Copy of LinkedIn posts
I need to be louder on the internet, and one of the ways in which to do that is LinkedIn. So I'll start a series of posts on LinkedIn about my many technical pursuits. Some of these will be to do with Linux Infrastructure, others will be about the volunteer work I do for Medway Little Theatre, and who knows? maybe I'll share my recipe for Boerenkool met Worst or recommendations for music bands operating along the banks of the River Medway.
Now one thing is important about my words here: They are mine. Opinions given here are mine and mine alone, not necessarily those of my employer. Since my employer is a multi-national financial institution, I will of course not share anything.
So what can you expect here? Well, I have been wrangling computers since (officially) 1996, mostly variants of Unix. And what is experience if not a long list of stupid things you no longer do?
My home lab project: NSCHOOL
N-School stands for Nerdhole Small Company or Home Office On Linux. It is the way I use to manage my home network of a handfull of PCs, a printer, and a bunch of virtual machines that drift in and out of existence with my learning projects. Currently I am on a Docker-Gitlab-CI/DC journey. As it happens, I may put my external website on a Docker container running NGINX. Docker contrainers aren't as heavy as virtual machines, and even my little main server should be able to support one or two containers. When I do, I will be sure to document it here.
Medway Little Theatre
I am a member of the Rochester based Medway Little Theatre, and I am mostly involved in stage tech. lighting, sound, stage building and the like. MLT are licky to have a fairly advanced setup. We recently upgraded our incandescent lights to LED based technology, with the light deck to support it. We have a few old hands at stage tech, a few younger ones, and we actually have quite a good name in the region. I am still pushing for MLT to get a proper file server where we can store all the files that a theatre needs in this increasingly digital world. Light deck configurations, documentation, scripts, sound effect files, videos and so on and so on. These days, about £1500,-- gets you a pretty decent server. (Though with the recent explosion in memory prices it may not be as easy). I don't want this to be some sort of scrap PC job though. We will be relying on this machine and The Show Must Go On!! More on this story as it develops.
Docker in the Nerdhole
At the moment, I have one main server that does most of the heavy lifting, a small Dell Optiplex with a whopping 16GB of RAM. At the moment it is running a native Apache server with a mkdoc-generated static website. I think Docker can easily run a webserver with my few pages on it. There is a Docker image for NGINX, where I only have to point it at the HTML pages to get it to work. Maybe that is something to use the CI/CD pipeline for. Containers atre the new VMs after all. Note to self: research this.