Pontifier

Be the Ocean

I’ve discovered something about many of the business ideas and projects that I have been pursuing lately. They all have a common thread that I had not noticed before. They all involve the concept of “being the ocean”. It is easier for water to enter the ocean than to leave the ocean. All water eventually flows […]

A tangled web of code

I have been thinking a lot about computing. I feel that many of the basic ideas about how computers work could be radically reformulated to create a much more secure and maintainable base to build future systems upon. The basic building blocks of the languages we use are still the variable and the loop. Functions […]

Adventures in provisioning

I have been playing around with various provisioning systems with the goal of being able to just boot up a machine, and have it join my cluster automatically. I have been playing around with Ubuntu MAAS, and Salt lately, and almost have a really good system set up. Key to both MAAS and Salt is […]

The end of internet innocence

I’ve been alarmed to hear about some rather scary things happening in the last few days (possibly due to Black Hat and DefCon which I was unable to attend). I can see the end of internet optimism rapidly approaching, and it will most likely be replaced with justifiable paranoia. In no particular order, the things […]

Postgresql streaming replication part 2: the standby machine

Building on part 2, we have set up the master to connect and store files on the wal-archive machine. Setting up the standby machine will be much like setting up the master… in fact you want to set it up exactly the same way… If it is to be able to take over, it should […]

Postgresql streaming replication part 1: remote wal archive

I finally got streaming replication to work! There were a few things that I needed to set up before it worked right… I will be working under the assumption that you already have SSL connections and authentication set up correctly. First the background. You are probably going to want your WAL archive on another machine, […]

Postgres SSL troubleshooting

I decided to try to build a troubleshooting matrix for Postgres SSL client and server problems because the solutions to each problem were far from intuitive.

Postgresql SSL certificates

I had a devil of a time getting SSL communication between a client and server on 2 virtual machines working, but I finally got it to work. Helpful documentation: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/ssl-tcp.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/auth-pg-hba-conf.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/libpq-connect.html First I followed instructions at http://blog.didierstevens.com/2008/12/30/howto-make-your-own-cert-with-openssl/ to make a self signed root certificate for signing the server and client keys. On each certificate request I […]

Iterative data modeling

I have been having a devil of a time building a good website. There are so many choices for the various ways the site can be built that it’s difficult to lock down the choices and go full bore on the project. One of the more difficult parts of the particular site I am thinking […]

Too many projects… start with Life

I seem to have too many projects, and not enough time. Every time I look around I see ways that the world could be a better place. I am overrun with ideas at every turn. Where can I make the most impact? Why can’t the world be the shining utopia that I see when I […]