Brian Ewell

2022 New Language Resolutions

One of the most valuable things a programmer can do with their time is to continue to learn new things. Not only does this help to maintain the mental flexibility that is critical for tackling problems in ever-changing environments, but is simply makes life more fun. Half a lifetime ago,

SmartOS

Package Caching on SmartOS

If you use package management software commonly across two or more systems, network package caching may be of benefit to you.  In this article, we will setup a package caching solution to service multiple package management systems simultaneously. Methodology While caching packages locally in the file system is already common

Hardware

NUT in the Global Zone

Network UPS Tools [https://networkupstools.org/] is a project for connecting with many different power devices, and can access UPS data and coordinate with the device to ensure orderly shutdown of a host such as a SmartOS compute node. NUT flies a bit in the face of the design philosophy

Networking

2022 Home Router Refresh

With the new hardware up and running, it's time to redeploy new zones. We're going to start with the router zone, and as it's almost 2022, I'm going to call this article my 2022 Home Router Refresh. This article will overview rebuilding my zone based SmartOS router, and draw from

Hardware

Homelab Updates Part 2

This is a continuation of the previous article on hardware updates [https://blog.brianewell.com/homelab-hardware-updates/] to my homelab, focusing on the configuration of the major hardware components discussed. No need for much of a preamble here, lets get into it. Network Configuration There are a bunch of advanced features

Hardware

Homelab Hardware Updates

So much for regular posts to this blog in 2021. A lot of what I intended to write about this year hinged on access to better hardware. Not that I couldn't have done it with the N54L, it was more a case of only wanting to do it once instead

SmartOS

SmartOS Manifests

SmartOS manifests, also sometimes referred to as zone manifests, are JSON files that describe the resources and permissions to be allocated and granted to a given guest zone on SmartOS.  They are used by SmartOS global zones to instance discrete guest zones, either through Triton or directly on the global

SmartOS

Plex on SmartOS

Plex [https://plex.tv/] is a client-server media player suite combined with a hybrid video streaming service, and is currently the most popular do-it-yourself method of media streaming. While the Plex Media Player [https://github.com/plexinc/plex-media-player] is open source, the Plex Media Server is closed source, and only

SmartOS

Samba on SmartOS

While TrueNAS [https://www.truenas.com/] is a powerful tool for setting up simple and easy network addressable storage, there's a lot of unnecessary feature overlap between TrueNAS and SmartOS.  Both operating systems prefer direct hardware access, and passing through ZFS volumes to HVM for TrueNAS to format as ZFS

SmartOS

Ansible on SmartOS

It's easy to have a love-hate relationship with Infrastructure Automation. On one hand, the principle of Infrastructure Automation is fantastic: Using portable and well defined modules of code to ensure consistent deployments of software and configurations to potentially hundreds or thousands of physical or virtual machines is how we should

SmartOS

SmartOS in 2021

What started years ago as a wild goose chase for a scalable first-class hyper-converged infrastructure ultimately led to the fantastic discovery of Joyent SmartOS [https://www.joyent.com/smartos]. While I've barely looked back since, the world has changed significantly since then, especially with the exodus of multiple high [http:

SmartOS

su vs sudo on SmartOS

For as long as there have been multi-user operating systems, there has been the need to switch between those users.  Clearly, this can be done by directly starting a session as a given user, or even logging in again through localhost, but this approach tends to break down when manipulating

SmartOS

The Base SmartOS Zone

SmartOS Zones make for excellent blank slates to do development or production work from. Except as it turns out, they're not blank slates.  The two most minimal Zone images, base and minimal start out with over a dozen running processes on them. What are those processes and what functionality do

SmartOS

Minecraft on SmartOS

Minecraft. It's one of those games that can appeal to many different people in many different ways.  I got into playing under the assumption that modded Minecraft was the norm, and that calculating the optimum designs for automated power production and gargantuan resource-gathering apparatuses was the entire point of the

SmartOS

Configuring Readline on SmartOS

One of the more annoying differences I noticed in the switch from Linux to SmartOS was while connecting to a terminal via PuTTY: The former supports using the Home and End keys to navigate to the beginning and end of a command-line buffer while the latter does not, instead spitting

SmartOS

DLNA on SmartOS

Digital Living Network Alliance [https://www.dlna.org] (DLNA) was a fantastic answer to the age-old question of, "How the heck are we going to get all of these media libraries and media players to talk to each other?!" I say "was" because Plex [https://www.plex.tv] is pretty

SmartOS

Neo4j on SmartOS

If you've never played around with Neo4j before, stop reading this page and download it [https://neo4j.com/download/] now, or at least go try out the Neo4j Sandbox [https://neo4j.com/sandbox/]. Yes, I mean right now. I'll wait. Neo4j is pretty awesome huh? What's that?  You want to

SmartOS

Lets Encrypt on SmartOS

If you think encryption is awesome, then the Let's Encrypt project is pretty much free awesomeness. Operating as a crowd-funded 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Let's Encrypt provides a free, automated and open Certificate Authority to the Internet at large.  Which certainly beats paying for some third-party to sign your

SmartOS

SNAP on SmartOS

Despite being used in the open-source web-development world for over a decade, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) stacks remain a staple of the web-development environment, and show very little signs of fading in general use.  These stacks have driven the development of countless startups and large scale production projects

SmartOS

Receiving Email on SmartOS

If sending email seems difficult, receiving email must seem nightmarishly complex.  One of the biggest issues for senders: differentiating your legitimate email from the sheer volume of unsolicited messages, is nothing compared to being on the business end of that deluge.  In addition to providing the counterparts of nearly everything

SmartOS

Sending Email from SmartOS

Sending email is complicated today.  Unsolicited spam is easily as rampant as it has ever been, which has led to legal precedents, clever countermeasures, and ultimately high technical requirements just to reliably have your email end up in the right inbox. Setting up a simple email server just isn't that

SmartOS

Tunnels on SmartOS

We've all been there: You're managing two private network segments that need to have quick, secure communication between them but are separated by a few hundredths of a second of the wild and open Internet.  What to do... This is a brief guide on setting up a secure IPsec encrypted

SmartOS

Certificate Authority on SmartOS

Running your own Certificate Authority is truly the best option if you're managing a large number of systems which need to have secured, authenticated communication flowing between them.  While it can be a fair amount of work to setup and maintain, it is much cheaper than signing each of your

SmartOS

Certificates on SmartOS

Encryption.  Pretty much the coolest thing since sliced bread.  Where would we be without it?  Probably not using iPhones, instead, calling our banks and talking to real people to get business done.  In short, we'd be in the dark ages. This guide will go over how to setup X.509

Encryption

Asymmetric Cryptosystems

This week, we will be diving a bit deeper into how asymmetric cryptosystems work to answer common questions about key size and key type. This article is part of an ongoing series on using X.509 encryption on SmartOS.  It's recommended to read the previous article [https://blog.brianewell.com/