Blog
Welcome to the Blog.
Linux Networking 6: BPF and eBPF
2015-11-19
A decade of Linux networking work with ipchains, iptables, and iproute2 teaches a useful discipline: express policy explicitly, validate behavior with packets, and automate what humans consistently get wrong at 02:00.
By 2015, another shift is clearly visible at the horizon: BPF lineage maturing into eBPF capabilities that promise more programmable networking, richer observability, and tighter integration between policy and runtime behavior. ... continue
Storage on Budget Linux
2011-11-08
If there is one topic that separates “it works in the lab” from “it survives in production,” it is storage reliability.
In the 2000s, many of us ran important services on hardware that was affordable, not luxurious. IDE disks, then SATA, mixed controller quality, inconsistent cooling, tight budgets, and growth curves that never respected procurement cycles. The internet was becoming mandatory for daily work, but infrastructure budgets often still assumed occasional downtime was acceptable. ... continue
Mailboxes to Internet 4: Perimeter and Proxies
2010-05-21
The final phase of the migration story starts when internet access stops being “useful” and becomes “required for normal business.”
That is the moment architecture changes character. You are no longer adding online capabilities to an offline-first world. You are operating an internet-dependent environment where outages hurt immediately, security posture matters daily, and latency becomes political. ... continue
VMware on a Pentium II
2009-04-03
Some technical memories do not fade because they were elegant. They stay because they felt impossible at the time.
For me, one of those moments happened on a trusty Intel Pentium II at 350 MHz: early VMware beta builds on SuSE Linux, with Windows NT running inside a window. Today this sounds normal enough that younger admins shrug. Back then it felt like seeing tomorrow leak through a crack in the wall. ... continue
Mailboxes to Internet 3: Identity and File Services
2008-09-18
By the time mail became stable, the next migration pressure arrived exactly where everyone knew it would: file shares, printers, and user identity.
In theory this is straightforward. In reality, this is where organizations discover the true complexity of their own history. Shared drives are business process. Printer queues are department politics. User accounts are unwritten social contracts. You are not migrating servers. You are migrating habits. ... continue