Notes

Architects should question axioms from the past - the software world changes fast and some of those axioms may no longer be true. Hopefully, the book will give examples. In the past, I used to worry about not knowing non-AWS (for example, Kubernetes) or older technologies deeply enough. That’s actually okay. I don’t have anything more because I’ve dropped the book for now.

Until end of April, I won’t use my phone in the following situations: Restaurants, shops, malls, hikes or other external activities. (Only exception is when I am expecting a phone call from my parents.) Meal time. In bed. (Get alarm clock from parents and use that instead. Leave phone outside the bedroom, if possible.)

See this Also, if you want to print some part of your file, make sure that the starting page number is odd, otherwise you’ll get wrong results.

The following seem to be good: https://faxzero.com/ https://www.gotfreefax.com/

Traefik through Docker Compose seems to be a much cleaner way than manually installing and configuring Nginx, like I used to do earlier. traefik.yaml: entryPoints: web: address: ":80" http: redirections: entryPoint: to: websecure websecure: address: ":443" providers: docker: {} certificatesResolvers: myresolver: acme: email: [email protected] storage: /data/letsencrypt.json httpChallenge: entryPoint: web And docker-compose should contain something like the following: services: traefik: image: traefik:v2.5 # TODO: try with "latest" instead of "2.5". restart: unless-stopped ports: - "80:80" - "443:443" volumes: - "./traefik.yaml:/etc/traefik/traefik.yaml" - "./traefik/data:/data" - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock" some-web-service-that-needs-a-reverse-proxy: # ... labels: - "traefik.http.routers.photoprism.rule=Host(`example.com`)" - "traefik.http.routers.photoprism.tls=true" - "traefik.http.routers.photoprism.tls.certresolver=myresolver"

EBS seems to implement chain replication with just 2 copies. How does it recover if one of those servers died? EBS volumes aren’t meant to be shared. While obvious once stated, I imagine this leads to some interesting design trade offs for EBS. Problems with EBS if used for a DB: Too much network IO. Both replicas are stored in same AZ, so no AZ failure resiliency. How to use a relational DB in cloud? One way is to just install it on EC2 with EBS. However, since EBS is a zonal service, the arrangement isn’t resilient to AZ failures. You could do RDS style: replicate the DB in 2 (or more?) AZs and the service manages the replication on customer behalf. However, MySQL writes pages of btree which are large (think 8 KB) and, therefore, slow. (It also writes entries to its write ahead log but those are small and unavoidable.) Quorums: ...

The Digital Minimalism book reminded me today that solitude is an important part of life. (Somewhat ironically, I was driving my car while listening to the book.) I do a good job in decreasing phone usage in my life, or at least I think a lot about doing so. However, the other aspect I don’t do a good job on is this: The author defines solitude as time when your mind is left alone and doesn’t interact with that of others. So, reading books or listening to music doesn’t count. With that definition, I am hardly alone because I am dealing with something or the other - books, music albums or some courses - all the time. ...

Here are some changes I want to introduce on self-hosting front. Can I somehow get rid of rsync or similar backup service? Instead, I could make our local setup (with our 5 TB hard disk) reliable enough. Maybe once our data grows to 1 TB or more. Right now, it’s just ~150 GB and rsync.net is cheap enough for that. Automatically sort photos according to date. I don’t want the following: ...

Sometimes, I try to continue doing something which either I don’t like or I am neutral to it and just wish that I liked it more. A clear example of the former is running: I’ve disliked it as long as I remember but, barring those few situations when I didn’t have any other way to stay fit, I continued to run because I thought it’d be a cool activity to be good at. There are a lot more instances of the latter in my life. For e.g., reading a giant novel like Oathbringer or just some deeply philosophical book like The Brothers Karamazov, driving long distance on a motorcycle, etc. ...

Vanilla installation Setting up Pi-hole was really easy: https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/basic-install/ Docker, using macvlan The following allows you to setup Pi-hole with a new dedicated IP address alongside other services that are already running on port 80 on your machine. version: '3.5' services: pihole: container_name: pihole image: pihole/pihole:latest cap_add: - NET_ADMIN networks: pihole_network: ipv4_address: 192.168.1.199 # New IP address that we'll assign to Pi-hole. ports: - 443/tcp - 53/tcp - 53/udp - 67/udp - 80/tcp environment: ServerIP: 192.168.1.199 TZ: 'America/Los_Angeles' WEBPASSWORD: "" volumes: - '/home/pi/docker-stuff/etc-pihole:/etc/pihole' - '/home/pi/docker-stuff/etc-dnsmasq.d:/etc/dnsmasq.d' restart: unless-stopped networks: pihole_network: driver: macvlan driver_opts: parent: eth0 # I got this from the output of `ifconfig`. ipam: config: - subnet: 192.168.1.0/24 gateway: 192.168.1.1 ip_range: 192.168.1.192/28 Helpful resources on this: ...