Scott O'Brien

A friend of mine made fun of me for re-writing my website so many times, the latest iteration this time around is in NextJS. It moves my old Hugo blog to a new React, Tailwind CSS website with Typescript.

At Meta, we have a few internal workflow orchestration engines. The idea is to allow long-running jobs, or things that can be split into tasks and need to have safe "checkpoints" behind them be defined in a system that can safely execute them and make sure they're executed in a durable, reliable and scalable way.

Last time I did hydroponic growing and germinated seeds in the rockwool, I found it annoying that the roots would grow out the bottom of the rockwool, then get squished by the ground, making it harder to have dangling roots to easily transfer to an NFT system.

In Network Engineering at Facebook Meta, we've been going through an interesting transformation in which we're starting to be discouraged to write new services in Python, and, instead start writing more in Rust (and sorry Golang, of which we've already got a bit written in.)

Ordering is a little off here, but I wanted to writeup about a bug I'm seeing in the ESPChess project (post to come) and how I intend to fix it.

As my hydroponic experiemnt has shown success, I wanted to scale this up. My plan is to build an NFT hydroponic system for the yard, and dutch bucket for tomatoes.

This year i've decided to start playing with Hydroponics as a hobby. I've been interested in starting with the Kratky Method of gardening. The idea is to grow lettuce in mason jars and see how growing without soil does. I've previously enjoyed growing my own alfalfa micro-greens, so this is the next obvious step.

My partner and I recently started renting an old place in Palo Alto. With COVID, we've been working from home for almost two years now, and sharing a desk at times things felt a little cramped (especially with the occsional electronics project).

It's so easy to build react apps these days. Over two nights, I knocked up a quick website to be able to upload igc flight files, and an xctask files to locally compute if you managed to hit the targets.

After working at Facebook for 5 years, we get to have a recharge. (think of it long service leave). 4 weeks of break which I added 1 week of PTO with.

I've not been writing or blogging for some time. Over half a decade. It has been about 12 years since I started this blog, and a lot has changed since then. I've not found the time to document my tinkerings and projects as work has taken most of my time. I'm going to leave work related things on Linkedin, personal posts on Facebook, but I would like to continue using this site as my partner tends to use her diaries, as a way looking back at what I've been playing with.

I made this video a while ago and some people on YouTube seem to like it, so here is my very basic MPLS tutorial. Towards the end of the video there's a live demonstration showing the concepts with Wireshark

One of the biggest problems in the environment I work in is that almost all of the deployment of our 300+ devices is that everything has been hand crafted.  Usually this isn't such a big problem, but add that with a design decision to route right to the access layer of our campus network with a multi-VRF network and you can start to see how mistakes, or changes in design along the deployment has meant inconsistencies.  Not only that, but when it comes time to go and change something, that means going through and altering near 300 devices, a massive pain that is hard to scale.

It's often handy when dealing with infringement notices and the like to have NAT translations logged.  Sure a better way would be to record netflow from these devices (and include the translations) but for a quick syslog solution, you can always enable by running the following...

We have an interesting problem at my workplace, we have an MPLS VPN design for separation of security zones (e.g., staff from students.) and we don't have MPLS support on our edge. With a L3 to the edge design though this means that while every edge switch has its own address space (per VRF), it also has a /30 uplink (once again, per VRF) back to the PE device.

I've been happily running my Apple Airport Extreme as m home router for the past few years (since my debian router died, and I've been too lazy to replace it).  One of the cool features was the ability to create a guest network (SSID) to access the internet without being able to access your trusted network.  One feature I wanted was the ability to throttle the speed guests can access the internet at.  While I couldn't do this with the Airport Extreme alone, Add a Juniper SRX100 into the mix that the awesome Cooper Lees gave me into the mix and problem solved.

I've never found a really simple video on what exactly Anycast is with a basic examples when exploring the concepts.  I decided to lab it up and figured this might help some of you starting out with the concepts.  Any comments feel free to let me know!

One recent pet gripe of mine has been having to add a new VLAN into our datacenter for our vSphere platform.  Not that I trust my DCs switches with puppet just yet, this is a proof of concept post about how we could be using puppet to centrally manage this configuration and push it out across our DC.

So lately I've been thinking about my backup strategy on my Mac. From previous posts you might know I've build my OpenIndiana ZFS FileServer. Well, just created a volume and decided to put 300GB to good use to create a time machine on my mac. There is a brilliant guide on how to do it here and suggest you all take a look (Thanks for the awesome guide Marco).

Just finishing off a few things at work this week.  We've got a few sites around the place where we have HA internet powered by two Juniper SRX100's.  The Two SRX100's operate in a Chassis Cluster and peer with our ISP using BGP across both active/passive devices.

In one of my last little tasks at work, I was asked to eliminate single points of failure in the software and hardware stack without spending a fortune on hardware or software licenses. During the process of ensuring high availability (HA), I realized that many small companies might have similar need, but with more pressing tasks and limited man hours, without a post that talks about all the issues and solutions in one place, many companies and organisations tend to leave single points of failure living with the chance that they’re not going to fail any time soon.

This is in the series of setting up a fileserver. We go through the process of setting up NFS & Samba.

This is a post of a series for setting up a Fileserver with ZFS and OpenIndiana. This post runs through setting up the operating system.

I want to write a quick and dirty blog post to tell you a little solution on downloading HTTP files in your off-peak usage using linux.

I've recently come up across some problems with the CRUD generator in Symfony, so in case anyone is googling for a solution out there, I'll try and help you along (or at least bump up the page references to the articles that helped me 😉 )

so I've moved back home with the family now. One thing I've been meaning to do is to digitise my life and get set up on the cloud. I think it'll be really basic to start off with. VPN access in to my home network, firewall everything off, then create a few layers of the network.

so, since I had the scare with my Asterisk VoIP box being hacked and a telephone call to Antarctica having being made, I decided to do something about it....