ryan chewning dot net

Or, how I finally post something straight to the web without holding on to it for months and months in my drafts folder until I forget what it was about and delete it...

Yes, the blog is still alive. I haven’t done much with it though which is kinda sad. That being said I feel like I’ve been doing a bit recently that I’m both excited about and looking forward to having it done, documented and posted. Hopefully I’ll feel like doing all of that sooner rather than later, but after a long day at work, the last thing I really want to come home and do is write more documentation.

Since the last thing that’s posted is a bunch of MySQL stuff from when I was at UC almost two years ago I’ve been a busy guy. I left UC for a full-time gig all be it a lower position in the grand scheme of things as a computer technician for a school district in Warren County. Its not a bad gig as I’m about to reach a year there, but its not all that I’d hoped it would be as far as opportunities and my desired career path as a Linux Systems Administrator / DBA (MySQL or Oracle [someday]) / Network Administrator. Don’t get me wrong. Its important to have the folks that change out busted computers and fix the technology at the physical level, but its just not what I want to spend the next several years of my life doing.

Which leads me to what I’ve been doing besides work. As I sit at a local Starbucks (that I will soon be working at again so I can get a newer car sooner) I’m typing this on my laptop that is happy connected to the OpenVPN server that’s running at home. Its running on a PC using Ubuntu LTS server. This box is also handling the firewall, IDS, DNS, DHCP and IPv6 gateway for the home network. The sad part about all of this, the load on the box is still way down on the load even when there is torrenting or gaming afoot. In addition to the single box, I’ve got another one setup as the fail over point and two other servers inside the home that are handling other servers such as radius for WiFi,system monitoring and notification software, a la Zabbix. All of this is clearly over kill for the house, but its the process and actually touching these things in a non-mission critical environment so I can say I’ve touched this stuff and know something about how it all works together.

Dreamhost Drama

And this site is running on the Linode servers I happily set up about three months ago because Dreamhost lost its competitive edge for me in their pricing. Honestly they probably lost it some years ago, but I wasn’t comfortable enough with administering a Linux server to make the jump to Linode. For example with Dreamhost you have to have their hosting plan which can be anywhere from $10.95 a month down to $5.95, if you prepay for 10 years. I was prepaid every three years which brought my monthly cost down to $7.95 a month for their hosting plan. If I wanted decent performance though I would have to go to a VPS and that started at $15 per instance at 300MB of RAM and scaled at a rate of $1 per 20MB in addition, if you needed to have a secured site (SSL’d) you had to pay $3.99 a month per IP address. Needless to say that was a bit too pricey for me. I believe I was paying about $70 a month for hosting through Dreamhost by the time it was all said and done. Once I crunched the numbers it became pretty clear to me that a move was in order and I went to the only other hosting company that I would trust and it was Linode. Not to sound dramatic about the move, but when you start paying a flat $20 per server with 512MB of RAM, 20GB of disk space and 200Gbs of transfer and your transfer pools between all of your servers, life is a bit nicer. Yes there is the headaches of keeping _everything_ updated on the servers, but for the price, the control and flexibility you can’t beat Linode. And I should mention that the little extras like extra IP addresses are only a dollar a month and their backup solution is $10 per server per month, which can save your ass if you get hacked or have fat finger syndrome.

Other Bits

So while I’ve been doing all this goofy stuff around my house, I’ve finally started to write my first complex Bash program/script. It sounds silly in this day and age with all the smart phones and fast 3G/4G networks out there, but I’m working to make a script to email/sms me important weather related information. In another life I’m a amateur radio operator that’s pretty involved with volunteer stuff, one of them is the weather. I’m a trained weather spotter for the National Weather Service’s SkyWarn program. I actually do the HAM stuff though. I’m one of several net control operators for the Cincinnati section. The script would respond both to updated information that’s relevant to severe weather outbreaks, like the Convective Outlooks published by  Storm Prediction Center and emails sent to an address that would be periodically checked and a response generated based on the commands in the email. That’s a useful feature so I can get weather information for any other place that I might be at or traveling to. I’ll try to post it up when I have something together.

Just to say that I’m still alive and going. I’ve been consumed by work, so much so that I’ve not had much time to put toward the writings that I want to do here nor really had the drive at the end of the day (but I’m working 18 – 20 hour days for the next few weeks).

In the beginning there was a blog and the blog was…well a blog, about technology. Welcome to the place I showcase the work I’ve done and my experience with technology. Here I hope to post every now and again my two cents on technology. Sometimes I’ll try to write in a how-to manner things that I’ve found tricky to do because there wasn’t much help from the great search god , or I just want to keep the information in a centralized spot of sorts. I hope that you’ll poke around a little and take a look at some of the projects that I have going on. Some of them will have svn repositories available once the alpha version is ready.

Thanks and happy coding.

Ryan