I am really glad about the paradigm shift the pandemic brought into my workplace with regards to remote work. Being able to stay at home 80% of my time is something I grew to be fond of and it helped a lot overcoming some personally challenging situations during the pandemic. I really enjoy the benefits and having the possibility to adjust my space to my needs which really helps to bring me more often into the flow which is beneficial for both me and my employer.

Sure there are distractions you will never have at the office. But it’s also easier to structure your work around your personal life and still deliver as it gives you greater flexibility. There’s also no denying that remote working fuels my self exploitation more than being on prem as it’s easier to just spin up the machine and start to work on stuff e.g. later in the evening but overall for me, personally, the benefits for both me and my employer outweigh the problems. With one notable exception that I absolutely dislike about remote working and that’s about meetings. Not neccessarily about the meetings themselves but how people in online meetings attend to them in a fashion that seems to be more and more common: inattentive to a point that said attendees almost are phased out of the meeting. I have witnessed more than one meeting in which everybody was leaving but one who apparently did not realize that the meeting concluded.

Signs of which are attendess which do not really attend the meeting but instead go on and work on different things, accept a phone call, read their e-mails or the newest messages in the chat. Obviously they feel like the meeting is a waste of their time but it’s definetely wasted time for others which are e.g. waiting for a response from someone who’s just not paying attention. And most likely it really is wasted time for both of them. This is not something that’s novel or unique to online meetings. You can observe it in presence meetings, …

A while ago I decided to ditch my Windows machine at home as I never really felt at home with the way Windows made me handle the system and the overall `ergonomics' of the OS. Sure, things got better with the introduction of powershell, winget and the Microsoft Terminal but still I always felt like working against the OS and not with it and most of the time I was using my Huawei Matebook running OpenBSD. But more and more often I needed a commercial OS especially due to the pandemic going on.

Having had fond enough memories of macOS from my time at one of my last employers I decided to treat myself to a new M1 based macbook and it’s now being months and frankly, I loved almost every moment of it. Especially running macOS alongside nixpkgs is something that I really enjoy.

But with the move I lost the tools I used to generate the static pages for my blog as they are not readily available as a nixpkg and as my whole blog thingy was very makeshifty I finally decided to jump boat and convert my blog over to hugo. The conversion has been pretty straightforward, easy and enjoyable so far. Despite a steep learning curve, at least for me it was. But after getting more and more into the flow of how stuff work with hugo things started to become easier the pieces of the puzzle fell more and more into their place.

Funnily enough, the structure I created for running my old blog with sblg and a bunch of shell scripts really helped me making the switch and really eased my way into converting the blog into hugo’s go templating and no kidding, hugo really is blazing fast and having hugo -D server running in a shell and manipulation files or working on a new blog post is instantaneous. The amazing speed makes the whole process easy and provides a fantastically low bar for getting back into blogging!

So if you are on the lookout for a static site generator give hugo a chance 😀.

So I am back on Vultr. Kind of. Not that I am disappointed with hetzner but I just want to run my stuff at home just like I was doing when I started getting more into being part of the Internet and before running your mail server from home became more or less impossible. I still like thinking of the internet as being a decentralized space. A space where anyone can found his own settlement.

I was also chewing the bone of self hosting for quite a while again and what hold me back the most was my own domain and my wish to run my own name servers. Up until lately I was running my setup either on 2 Vultr instances or two virtual machines on my hetzner setup in order to satisfy the requirement of having 2 nameservers available. Luckily I was finally able to collaborate in that regard with a friend of mine. He’s also running his own nameservers and he agreed to act as my secondary so I am even better off than before.

I thought about how to move my setup back into my home without having to have a business line and therefor a static IP. And I thought maybe others might have interest in doing the same so I started thinking about setting it up in way I could provide it as a service. Which was a good reason to get myself into docker. So I installed Alpine on vultr and started to build my own docker images as I don’t want to use 3rd party images which I don’t know how they have been setup and instead of spending my time auditing the images I wanted to spend my time learning docker.

Using a dynamic DNS provider was not an option for two reasons:

1. I wanted to send e-mails which is dead since decades if you are running your mailserver from a consumer dialup range
2. I wanted to be at least online wrt my mail setup and if possible at least partial for my blog

The idea was to run a per tenant mail relay and caching reverse proxy connecting back to your basement via wireguard. I got most of the parts running on my own docker images but honestly, progress was slow and …

Lately I started thinking about my future and whether I should keep my self employed or if I should finally start working on being either self-employed or start my own company. Yeah, interesting timing in such uncertain economic times but I guess they’ll stay uncertain no matter what. As I am starting a new day job mid September I’m going to explore the situation most probably by starting working on public engagements on yeswehack.

This means a slight change in direction, heading more for the redteam but my dayjob hopefully gives me enough blueteam and I hope and I can make a lasting impression there increasing their security stance.

But first I need some organizational stuff cleared like tax, insurance and also I need all of that greenlit by my current and future employer.

Why the change of pace? Mostly due to the experience at my current day job which has been for years now, pretty unpleasant. Also a lot of guys kept asking all those years why I didn’t quit and start a business of my own. Seems like others deem me to be fit for the task.

Another piece of the puzzle has been the OSCP and virtual hacking lab and chit chat with other redteamers and it seems that I am holding myself up ok. Sure enough, I am by no means standing out of the crowd but at the very least this means I am also not standing out in a bad way.

My family also plays a part in this. I hope to be an inspiration for my brother who’s lately been struggling with life. I hope to be an idol to my son showing him not to be afraid of taking matters into your own hand and hopefully laying a foundation for him.

But one step at a time. One step at a time.

Wasn’t much going on lately. First work kept me busy, then COVID19 came along and with it homeschooling next to having to work. So for me, COVID19 kept me even more busy. Which feels strange because a lot of people seem to have a lot of spare time at their hands. Still I managed to migrate my stuff to a new ESXi machine, upgraded my systems, fiddled with prometheus, telegraf, grafana and rabbitmq, bought myself a new switch and moved from bitbucket to sourcehut.

Oh, and I got myself a nice treat and bought a Huwaei Matebook X which also triggered a move from Xmonad to sdorfehs and a locally patched version of sdorfehs-bar