Migrating to Hugo

A journey from WordPress to Hugo.

 Posted on April 18, 2021  |  2 minutes  |  387 words  |  Matthew Sawasy

When I started this blog in 2013, I wasn’t really planning to. A friend convinced me to keep a place of technical musings and such. Sure why not. Over the years, it grew to include photos and other non-technical posts, such as Matt’s movies you may have missed or my GTD process. While I enjoy writing these posts, they do take some time. However, writing posts hasn’t take as much time as site maintenance. [Read More]

OpenVPN in a VPS instance

 Posted on May 1, 2018  |  3 minutes  |  588 words  |  matt604

A few days ago, I saw a small job request for a script that would start OpenVPN on a GCP instance and connect to an external VPN service. The requester mentioned being able to SSH to the host and running a script on the host. The last part got me thinking about about how routing for OpenVPN might make less straightforward than it seems. It was. It seemed like a fun technical challenge so I took a crack at it. [Read More]

Goodbye Evernote

 Posted on October 19, 2016  |  2 minutes  |  267 words  |  matt604

Evernote has been a staple of my GTD process for around 10 years now. Originally I used it as my idea capture bucket. Over time I found it clunky and more GTD software had arrived on the scene, so I used it for reference material, notes, and such. I really liked the software, so much so, I paid for it for a number of years. One thing that bothered me about the software was the lack of keyboard short-cuts. [Read More]

tmux just saved my bacon

 Posted on September 17, 2016  |  2 minutes  |  241 words  |  matt604

As an administrator of systems, I live in the console, or the command-line, or as I call it “the shell”. Many moons ago, I would open many connections in tabs between my workstation and a host. This allowed me to run many commands in parallel. Over time, I learn about SSH multiplexing which is some serious nerdy hotness. That, in a nutshell, had all of those session running on one SSH connection. [Read More]

Systems Administration Titles

 Posted on July 24, 2016  |  2 minutes  |  229 words  |  matt604

When I first started as a Unix Administrator, I was given the title of System Programmer. This was a hold over from decades earlier when the team was all mainframe operators. At the time, I wanted to be a System Administrator, as that was the hot title. Some years later, I moved jobs and received a new title: Unix Administrator. Hot damn! I was happy with that title for quite some time. [Read More]

Which command do I use the most?

 Posted on February 13, 2016  |  2 minutes  |  312 words  |  matt604

After waking to a ringing phone, I was attempting to fall back asleep. As I drifted, I wondered which command I used the most? I thought it a neat exercise, so I found out. As I type this, I suspect it is ls. Which is second and third should be interesting. I gathered up .zsh_history and .bash_history files from 5 different machines I work on a fair bit and put them in a pile, erm, directory. [Read More]

VMs in my home lab

 Posted on February 1, 2016  |  4 minutes  |  834 words  |  matt604

TL;DR: Read the scripts here. There is a simple “if; this; then; that” at the bottom. It’s often I see some new bit of software I’d like to deploy in my home lab to test against my infrastructure. I’m not super keen on loading it on a machine I use for some other function, especially if I end up tossing the software. With this in mind, I started using Linux’s Kernel Virtual Machines (KVM) and Quick Emulator (Qmeu) to test things out. [Read More]

Cloud all the things!

 Posted on November 8, 2015  |  3 minutes  |  520 words  |  matt604

Recently, I found that Amazon is offering their Cloud Drive service, with unlimited storage, for $60/year. As someone who has had more than one catastrophic disk crash on my personal data stores, I was very interested in this service. They are offering a 3 month trial so, I jumped to sign-up. And was immediately very confused to find I was only offered 5 GB of photo space. After puzzling for some time, I realized I was not allowed this service because my Canadian Amazon site was linked to my US Amazon site. [Read More]

xmlrpc and bots

 Posted on February 24, 2015  |  2 minutes  |  365 words  |  matt604

Some time ago, I was told I should give back to the Internet and post some technical musings. As one does, I grabbed some off the shelf software and set up Apache on a little tiny virtual server. Off we went. Some time later, I started getting alarms that the host was not responding or that one of the services had crashed. I’d fix the issue and some time later it would happen again. [Read More]

Python’s module search path

 Posted on December 12, 2014  |  3 minutes  |  534 words  |  matt604

Upgrading software on an Ubuntu 12.04 machine, I hit a snag. A daemon wouldn’t start. The error log showed the following: from util.pystone import pystones ImportError: No module named util.pystone Reading a little, pystone is used in benchmarking and comes with Python 2.7. Yep, it’s there. $ ls /usr/lib/python2.7/test __init__.py __init__.pyc pystone.py pystone.pyc regrtest.py regrtest.pyc test_support.py test_support.pyc Strange. Firing up python and importing this from the python prompt failed. I tried only specifying this path to see if it would import: [Read More]