/techblog

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that last Friday a global crash of computer systems caused by ‘CrowdStrike’ led to widespread chaos and mayhem: flights were cancelled, shops closed their doors, even some hospitals and pharmacies were affected. When things like this happen, I first have a smug feeling “this would never happen at our place”, then I start thinking. Could it?

Broken Software Updates

Our department do take responsibility for keeping quite a lot ... [continue reading]

At my work, we’re very much dependent on alarms. The systems need to be operational 24/7. When unexpected issues arise, timely manual intervention may be essential. We need good monitoring systems to catch whatever is wrong and good alarm systems to make someone aware that something urgently needs attention. I would claim that we’re quite good at setting up, tuning, and handling alarms.

When I’m not at work, I’m often sailing, often single-handedly for longer distances. Alarms are important for ... [continue reading]

make is a utility for automating builds. You specify the source and the build file and make will determine which file(s) have to be re-built. Using this functionality in make as an all-round tool for command running as well, is considered common practice. Yes, you could write Shell scripts for this instead and they would be probably equally good. But using make has its own charm (and gets you karma points).

Even this ... [continue reading]

Do you spend days or weeks setting up your development environment just the way you like it when you get a new computer? Is your home directory a mess of dotfiles and metadata that you’re reluctant to clean up just in case they do something useful? Do you avoid trying new versions of software because of the effort to roll back software and settings if the new version doesn’t work?

Take control over your local development environment with containerization and Dev-Env-as-Code!

The command ansible-runner is part of the Ansible automation platform. If you have got installed Ansible, then you probably have already installed ansible-runner as well.

But what do you use it for? Well, if you run AWX or the Ansible Automation platform package somewhere in your environment, ansible-runner is part of the magic in the background and running your code. It is also a python library that can connect your code directly to Ansible ... [continue reading]

In some rare cases you might want to run Java code as a script. Let’s discover how to create portable, executable, robust, no-compilation-needed scripts with Java 21!

Git is an important part of my daily life. Professional as well as in private I use it to manage documents and all kinds of files and changes and synchronize these between my environments.

Working alone in my repositories I can commit my changes to the branch master all day long. This works well since I am the only one working in it.

In a customer environment this is different. Different workflow might be implemented, which then require branching, merge/pull ... [continue reading]

Helidon 4 is a micro-service framework which purports to make our lives slightly better with speed of development coupled with speed of runtime while being light on the mind. Is it any good?

This guide can be used set up a vanilla/lightweight dual-stack Kubernetes (k3s) configuration on a Raspberry Pi. You can add more k3s-nodes to achieve high-availability if needed. In the end a IPv4/IPv6 Nextcloud instance ... [continue reading]

As a dedicated advocate of IPv6, I recently embarked on the task of converting my personal Kubernetes cluster to an IPv6-only environment.

Why?

The growing scarcity of IPv4 addresses is a well-known issue. ... [continue reading]