IT – APSoft

Working on IT problems often requires intense focus and research to find the solution to the problem. I’ve previously written about Rabbit holes and Time sinks, this axiom is an extension of those. Sometimes you just have to know when to quit and regroup, rather than continuing to bang your head against the wall.

I’ve become familiar with Docker over the last year, using it for testing and educating myself on current technologies. My day job is working as a Principal Technical Support Engineer for MySQL, so I encounter every type of deployment you can imagine. We also have new product releases from time to time and I decided to dive into Kubernetes so that I can be knowledgeable in that domain.

This article is as much a piece of documentation as it is commentary. I recently decided to rejigger my home network after being quite comfortable in the current configuration for almost 7 years. The impetus was actually quite simple: one day I suddenly got paranoid when I realized what damage could be done if someone compromised my personal account. I am reasonably careful and competent about how I run things, but in spite of how careful I am, the services I’ve added in the last year increase the attack surface of my home network considerably. I would be foolish to ignore the increased risk these services pose.

Rabbit holes can be interesting or frustrating distractions to a relatively direct plan or process. Sometimes those rabbit holes turn from distractions into time sinks. Getting my home network upgrade completed was filled with both rabbit holes and time sinks. This isn’t the first major upgrade I’ve been involved in, I’ve moved datacenters multiple times, deployed new services, migrated services, but I’ve never had to completely duplicate all running services while also juggling new firewalls and network renumbers.

Tag: IT

Know when things are solvable and when they are just entropy

Rabbit Holes and Time Sinks