DevOps

The last post of this year. In the past years (June 2018 - December 2022) I have worked for Pro Warehouse, with great joy and lots of challenges and opportunities. In this reasonable long period I have been given increasing responsibilities, started in a Apple Platform Developer role in which I coded the Erase Install wrapper application. My first real purpose MacOS application I developed, a very nice project to do. This work grew into from being responsible for the project-management of the in-house developed FileMaker Pro application to designing, building and maintaining the Pro Platform. The Pro Platform hosts the FileMaker Pro application and all services and servers to display the data you now see when visiting the Pro Warehouse Sites. ...

Documenting Network Upgrade Creating a nice graph of the home lab What is next? Documenting Documenting, always the part most engineers loath. However it is proven to be a life saver. For me the home lab was becoming increasingly more complex, my better half, righteously, was more and more concerned that in case something happens to me or I’m not available for whatever reason, she did not know, where, how and what to do when it is relating to the devices at home. ...

Introduction Finding the right template IDE Migration Template changes Deployment Conclusion Introduction When I moved from Digital Ocean to Strato I also moved into a Static Site solution with Publii. The application had benefits at the time. A little over a year ago I had some troubles with the default free template, with a update of that template the site broke. At the time no real time left to investigate properly in the why and how to solve. So I went for the “easy” solution in purchasing another template. Too busy to spend my downtime on my site. Priorities… After 6 months I realized that the use of the template was with a small caveat, namely the updates of the template were only possible inside a window of 6 months. Again no time to move in a different direction, got myself a “update” for another 6 months. These 6 months are almost up. And now I do have some time and I am willing to see what else is out there. After some investigation online I made the decision to do a deep dive into using Hugo. What I saw I liked, a lot! Being able to code my site, have it under VCS, and written in Go. Definitely a winner! ...

In the private VPS cloud solution I have built and setup for Pro Warehouse there was a small nagging issue that needed to be solved. I wanted to have a routed layer 2 network and be able to use the public load balancers provided by the VPS provider. When we started the platform, we got the non-routed layer 2 network up and running pretty fast. Adding a OpenVPN server made the Site-2-Site more and less working. It works, the only caveat I had was that everybody had the same originating source IP in the layer 2 network. We still had the issue that all of the servers could access the internet directly. And with the number of server rising ( > 40 ) an increasing worry. ...

This month (June 2018) I started working for Pro Warehouse. One of two Apple Enterprise Resellers in the Netherlands. When working for this company I get to combine my two areas of expertise: Development Apple System Engineering When attending the WWDC'08, ten years ago, I made the conscious move from System Engineering to full-time development. Started as a junior developer in ‘10, and increased my skills as a developer over the past years. I learned a lot and keep on learning every day. I just love the challenges development throws at me. ...

Last Sunday I finally found and made the time to start reading the book that was recommended to me over a year ago: “The Phoenix Project”. It was a nice quite Sunday at home, doors open to the garden, good music on and started reading in the morning. After a couple of chapters I was unable to put it away. It was such a catching read, ten hours later, book done. It was a very long time ago that I was able to read for that long a period. ...