The Internet's Shittiest Wizard

We made it back! The Tupperbaby is an incredibly understanding traveler, though we did run into several issues unrelated to the baby.

You see, when Reagan fired those 11,000 air traffic controllers for striking, it had knock-on effects throughout the industry that caused permanent damage to not only that industry but to the labor movement writ large. This was followed by a series of recessions, terrorist attacks, recessions, coronaviruses, and recessions have kept the remaining airlines confident that they can get away with poor behavior because the government will just bail them out with no consequences. So now they’re just not afraid to funnel all their money right back to executives and shareholders.

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This post will be periodically updated as we travel throughout the day. I’ve set it as a draft for now (so this should be erased), but we’ll see how that goes.

I hate traveling, particularly flying. I’m over 6 foot tall, so there’s no comfortable way to sit in an airline seat for me. On top of that, I’m a Big Dude¹ so it’s even harder to just sit comfortably than you’d imagine. Last year we took the train west to Oregon and that was truly a delight. I’m less than thrilled about going through TSA again and I’m certainly less than thrilled about being in an absolute hellscape of suburban north-central Texas

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It’s working! I set up a self-hosted action runner on one of the scrappernetes nodes and made it run as a service. This allowed me to start building out steps using the doctl tools after I was able to install that on the node as well.

This was pretty easy with the Actions Runner documentation.

Download

# Create a folder
$ mkdir actions-runner && cd actions-runner
# Download the latest runner package
$ curl -o actions-runner-linux-x64-2.301.1.tar.gz -L https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/download/v2.301.1/actions-runner-linux-x64-2.301.1.tar.gz
# Optional: Validate the hash
$ echo "3ee9c3b83de642f919912e0594ee2601835518827da785d034c1163f8efdf907  actions-runner-linux-x64-2.301.1.tar.gz" | shasum -a 256 -c
# Extract the installer
$ tar xzf ./actions-runner-linux-x64-2.301.1.tar.gz

Configure

# Create the runner and start the configuration experience
$ ./config.sh --url https://github.com/foo/bar --token fubar
# Create a service.
$ ./svc.sh install
# Last step, run it!
$ ./svc.sh start

From there it was just a matter of making sure runs-on: self-hosted is in my workflow, which coincidentally looks like this.

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Fuck Jenkins man.

I do this shit for work, not for fun. I’m already done. The problem I’m running into is specifically around credentials, which I feel should be fairly easy to manage with Kubernetes secrets but apparently not for Jenkins. Fighting with the UI and the settings, I’m just…I think I’m done? I’m going to leave it installed for now because I think it might actually be something I come back around to in a week or so. Maybe on my trip next week if I need some time to myself. Whatever, I’m not getting paid for this right now this is entirely for my own purposes.

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A few years back a friend of mine in a Discord server created a bot that, on request, browsed some GoComics for a given comic strip or comment if possible. We mainly used it to ask for the most recent Heathcliff, Nancy and Garfield strips, but you did have to ask for them. So usually someone in Europe would ping the bot when they woke up and bing bang boom Bob’s yer@email.biz we got our comics. But for everybody in the US this was effectively automation (so long as someone in Europe remained routine-driven, a pretty safe bet).

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The Importance of Being Earnest

So far the biggest lesson I would have to impart on you, reader, is how easy it is to get TLS working with cert-manager on your cluster. It’s so easy, in fact, I think getting cert-manager installed on your lab cluster is maybe one of the first things you should do. SSL/TLS certs are going to be massively important in the decentralized authentication of the future. In fact, authenticatation is exactly what they’re for. They confirm that the domain name owner is the same person as the content owner. It’s increasingly important that you confirm that the content you’re receiving is in fact from who you’re expecting it to be from, take Musk’s Twitter for example. You don’t want everyone to think your famous jolly cartoon character is flipping them off do you?

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Tomorrow is primidi 1 pluviôse an 231, celebrating the spurge-laurel. Spurge-laurel doesn’t grow here and that bothers me.

I love the French Republican Calendar a lot. It’s such a beautiful and revolutiponary idea: reclaiming the very framework of time from the gods and kings whose names litter the Gregorian days and months. What’s a way to celebrate the saints in a secular manner, in a way for the common person to still understand it. On top of that, the saints days were replaced by common Parisian countryside plants and animals as well as common tools that would be familiar to a common person of the time.

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Re-reading my very first post makes me realize that perhaps a second introduction is in order, this one a little more concise and simultaneously a little more specific.

I’m Ward. I am a self-taught engineer coming from the help desk and now working primarily with kubernetes and Platform engineering teams. I’m a fairly new dad which is about as mundane as thrilling adventures gets. I live in central Ohio, obviously. My interests are in distributed systems, games of all varieties but specifically TTRPGS, wargames and chess-like games (e.g. The Duke, Tak).

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Ok, finally got this up and running. I’m going to work now on getting a handle of the formatting, but first we’re doing a bunch of CI/CD work. I’m a damned DevOps guy so let’s make it happen.

What we’re going to likely be doing is using Jenkins as always, but I’m curious about exploring Dagger.io to really more easily manage the pipeline work and test it locally. The big idea would be to always make it so that the image being served on the live site matches what is in my GitHub repo. So that’s going to mean playing a lot with GitHub Action Runners. Or not. Who knows!

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A Brief Introduction

I’m Ward, a simple idiot wizard and tech dude based out of central Ohio. My relationship with central Ohio is very similar to my relationship with my dad: strained and vacillating between love and extreme frustration. I decided, some weeks ago, that with the current shift in the internet it would be a good idea to put my money where my mouth is and create a personal website with which I can convey to people my stupid thoughts in a more thorough and effective manner than a half though out toot scrawled from the toilet.

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