, ..., 11:45, 12:00, 12:45, 1:00 again

What if arrays started with 12? I bet Americans would love that!
arr[12]=fuck
arr[1]=this
arr[2]=shit
arr[3]=!!!

Today is a great day for me! Today I've reached my weight goal - 99.9 . That's right guys - this nerd can proudly say that he's lost 20kg since last Nov!

Boi does that feel amazing.

So yeah guys, listen up. If your weight is <100 - appreciate that! Your hearts aren't in trouble, you can bend easily to put your socks on, you can sit with your legs crossed, you can do sooo many things! Enjoy it. And don't let it go easily. Don't think like I did: "meeh, it's just one more kilo -- I'll tackle it down later". It's a // TODO. It'll never happen!

"We don't need to invest in security - noone is going to hack us anyway" == "We don't need a fire department in our city - fire is not going to start here anyway"

We don't need to invest in security - everything is public anyway" == "We don't need a fire department in our city - our buildings are made out of straws anyway"

-- my thoughts after seing a line in client's spec: "sensitive data is transferred via a secure tcp channel (https) and all the public data is transferred via an unencrypted tcp (http) channel"

So yesterday I installed this awesome game on my laptop...

src: https://twitter.com/_SelloM/status/...

Corona virus: we will make America great again!

Makes sense, doesn't it?

[this post is not intended to be political - just an observation]

"I am sure you might have heard this many times that 'Linux doesn't need antivirus software,' but this is not the case anymore."

-- MS Defender for Linux, Android and iOS

https://thehackernews.com/2020/02/...

well that's a load to take in :D
How many of you fine lads have had a Linux virus on your personal devices (NOT servers)? Raise your hands and tell your stories! :D

Boi did I forget what a horror is to deal with Wndows...

I just wanted to shutdown a laptop to replace the SSD and a wifi card. Prepared everything, clicked on the [start] and there were only "Update and *" options. Wha the hell I thought, I could spare a few minutes. It's just a software update - should not take long!

Little did I know...
That was 45 minutes ago and It's still shutting down. And I'm just sitting with that screwdrived in my hand, looking at that blue screen and waiting. I feel stupid

UPDATE: I gave up. Long-pressed the POWER button. que sera, sera, right?

Lights go out. I press POWER again to boot it back up (forgot to save smth else). And it boots up back to the "SHUTTING fucking DOWN" AGAIN!!!