Posts

Introduction Since some time our kids to to daycare, and the occassionaly place photos on the secured environment. It’s a bit problematic to download the photos. On the phone it feels a bit weird how that works and online you can only fetch one photo at at time. But since they are there for a longer period already, that would mean manually download a lot of photos. So, I decided to write a little python wrapper. Using proxyman in between I analyzed the requests and contents and was able to determine how the login procedure works. We first POST a request to the LOGIN URL and bind a session to the ‘requests’ structure , which we will use later to POST to the album URL (you need to do that first, it seems that the PHPSESSID is then placed on the allowed list or something), which will result in a list of available photos. We can then fetch the items by iterating over the dict and nested list and download the images. We do our best to not overload the server so we delay every other request like a regular browser would also do. ...

Leaving After 15 precious years with many ups and some downs (personally) I sadly decided to leave the mothership of Sue and be part of another company. I will announce which company later on, I need to make it a bit exciting to read right? ;-) Leaving after so many years is a difficult thing, or at least for me. Sue has been part for 3/4 of my professional life, 2 out of my 3 kids where born during my time at Sue. I was seriously ill a few years ago, which made me partially deaf, all during my time at Sue. It feels like close family! ...

CCNP - ENCOR ‘Recently’ Cisco changed the CCNP track quite a lot. In the past it was composed of vertical colums so to say with Routing, Switching and Tshoot as seperated colums. This had the advantage that you could focus on pure Routing and pure Switching and no need to worry about bringing many different knowledge into the exam. To recertify you needed to pass one of the colums to pass and extend the certification for another three years. ...

Introduction For years I have been playing ‘Clash of Clans’. A strategy game that requires you to actively engage with others in either direct battles, or group based battles. You can improve your village by leveling-up housing, spells, troops, the town hall, heroes, having boosters etc. Ofcourse the makers allow you to play for free, which can take quite some time to get progress, or you can buy additional resources and improvements that speed up the process. ...

Introduction For a while now, my hosting company JR-Hosting, was stopped. But I still needed a way to host my mailboxes and that of several other domains that I own. It was brought to my attention that while playing with Docker I could combine that with a mailserver setup. Mailcow, or better Mailcow Dockerized. As there was a previous version which did not use Docker :-). The setup is trivial Installation link or at least it was for me. I used one of the components before, at home, for JRHosting and at work where I created the foundation for the currently still in use rspamd setup at work. ...

Today my first Sue Student Edition happened. Well not entirely true, it happened a few times already and I was present most of the times. But today was somewhat special. I gave the keynote before my coworker Tijmen did a presentation + workshop. And I recapped the event afterwards. Digital edition As Covid is still around very much and restrictions are in place all over, we needed to host this event on our digital platform. For me that was the first time doing a talk on a digital event. Ofcourse as coach for Sue I do this daily, but not as speaker with polls and such. It is good that we practised a bit upfront to be familiar with the tools. ...

For some time I am a perl fan, but perl is not that popular anymore so I decided to try and see whether I can use Python as well. After moving my systems from FreeBSD to Ubuntu and Debian (proxmox needs it) I also used the ’emerging-ipset-update.pl’ script to drop emerging treats as soon as possible. Python After or rather while following the Udemy’s ‘2020 Complete Python bootcamp: From Zero to Hero’ by Jose Portilla (Hi!) I decided that I could rewrite the perl script into python. And so I did. Below is the version that resulted from that effort. It can surely be smarter, so poke me on my email address if that is possible and I’ll update this. Thanks Jose for your great course! I appreciate it! ...

At the end of the month, my company JR-Webscripting en Hosting, will cease to exist. Justin and myself thought things over and with changes in our lives in the entire last year(s), we decided that we needed to spend our time differently. The time and effort of running your own business in the (flooded) hosting market is extremely difficult. You need scale, and offer an interesting price. And it will cost you countless hours. For us, it was worth this effort for almost 15 years, but the balance was lost not that long ago. While our reasons where not in the financial sector (In my opinion, the main reason for stopping most businesses), it does play along. The margins are small with our pricing scheme, and the benefits are low. Too low factually. What weight most for me was the investment of time that I can no longer realise that easily. ...

On my old blog, I tried to remember the passing of Freddy Mercury periodically. I failed to do that for several years. Freddy, wherever you may be, rest in peace. I still remember your music and listen to it very often. I visited the concerts of the remaining band members of Queen, it’s still amazing, even without you. One day, we will meet! Image used from express.co.uk and referenced from them:

As the title states (in dutch sorry it’s the original name, but you can translate it to: autumn conference NLUUG2019), I was at the NLUUG 2019. My last visit with Snow (now Sue) was when it was still in “De Reehorst” in Ede. Which appeared to have been a few years ago. One of the reasons for not visiting it more often is that I was soo much into FreeBSD that I didn’t look around that much. That changed this year when I stopped volunteering for FreeBSD. I got my RHCSA and RHCE this year and as technical field manager I decided to show my face and talk with people (and learn something myself as well). ...