• 3 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • DNS is often misconfigured.

    On the linux side of things, people like to manually edit /etc/resolv.conf when it’s actually a symlink and changes to it don’t persist on boot (the real file location varies, but it’s usually in something like /etc/system/resolve). And forget bind9, if it’s not MS DNS it’s not DNS to some folks.

    On the Windows side, people love to ignore that reverse DNS exists, even though so many things use it. They also freaking love CNAME aliases and break stuff in interesting ways (for example, a “load balanced” configuration that’s all just the first node acting as all three nodes of a cluster or pool).

    Many people only know enough DNS to be dangerous and come up with really jank workarounds to get things running because they don’t understand the proper solutions.



  • You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.

    For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.



  • Pretty great. Had a small (1050 sq/ft) house built in a semi-rural area and live comfortably. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, was only ~$210k. Bought about $6k in points to get the interest rate at 2.25%. My mortgage is less than I was paying in rent for a ratty old single bed/bath 640 sq/ft townhome.

    Plus I got out of the city. It’s quiet. Night sky is beautiful out here. Just stars as far as the eye can see. I got mountain views, deer chilling outside my house. I’ve got one neighbor across the street and my next closest neighbor is like a quarter mile up the road. It’s lovely.

    Also, I don’t plan on selling, but apparently the place is already worth something like 30% more than the purchase price.


  • You’re probably right with the bullshit going on now. IBM just loves fucking up everything it touches. You wouldn’t believe the headaches all the RHEL 9 crap and the end of CentOS has caused for some of my customers. AlmaLinux seems like a decent alternative, but not sure how well it’s going to be received long term.

    I’ll add that I don’t know if there are good certs for it, but SQL admins are pretty much always in demand, and I hear that kinda thing can pay well. I knew some folks in business Intelligence (BI) that did nothing but SQL and outputting charts and data for analytics and they made bank. Seemed like a pretty neat job too, I have to admit. It’s cool to take data like that and turn it into something useful for everyone else.

    And having occasionally mucked around in postgres DBs, yeah, good on them. SQL can be both completely simple, and at the same time, ridiculously complex and involved, all depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go. Blows my mind all the things you can do with it with so few commands.


  • This person got in somewhere good early on and rode that career train. These opportunities rarely exist today unless you arre a charismatic super talented genius.

    Not really true. It takes a bit of knowing your worth, advocating for yourself in interviews, and job hopping as needed for pay raises every year or two while continuing to build your skills both on the job and outside of it. IT isn’t an industry that lends itself to job stability and high pay if you stay in a role long term, and stagnation can certainly be a factor if you decide to stop learning things.

    Also. it’s still very possible to get in, but focus these days is DevOps, automation, virtualization, and more recently, AI. You won’t make bank in some shitty low tier helpdesk role.


    A good start would be certification path to pick up some straightforward “guaranteed to get you work” kind of certs like:

    • Linux+
    • Network+
    • VMware VCP-DCV (and later with experience maybe VCP-CMA)
    • Any Redhat cert
    • Security+ if you’re interested in cybersecurity and/or federal work (USA, not sure about other places)

    Alternately, getting a few programming languages under your belt is totally doable for free with Youtube and other online courses and then doing your own projects with public repositories on Github for prospective employers to see. Getting a foot in the door with dev is gonna be very luck of the draw though.

    You definitely wont’ start out making a wage that high on the Ops side, but finding a foot in the door at between $25 and $30 an hour shouldn’t be hard once you get some bare minimum experience under your belt.

    College grads may have an easier time, but I wouldn’t know, I dropped out and went the certification/experience route some 15+ years ago.




  • I dunno, there’s so many great NES games with interesting mechanics, and totally hold up today. Stuff like the OG Mega Man series, Bionic Commando, Blaster Master, Castlevania (especially CV3), River City Ransom, Little Samson, Batman (Sunsoft version), Metal Storm, Double Dragon 2, Mighty Final Fight (IMO better than the original), Ninja Gaiden series, Contra, Tecmo Super Bowl, Shatterhand… list goes on.

    There’s a lot of great games for the system if you can look past the graphics. And there are still games being made either for it, or as homages. Stuff like Micro Mages (actual NES game that’s also on Steam and it’s great), Blazing Chrome (inspired by Contra/Contra 3), and stuff like Legend Bowl and Retro Bowl (retro inspired American football games), and The Messenger, which was Ninja Gaiden and Metroidvania inspired.











  • True, and it’s why I’m on the fence about GameCube. It’s kinda retro but kinda not. The weird controller and small disc sizes make it feel retro, but it has modern-ish dual stage triggers, and a PowerPC architecture with a modern GPU design, double precision floats, OOE compute.

    Meanwhile the PS2 was still weird, included the PS1 chip, and mostly just had a massive fill rate to make up for its shortcomings.