Various Ways of Sending Mail via SMTP

Mon 30 January 2023

Internet Mail, or email, or whatever kids these days call it, was one of those things that terrified me very early on when I was a strapping young System Administrator. Everything else that I was doing at the time seemed comparitively easy: Linux/BSD installs, system setup, automation, and such …

DIY Vinyl Cut Motorcycle Emblem

Sun 26 June 2022

So I have this motorcycle.

It's a lot of fun.

I could talk at length about the general awesomeness of the late 70's to early 80's Suzuki GS muscle bikes. But! We only have so much time until the heat death of the universe. So to keep it brief, I …

Rabbit Holes: The Secret to Technical Expertise

Sat 24 August 2019

Sometimes, the simplest questions take you on exciting journies. This was, in fact, the most powerful and motivating force that got me into doing computery things from a very young age. I would ask a question, how do …

Graphite and the Energy Bridge to Nowhere

Fri 06 July 2018

Remember the good old days when neighbors knew each other, cars had chrome bumpers, and nobody had any idea how much electricity they were using until a bill came in the mail? Well, a few years back, my local power company started offering a mobile app that customers could use …

Rebuilding Docker for Custom Networks, a SysAdmin Tale

Fri 04 May 2018

At work, we use Docker for developing, testing, and deploying applications. For the most part, it has simplified our lives greatly at the cost of a few annoyances and headaches here and there. I just spent the better part of a week dealing with one of them and since misery …

In Beaver We Trust: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Thu 26 April 2018

Even though I have been using some Linux distribution or another pretty much daily for roughly two decades, I have not had occasion to write a review on one. Today, opportunity knocks not once but 18.04 times.

Background

Just who in blazes …

Linux Neckbeard Shocked, A Newfangled Code Editor that Doesn't Suck

Sun 29 October 2017

It was a dark and stormy night. My eyes were glued to the screen as I watched the Ansible playbook make its way through the myriad configuration changes across dozens of production hosts. Of course all of this had been tested in staging but if you work in technology, you …

Raspberry Pi Serial Console in Linux

Sat 23 June 2012

My Raspberry Pi arrived in the mail earlier this week. However, work, family, and other commitments meant that tinkering with it had to wait until the weekend. Until today, all that I managed to accomplish was to download a Debian-based OS image, flash it to an SD card, hook the …

OpenSSH: The Poor Man's SOCKS Proxy

Wed 21 January 2009

Just when I think I know everything I need to know about OpenSSH, I end up learning something new and tremendously useful. Today, that would be the -D argument.

Many times I have been stuck on an "untrusted" Internet connection and need to log in (insecurely) to a certain site …

Linux Terminal Speed Benchmarks

Mon 27 October 2008

In system administration, you spend a lot of time typing into and reading back information from a terminal. Although all terminals pretty much do the same thing, they can differ somewhat in their UI features or which desktop they were designed to be integrated into.

A few years back I …