gemini.git

48b5c3106030f30d9927514964710ec6490f22aa - Matthew Ernisse - 1615222409
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+Title: Sysadmining: A series introduction?
+Date: 3/8/2021 11:50
+
+## The Idea
+
+I'm thinking about writing a series of articles on how (and why) I run things
+around here.  I spent the better part of a decade working for a national ISP
+and developed habits and methods for building and caring for systems operating
+not only at scale but in an environment where 'move fast and break stuff' was
+not only a resume generating event but also potentially a way to get in trouble
+with various State and Federal regulators.  It seems that in the early days of
+the Internet it was expected that anyone other than end-users would be able to
+run basic Internet services at their site for themselves, but now the norm
+even for technical people is to hand control for all of that away to someone
+else.  Things like e-mail, news, DNS, web, ftp, file and print services
+were all commonly 'self-hosted' and I still prefer the level of control I have
+over my Internet experience that comes from 'self-hosting'.
+
+## What a Long, Strange Journey it has been
+
+Over the years I have spent a lot of time trying new things and refining
+down the processes that knit all this crap together so that my hobby, which
+became the doorway to my career wouldn't consume my life.  Infrastructure
+needs caring for but it shouldn't be all consuming.  As it stands today
+the choices I have made support what I may describe as a medium-complexity
+home network and Internet site.
+
+### Network Diagram
+
+```
++-----+          +------+         +-----+
+| SJC | <----->  | COLO | <-----> | NYC |
++-----+          +------+         +-----+
+                   ^ ^
+                  /   \
+                 v     v
+         +--------+   +------+
+         | OFFICE |   | HOME |
+         +--------+   +------+
+```
+
+The network today looks like this.  It is interconnected by IPSec tunnels
+over which I run GRE so that I can provide dynamic routing (previously with
+BGP but now with OSPF).  The three sites across the top provide public and
+private services and the two bottom sites are mostly client devices
+and internal only services.  This demarcation has been the result of changes
+in the Internet.  When I started this whole journey there was only 1 site,
+my home, and all it had was a dial-up connection at a screamingly fast 14,400
+baud.  You might think it impossible but I ran my website, e-mail and DNS all
+on that dial-up connection with very few problems.  The growth of the Internet
+and malware based SPAM changed the landscape over the years, requiring me to
+move my public-facing infrastructure to a colocation provider to get access
+to non-residential IP space.
+
+## Topics and Audience
+
+It is the fate of any human system that becomes successful enough so as to
+move into the public consciousness as 'infrastructure' to become magic to
+the general populous.  There was a time when electricity was novel and new
+and so nearly anyone that was involved with it knew it intimately but now
+all the genius and complexity of the system falls quietly into the background,
+hidden behind a wall of standards, specifications, tribal knowledge, and
+assumptions that it will Just Work.  So too computers are starting to fade
+into that realm, layers of abstraction hiding ever more complexity, the 
+inter-networking of them being largely taken care of as a service.  This isn't
+for everyone, that is for sure.  Many technical people are perfectly content
+with opening up their web browser and VSCode and writing some JavaScript,
+clicking a button to sending it to GitHub and calling themselves a developer.
+That's fine, we will always need those kinds of people; however, if you are
+curious about some of the underpinnings that make that workflow function then
+you might find a series like this useful.
+
+## Up Next
+
+I think the first topic I'll discuss will be DNS.  Once you have yourself
+layer 3 network connectivity in almost all cases you will need yourself
+some DNS.
+
+Let me know if you find this series idea interesting.