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Stuff Rob Wrote

Sometimes, Rob writes stuff, and some of it ends up here.

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What a Terrible Day to Have a Computer

Well. Today* was fueled by caffeine and adrenaline. If you're any sort of system administrator, or know any system administrators, you know what I'm talking about.

Maybe some online stuff you're using has been down, or performing poorly, and you're hearing it is, or might be, DDoS. What does that mean, and why is it hard for them to solve this problem? DoS stands for Denial of Service - straightforward, an attacker is trying to deny (prevent) someone the ability to use a service. Why? We'll get to this at the end of the article when we talk about how to make it stop - it'll make sense then.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About AT Protocol and Bluesky

I've been interested in atproto (the protocol that Bluesky, Blacksky, and many other applications - including pckt, where this blog is hosted! - run on) for about a year now. I'm by no means an expert, but I've read a lot of documentation and discussion, looked at various versions of the architectural diagrams, and spent a lot of time thinking about the implications for scaling, decentralization, and other aspects of design and operation. I run my own PDS. I wrote some clients that consume fireh...

Calgary ... Texas?

How IP Geolocation Works, and How It Goes Wrong

Datacenters in Utah: A Photo Essay

There's a lot of stuff going around about datacenters, so I've spent some time in the last week visiting some of the ones in northern Utah. I started with a quick tour or some of the datacenters in the Salt Lake Valley. Some are indeed quite large, but there are a bunch of smaller ones too - and they are not always where you think! All of these are publicly known, and you can find them (and ones in your own area) at https://www.datacentermap.com/.

You've reached the end.