NFTs Are Dead!

As with all things, complacency will spell the death of a career. I always keep my eye open to new options even when I’m not looking for a change because you never know when the perfect opportunity might come along.

Today, I was sent a job description by a recruiter for a Product Manager at a new media company. One of the requirements was experience with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Honestly, I don’t know much about NFTs other than it’s typically an image that’s cryptographically protected by being “tokenized” using blockchain.

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Embracing New Media

I’ve been in the Information Technology industry for almost 30 years now. I’m not sure where the time goes. It seems like yesterday I was a bright-eyed Marine recruit standing on the yellow footprints at Parris Island, SC, but that was 26 years ago. I was fortunate enough to go the US Marine Corps Computer Science School where I completed their IT operations curriculum that set me on this journey. It’s afforded me many a great opportunity, including my current job as a Enterprise Account Engineer (Technical Account Manager, TAM) at Amazon in their web services division. For those of you not in tech, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the part of the larger Amazon company that builds and leases cloud computing to other companies. It’s actually their most profitable arm. The retail side of Amazon isn’t actually all that profitable, and the AWS portion often ends up propping the rest of the company up financially, but I digress.

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Rolling a Linux-VServer Kernel

Linux-VServer is a virtualization platform that allows you to run VPSs without running complete OS environments.  It can be argued that Linux-VServer is actually more of a container platform than virtualization, however, you can’t think of it like Docker or LXC containers.  From a structural design, I would actually say that they are more similar to Solaris Zones, which are still technically containers, but the functionality is different.

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The Battle of Beijing

At my current job, I take care of all things systems. That’s infrastructure, security, networking, in-house desktop support, and automation. That’s a lot, I know, but someone has to do it. Nonetheless, it’s a great job. I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life, and this one is definitely top three. That being said, there are a bunch of a-holes in China making my life very hard right now by constantly running DDOS (dynamic denial of service) attacks against our IP address space. They particularly like to target our Joomla and WordPress sites. I’ve been fighting with them off and on for a few weeks now, but this morning, they launched the mother of all attacks against us. This was a geographically distributed, multi-datacenter DDOS attack. They were using in excess of 100 IPs in separate subnets scattered across at least five countries. So how did I fix this? Let’s get into it.

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Nagios Doesn’t Suck (As much as people think)

My predecessor at my current company used a platform called check_mk to monitor our network.  Unfortunately, check_mk has a feature that populates based on network discovery and can be very chatty. check_mk is also very convoluted as it’s built on top of Icinga, which is built on top of Nagios.  When making changes, there were layers and layers of configuration files you had to dig through, at least, in the check_mk instance my predecessor had bequeathed me.  Needless to say, I was not a fan and it wasn’t very efficient.  I understand why they forked to create Icinga.  At the time, Nagios was stagnant.  Since then, I feel like the Nagios camp has progressed significantly.  I also understand why they forked Icinga to check_mk, but it’s not for me.   For the granularity I want in monitoring, check_mk would be more work intensive than Nagios.

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