I was a good student. My parents brought me up to work hard and do what I was told which, coincidentally, was what the teachers were telling us. For the most part, I enjoyed the lessons at school. I was sad when we moved and I lost some good lessons – I was doing well at learning Spanish as a full-time course, and was kicking bottom in Home Economics.
Perhaps if we’d stayed, I’d have gone on to be a chef working in Spain.
Continue readingSee!! Told you it wouldn’t take another eight months to write the next one. Are you proud? Well, don’t be. It’s absolutely shameful that it takes me so long to sit and write things and I don’t deserve any praise for stepping over an incredibly low bar.
So, what next? You’ve read about my creative aspirations, and you’ve learned that a computer informed a major life philosophy that I keep with me to this day. So far it seems like my destiny was pretty mapped out, right?
Yeah. Wasn’t like that at the time.
Continue readingI really, truly am terrible at blogging. My last ‘Without a Plan‘ post was conceived as a notion on November 27th, written and posted by December 23rd, and it’s now August 23rd of the following year and I’m just sitting down for a Part Deux.
There’s not even a good excuse. Coronavirus restrictions and some truly random, bizarre and unpleasant weather throughout 2021 have conspired to give me plenty of free time outside of work, with which I have done remarkably little. I had loads of time to write this and many subsequent posts, but didn’t. Maybe I’ll unpack that one day, but today is not that day. Today is … the day I go back and read my first post in this series to get back into the flow of wherever the heck I was going in the first place.
Now I think about it, this rocky and unplanned start really does quite fit the theme of this whole thing …
Continue reading(If you’re just looking for the brief version, read it here. Otherwise to read my ramblings, carry on!)
On September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to everyone at least 13 years old with a valid email address.
I remember signing up, thrilled that I could finally be a part of this new ‘Web 2.0’ movement that all my still-at-university friends had been talking about. At the very beginning, it was an incredible new tool for keeping in touch with friends, sharing events, and finding new and interesting ways to socialize.
Over the years, the information that the company has gathered on individuals is staggering in breadth, depth, and scariness. An information gathering campaign that once only existed in the wet dreams of intelligence agency wonks was now a living, breathing thing, and we were all voluntarily giving it more oxygen every day, with every post, every message, every uploaded picture, every ‘Like’.
I now view the company as one of the most insidious and evil companies in tech, and am unable to divorce the many terrible events in real life that have occurred after being organized, in part, on Facebook, from any other benefits it might bring.
In 2009, WhatsApp was launched, and it took off in a big way in the UK and Europe. With smartphones in their infancy but commanding a high price, mobile service providers began offering enticing ‘unlimited data’ plans, to try and encourage us all to swap over to the new expensive devices. As a trade-off, at least for some providers, you had fewer bundled text messages that you could send.
WhatsApp made the idea of ‘bundled texts’ an immediately archaic idea. WhatsApp allowed you to send essentially supercharged MMS messages for, essentially, nothing. It was all ‘data’, and suddenly you no longer sent ‘a text’ you sent ‘a WhatsApp’.
Apple pushed further away from SMS with iMessage so now if you were an Apple user, you expected richer features. If you were messaging an Android user, the obvious answer was WhatsApp.
In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp. Now everyone you knew was either on Facebook, or on WhatsApp, but either way you were on a platform controlled by Facebook.
WhatsApp (and Facebook) were immediately at pains to point out that no information would be shared with Facebook, and WhatsApp chats would stay secure.
Of course, those of us who have been in tech a while (or been through an acquisition) know that there are no guarantees and just because a company says they aren’t going to do something, it doesn’t mean they aren’t eventually going to do it.
Sure enough, as of February this year, the WhatsApp Terms of Service are changing (outside of Europe) to remove certain clauses which previously stated that no information would be shared with Facebook.
WhatsApp is no longer a platform I wish to be on as a result.
I’m still on Instagram, another Facebook owned property, and I’m sure there will come a time when I need to move away from that too. The only reason I haven’t already is that there’s no good alternative to it (yet) and I still very much enjoy it.
For WhatsApp though, there are now several excellent alternatives. The two I’ve chosen are Signal and Telegram.
Signal actually uses the same basic encryption as WhatsApp. In fact, WhatsApp only started to encrypt its non-text messages after partnering with Signal to further develop the technology.
Signal.org is a Not-for-Profit organization, and the Signal Messenger app is open source, peer reviewed, and funded entirely by grants and donations. Security is the foremost consideration, then features. I’ve certainly seen improvements in functionality since I started using Signal over a year ago and for the most part it’s just as good as WhatsApp in terms of functionality.
A messaging app with even more features is Telegram. However, this is not an end-to-end encrypted tool. For some, that may not matter and, honestly, if somebody really wanted to pilfer the many (many) cat pictures I exchanged across these services, they’re welcome to them. As mentioned, my primary reason to ditch WhatsApp is its Facebookification.
However, if you’re making a significant change, might as well go for security, right?
So my #1 recommendation is Signal; anybody security-minded who wants to get away from Facebook’s clutches will gravitate to this one.
Telegram is for those who want to ditch Facebook, but can’t live without some of the rich features available elsewhere.
For example, my server has a webhook connection with my Telegram account, allowing the server to send me alert messages directly to my connected devices.
Either way, it’s “So Long” to WhatsApp. It’s been a blast.
Much like a dream, the idea for this series of posts was so clear at the time. That time was yesterday, November 27th, at about 6:00PM EST whilst I was in the shower. Also like a dream, the clarity of the idea has faded somewhat in the intervening 19 hours.
However, I’m still here to write it because I feel compelled to. I’m at a point in my life where things are really quite different from what’s gone before in some ways, whilst remaining resolutely, defiantly the same in others. Perhaps I hope that this series of posts will provide me with some stream-of-consciousness-introspection, a kind of ‘Write Your Own Therapy’ exercise. Maybe I’m just a closet narcissist who wants to write more about himself.
Uncertainty is probably the most appropriate feeling as I go into this. As the title says, this is Without a Plan, subtitle TBD. I’ve lived much of my life without what I would consider any concrete plan. I’ve taken opportunities as they arise, certainly missed out on my share too, bounced around the United Kingdom and, latterly, the United States, and questioned myself more times than I care to admit. I’ve experienced truly wonderful moments, and plumbed the depths of depression.
“So what?” you might think, “That describes everybody.”
Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn’t. One thing I’ve come to realize is that many of us are all broken in our own ways, but that some people really just do Have Their Shit Together in ways that I wish I could, but probably never will.
Anyway, let’s get into it, shall we?
I’m a 35 year old IT Manager, working for a software company in the North East of the United States of America.
Before all of that, I wanted to be a writer.
Continue readingI’ve been busy with work lately, but got some time this Sunday to work on the next part of my build – authentication.
The Unraid build itself is coming on well, but I now have 14 separate docker containers doing things for me, all with their own individual authentication methods. If I plan on opening up the server to external access (which I do), then I need something to manage usernames and passwords from a central point.
That something is LDAP.
LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, and is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
The most common implementation of LDAP that people will probably have heard of is Microsoft’s Active Directory, itself an implementation of LDAP. It’s what I’m most familiar with, having worked with flavors of AD from 2003 onwards. It’s easy to setup and easy to work with, and is – in my view – the best implementation of LDAP for a heavily Windows-based environment.
I’m not exactly running a completely Windows environment. My primary machine, and that of my girlfriend, is running Windows 10. However, I have 14 docker containers (and growing), and some implementations I want to do that require some integration with whatever LDAP server you’re running, and I’m not sure how well AD would play with those.
Lastly, AD requires you to be running Windows Server, which requires a license, and also some fairly decent system requirements.
Plus, it’s fun to learn new things.
So I’ll be using something called FreeIPA (hopefully the punny title makes sense now) on a CentOS 8 install, with 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM and a 60GB disk.
Read on for how it’s done.
Continue readingIn my last post I commented about my USB situation, which I hoped would be quickly resolved with a USB expansion card. I picked up this model from Inateck; a 5-port USB A device which would allow me to connect my USB switcher for keyboard & webcam, a headset for gaming, as well as gamepads and wheels.
It arrived with customary Amazon quickness, and I added it to the machine. Slightly annoyingly it (and others) required a power connection from the PSU, as the PCIe slots can’t supply the 5V required. I was out of SATA connectors so this meant running a Molex cable through the case (urgh).
I brought the machine back online and found the new USB device sitting happily in its own IOMMU group, so I bound it to VFIO, rebooted the server, then passed it through to the Windows machine and started it up.
That’s where my troubles began.
Continue readingSo it’s been six days since my last post, and after a busy and at times frustrating week (work-wise, nothing to do with Blackjack) I have some more updates.
First, good news.
The Plex migration worked flawlessly as I mentioned in the last post. We’ve been running it for 6 days now and have watched a bunch of stuff on it without any issue whatsoever. This is what should have happened but I’m still pleased.
As you can see, I’m also penning this on my Windows 10 VM, using dual screens. The performance is excellent – it’s faster at booting than the bare metal install on my old machine!
I’ve now shut down my old machine, physically replacing it with Blackjack and swapping the rest of the memory. We’re now running on 64GB total, with 24GB reserved for the Windows 10 machine. It was pretty happy with 8 and I’m sure would be happy with 16, but if I have a surplus why not use it?
So far the containers I have running aren’t taxing the system much at all, but I have further plans which may drive that usage higher.
There have been a few things that haven’t quite worked as well as I’d hoped though.
Continue readingSo, my data is all moved from t’old machine t’new one (for any Americans, you’ll need to read that sentence in a strong Yorkshire accent. Good luck.)
That could be that, but losing all of the ‘watched/unwatched’ and progress through series would be a bit of a pain in the arse, so I’m trying to migrate the metadata of my now-old Plex install (Razorback) to the new one (Blackjack).
On Windows, Plex stores everything in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server.
In Docker, that data is located at /mnt/cache/appdata/Plex-Media-Server/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/
Plex’s FAQ does include information on moving Plex data around, but it’s a far cry from what you really need to know in a scenario like this. That is fair, as there are a large number of potential scenarios and configurations that it would be unfair to expect Plex to constantly stay on top of and document adequately – after all if it doesn’t work, people would come crying to Plex and they’d have to support that or risk the wrath of Unhappy Internet People.
I’ll make this a long story short – I’m going with the basic bitch method of just copying the (several hundred thousand) files across the network from my Windows machine. I tried zipping the whole lot up and then unzipping it on the host, but with various combinations of commands I always got the same error: caution: filename not matched, which didn’t make sense then, and still doesn’t now.
I tried a number of different solutions from researching online but decided quite quickly that this is one of those annoying Linux things that I know I’ll spin my wheels on for an hour or so, and eventually just have to do it the basic way anyway.
So, I skipped ahead.
At the very least I am grateful that Plex have kept the folder structure and mechanisms broadly identical across different platforms. I’ve certainly dealt with software in my time where a Windows and a Linux version of an app were entirely incompatible and there was no hope of moving settings from one to the other, so this is a refreshing change from previous experiences.
Of course now we’ll have to see if this actually works or not. I have … middling hopes of success, but we’ll see.
So the metadata is all copied over. I started the Plex Docker and immediately went into the server settings and edited my libraries; the existing libraries pointed at the old media locations, which was good. I added the new locations and let Plex scan them.
And … it worked! My On Deck still shows a half-watched episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and my watched / unwatched lists are all there.
So I’ll say up front, it’s possible that I haven’t set my storage up in the optimum way, and that choosing ‘just’ a 500GB cache drive has caused me some small issues, but I think that in daily operation, things should be fine.
My biggest challenge with the transition to the new machine was always going to be moving the data from old to new, whilst keeping the old one running and serving media.
As it transpired, we’ve had some internet issues over the last week which has meant the Plex server has been inaccessible to the outside world most of the time anyway, but I had already hatched a plan and that was what I stuck to.
I had 4x6TB (not 4x4TB as I said in my first post) in my Windows machine configured in Windows Storage Spaces. Due to the way it was configured, I could only remove one of the disks, despite having just over 1 disk-worth of data.
Therefore I’d need to move everything before I could destroy the array on my Windows machine and move the other disks.
The cache drive was a savior here, both in terms of storage and speed.
Continue reading
An Englishman in Boston 