powernine.net

I need to blog more. Lots of stuff I could talk about, both in and out of the tech world and given how much content is moving to private Discord servers or buried in ancient reddit theads, it’s probably good to have a few things on regular old boring websites. More to come? Maybe?

Ok, one thing I want to touch on right away. I’m reading through my old post about UniFi and wanted to touch on a few items related to that. Obviously a lot has changed in the past seven years and this probably warrants a more in-depth post but for now I’ll throw out some quick bullet points. It’s probably worth noting that I have worked with UniFi extensively since my last post in February 2013 – in fact the computer I am typing this on is connected via a UniFi Switch 8 and I have multiple APs at home, as well as our setup at work and many client sites with one or more APs.

Key differences:

• Most APs now support standard 802.3 PoE. There are a handful of older APs that only support Ubiqiti’s passive 24V PoE and a handful of other devices that support both but have limits on their support in one direction or another. There are also quite a few newer devices that do not support the old passive standard. Thankfully there is a handy support matrix ( https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000263008-UniFi-Supported-PoE-Protocols ).
• The management stack has come a LONG way. It absolutely does run on Linux now (as well as Windows and macOS) and there are all kinds of places to run it other than a premise machine. My personal preferred approach is a tiny Linux VM (I use a Debian 9 VM with 2GB RAM, 1 CPU core and 30GB disk at home – and I’m sure it could be made smaller) but I’m interested in playing around with the various Docker images that are out there. Ubiqiti also offers their CloudKey management appliances (which are okay but pretty expensive for what you get), and it’s easy to run in the public cloud if need be.
• Ubiqiti now offers a cloud management interface (which plugs into the local controller, wherever it happens to run). I don’t have a ton of experience with it, but it’s certainly handy.
• Greatly expanded product line – in additon to many APs, there are switches, camera gear, lighting, firewalls, etc. There’s also a ton of non-UniFi gear in their product line. How good that gear is in absolute terms varies a bit but the value for money is typically hard to beat.

Again this is probably something I could write several posts about but for now I wanted to throw out some commentary to update my post from 2013.

Well, not that long. Eighteen months with no new posts is still way less than my last update gap. Still wearing my consultant hat, still a coffee and beer lover, Windows 7/2008 has finally gone EOL, Palo Alto is buying everything in sight, Intel continues to get security egg on their face and the industry is as interesting as ever.

I don’t know that I will ever keep updating on a regular basis but perhaps I will. I certainly have plenty to say these days. I just got done moving the site from a relatively ancient CentOS 6/Apache/MySQL backend to a modern-ish Debian 10/nginx/MariaDB VPS (still at Linode and still using Cloudflare) which is probably worthy of a post on it’s own. My core Linux/UNIX background came from my high school days running FreeBSD 4.8 (and Apache 1.3!) on an old Pentium P5-200 in my bedroom. I’ve obviously kept those skills up to date but I’m still used to thinking in those terms (and I still support a lot of CentOS 6.x) so dealing with systemd and nginx config files requires a bit of extra thinking.

Anyway, perhaps more to come soon.

It’s been a while! Lots to catch up on – plenty of tech industry changes since 2013, even with the relatively few number of areas I specifically touched on previously. I still like Ubiquiti (even more now than five years ago), I spent a couple of years using macOS almost exclusively at my day job, Windows 8.1 was eclipsed by Windows 10, Dell divested SonicWALL, and oh yeah, I’m consulting these days.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I have a lot to talk about. Amazingly this dusty old WordPress has held up pretty well (and upgraded cleanly to the latest version!), so it looks like I’ve still got a venue for it. I’m sitting much more on the backend side of the house these days but I still have some opinions on the desktop area of things (to say nothing of mobile).