In the beginning of the 21st century, a bunch of my friends/coworkers decided to collaborate to get an affordable internet presence. Running stuff off of your home internet was strongly discouraged (then and now), but the “cloud” didn’t quite exist yet either.

Our first attempt used an early cloud hosting provider, ServPath. This was before virtualization was well established, so this provider rented physical hardware that they managed. Our host was named “zak”, and was the beginning of all of our personal online presences. We all did email for ourselves and had web pages, all hosted on this server.

Every once in a while I need to make sure I can still post to this blog. What prompted this post attempt was the desire to get “verified” on Mastodon. This turns out to be just adding a link to the page you have in your Mastodon profile, but since that page was this blog, and not simply https://blacka.com (which is a very plain ancient style website), I had to figure out how to do that.

I have a common fear: that I’ve left my garage door open without realizing it. This is partly because I’ve absolutely done this, although only when I’m at home. Based on my fear, I’ve successfully trained myself to check the state of the garage door as I leave. However, even with this training, I still harbor this nagging fear.

The pandemic and the subsequent work-from-home stance made this general fear less of an issue, at least in the sense that I wasn’t leaving the garage door open while I wasn’t at home, because I was always at home. Prior to the pandemic, however, I had solved this problem by getting my first smart garage door controller: a Chamberlain “MyQ” device. The primary advantage of the MyQ is that it would alert me if the garage door was left open over a configurable amount of time. While working from home, this turned out to be a surprisingly common issue.

If anyone still had my long dormant blog in their RSS reader, they might have noticed my first post in five years (and my first post with actual content in even longer than that.) Looking at my posts, it is clear that

1. I started this blog using wordpress in 2004.
2. In 2011, I decided that a local wordpress installation was too insecure, and switched to octopress.
3. In 2015, I figured out how to post with octopress again.

Fast forward to 2019. The host that I serve this blog on was seriously old at this point (it had a Celeron!) The colo facility that we had this box in was looking at it with increasing suspicion. So we (finally) replaced it with newer hardware and a recent operating system with essentially a clean build. At this point, I decided that while I wasn’t really posting to this blog, I’d still like to keep it on the Internet. I went about getting Octopress working again. At this point I discovered:

I went to OARC 32 last weekend. I’m not really going to summarize the event, since you should be able to view the presentions yourself. The most gratifying session for me was an early one: Brian Somers’ talk on implementing DNSSEC for Cisco OpenDNS (“Recursive Resolution From the Ground Up”.)

I enjoyed this talk both because it is always fun to hear about other’s development experiences, and because he was basically describing challenges that I’d gone through myself, albeit 15 years earlier. In particular, on slide ten Brian says “NSEC3 was harder; Ironically it cleaned up our NSEC implementation.” This might have been surprising (or non-committal) to most of the audience, but it resonated with me. That is because, when working on defining NSEC3, I realized that NSEC3 was really the same algorithm as NSEC, but with all the steps becoming explicit. (I said basically this 12 years ago too.)

…And another two years has past without updating the blog. Mostly this is because I’ve been having a hard time thinking of suitable topics to actually blog about, but also because I let my blogging setup fall into disarray.

A few things have changed since the last time I tried this. At the moment, I’m somewhat inspired to write this because I’ve upgraded my venerable 6 year old iMac to a fancy 5k iMac, and working on this screen is very nice.