quillo · HackerTrans

I have built a small signing service that works by a user SSHing in, performing LDAP (password) authentication and 2FA with duo, then injecting a time-limited certificate signed by Hashicorp Vault back to their user agent (although it could be modified to remove the Vault requirement). The UX is very simple (SSH to this address once per day), but the backend is complicated, so if there is any demand for me to put this on Github I am happy to do so.

quillo

7년 전discuss

I personally feel that browsers are headed entirely in the wrong direction - "one thing well" no longer applies in this space.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a lightweight browser, if such a thing even exists anymore? Perhaps Chromium + Scriptsafe + uBlock is what I need, but ultimately I want is a tabbed browser without a load of unnecessary features bundled in.

For example; there is no way I would trust the VPN embedded into a browser, thereby rendering it useless bloat. Much like I don't trust the ad blocker in Brave for Android, but I find the experience better than Firefox mobile, and carry on using it despite my displeasure.

quillo

8년 전discuss

For anyone that might be interested, here are live graphs representing different generation types and their current cost for the Australian energy market (caveat: not all of Australia):

https://opennem.org.au/

https://opennem.org.au/#/regions/sa

South Australia - where the battery is located - is an outlier in the Australian market due to its relatively progressive energy generation composition. It's worth noting the battery charge/discharge values depending on the market price of wholesale electricity. Arbitrage in action! :)

The application is open sourced and available here:

https://github.com/opennem

quillo

8년 전discuss

I have a serious bee in my bonnet about POWER9.

The architecture was something I was very excited about for low latency workloads; it seemed that only thing stopping IBM from overtaking x86 in this space was the actual availability of hardware. POWER9 has been "in the works" for, what, two years now [1]? Google have been running POWER9 internally for at least 12 months [2], and IBM seem to have been caught up in the AI hype train by pivoting the POWER9 to some kind of "AI processing system" [3].

Had the P9 been released before Skylake, it might have been successful. By the time it is GA, it will be competing with x86 chips two generations higher than were available at the original P9 announcements and SPECInt benchmarks.

This has been made even more frustrating by the fact that Oracle effectively killed off SPARC during this time. Perhaps Fujitsu will continue to run with it, but I think it's fair to say that development will stagnate and support will dwindle as it is increasingly obscure and niche architecture.

[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky-po...

[2] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zai...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/12/08/why-i...

quillo

8년 전discuss

A job, doing what I love, with conditions I never dreamed possible for someone with poor formal qualifications but an insatiable desire to learn and prove my value.

I am grateful.

quillo

9년 전discuss

x86 offerings are so cheap now, is there still a market for this kind of ARM hosting? I would argue that you will achieve at least equivalent performance from an entry level KVM or Xen VM.

Perhaps there is still a market for the security concious or workloads sensitive to noisy neighbours.

Somewhat of a tangent - although not small scale, I have found the packet.net 96 core ARM offering to be good value.

quillo

9년 전discuss

On the topic of enterprise features and specifically, Hashicorp Vault, I did ask Hashicorp sales if it was possible to trial Vault Enterprise (for the UI) without the pre-sales dance and was flatly told "no".

This kind of attitude really rubs me the wrong way. On follow up from their sales I simply told them I opted for an open source UI from Github.

While I want to support the work Hashicorp are doing, I want to be treated as someone who understands that I don't need to spend money on the product. It's a concern to me that as these open source projects find ways to monetise they start to slowly make their way back to the type of ecosystem that I wanted to avoid in the first place.

quillo

9년 전discuss

I would expect that this will have an unexpected (?) side effect of further weakening the capabilities of packet inspection by intelligence agencies through increased utilisation of VPN services, especially those outside of the US.

At face value this is a good thing for privacy, but I am concerned that when lawmakers realise their error they will just legislate themselves out of the hole by making access to VPN services harder.

quillo

12년 전discuss

Nanog is asleep, but Ausnog might shed some light on it: http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/2015-January/029463...

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