Tiernans Comms Closet

After many years, I am finally trying to move to a proper VoIP system for the house. This post will explain what I am using, how I am setting it up, and some other details you might (or might not) find useful.

First, backstory. I have been interested in VoIP for many years. The first post I wrote about Ito this site was here back in 2012, but I had posted about it on my other site back in 2008. It got my attention years ago as a way of saving money on calls, but in recent times, that has changed a little, mainly because most providers gives you calls for free (my mobile and land lines both come with unlimited calls and with my mobile, I can make them anywhere in Europe). The new reason I am interesting in VoIP is consolidation: I currently have 3 mobile phone numbers, at least 1 landline dedicated to me in the house, plus a work landline. I want to be able to pick up any phone and make a call, and it show as coming from my main number. Or a call comes in and i can pick it up from any of my phones. And that is what i am trying to do here. I (will) have some of it working, but some parts are still missing.

In yesterdays post, i mentioned that i wanted to try get an auto deploy working for this site. It already builds auto-magically using Forestry and puts the static HTML into a Github repo, but i needed to manually update the servers hosting the site. Well, not any more!

using the magic of Github’s Web hooks, the Webhook project and a small piece of bash shell script, i have managed to get this auto deploying.

After a LOT of messing with Jekyll, i have finally moved to Hugo! There are a few things that don’t fully work yet, and there will be updates to the site soon enough, but for the moment, I am happy. Its also a LOT faster to build than Jekyll, and less dependencies. Happy days!

[update] I though i should probably update this post with a bit more information around hows its built, why i moved to Hugo, and some more links, etc.

So, a few days back I got an email from Packet.net about a promotion they and AMD where running. Essentially, they gave me some credit for their service (I am an existing customer) to play with one of their c2.medium machines. A c2.medium comes with an AMD EPYC 7401P which consists of 24 physical cores clocked at 2Gz with an all core boost at 2.8Gz and a max clock of 3Gz, 48 threads, 64GB ECC Memory, 2x120GB SSDs for boot and 2x480GB SSDs for main storage. It also has a 20Gb network link (2x10gb bonded) and can run pretty much any OS you can think of (Windows is not on the list officially, but you can boot off your own ISO, so you could probably get it on there. might not be supported, but it might be possible). All this for $1 per hour! And did i mention they are bare metal machines?

So, if you are reading this page, it is being delivered with the magic of Anycast. Well, technically, it was before, since i used Cloudflare, and it still is because of Cloudflare, but also because of my own ASN (As204994), some servers in different locations, and some magic, which i will explain a bit of in this post.

This all started late last year when i got my hands on an ASN and a /48 block of IPv6 addresses. I had been reading stuff about BGP, routing, etc, and decided to go all in. it was quite cheap with the help of HostUS. All in, it was about $50 for the year. As part of the process, i needed 2 upstream providers to say they would accept my announcement. They were Hurricane Electric though their Tunnel Broker service, and Vultr using a few of their VPSs.

So, a few months back I bought myself an iPad Pro. I got a 10.5" with 64GB Storage and the Smart Keyboard. Since then, i have been mostly using it for playing around: watching YouTube, Netflix, surfing on the couch, etc. but i started to wonder how “Pro” this was…so i went and did some testing, and in the end nearly all of this post is being written on it…

first, the good stuff:

So, a few weeks back, CrashPlan, one of my chosen backup services, decided to kill their consumer backup plans. Which made me have to rethink my backup plan for the house…

Note: This is how I am backing up files, and may or may not work for you. Some of this is already in “production” as of today, but others are planned… Any questions, comments, etc, leave them in the comments.

So, first, as mentioned above, CrashPlan’s consumer backup options are now dead. They are giving you the option of either upgrading to their Small Business Plan for free till the end of your current contract + 2 months, or moving to Carbonite. For me, i just moved to their Small Business option, since its free, and meant that most of my backups just migrated over… i did not, how ever, look too much into Carbonite.

So, as you probably know, this site is built with Jekyll. Jekyll is a Static Site Generator, basically taking an input of a load of text files (see the source repo for this site on Github here) and generating a load more HTML (the static HTML is hosted on Github here, which auto publishes to Azure App Service).

In previous posts, i have talked about using the likes of Visual Studio Code and Mark Down Monster to build the site. Well, a few days back, i found Forestry.io. Its a web application which, in my case, is linked with my GitHub repo (the Jekyll source one) and allows me to make changes to the code easily. Because the way i build my site is a little different, i manually build the site and push to the destination GitHub project, but they have features allowing you to push directly to SFTP or FTP servers, GitHub, or some other options.

A few years back, i created a post showing you how to add an Alias to PowerShell to easily start Sublime Text from a PowerShell command line . This worked well, but this is 2017 (that post is from 2012!) and my daily text editor has changed. I have moved to Visual Studio Code for most of my daily work. It works well 95% of the time. I still use Visual Studio Pro for C# Development, but for quick fixes and work on, say Go or smaller edits, Code is great. For blogging, on the other hand, I am trying out MarkDown Monster but code still has some nice features. We will see how tests go.

in a previous post, I talked about setting up a distributed S3 like data storage system using Minio and ZeroTier. Well, this week, the ZeroTier guys tweeted about this.

A few people then started asking questions, and looking for a follow up, so here it is.

First, a quick recap. I had 4 machines, all running Linux. Three of them were in 1 time zone (GMT+1) and one was in another (GMT). Looking at the Distributed Minio Quickstart Guide again, there is a mention of times being in sync. which is probably why this did not work as planned. and by “not work as planed”, I mean that Minio would crash, or not be responsive, or not write data in the place it should have. which was a pain. But looking at the documentation again, they do mention that Windows support is “experimental” which means, hopefully, some day it will be not so experimental, and might work. Given that most of my machines in house are Windows boxes, this would be a nice feature.