Special Guest Co-Presenter: Russ Woodman from Linux In The Ham Shack

Errata: Jon got Streisand Routing wrong in the last show.

Russ works for a Broadband Carrier (ISP) that also supplies telephone, cellular (mobile), internet, satellite and cable. He’s in a team of 5 people, and is the main escalation point for the team.

Jon explains “Pets versus Cattle” (badly) and Russ explains they’re converting from Pets to Cattle.

The Broadband Carrier that Russ works for uses mostly open source technologies, and he is trying to move to more robust services.

He explains his path to Linux and Open Source, via VMS, BSD, Minix and SCO Unix. He started in his current job just after Y2K but has been working in System Administration for many years before that.

Russ talks about using Amateur Radio with Linux and Open Source.

We talk about how his job has changed, which is mostly in the abstraction of Hardware away from users, but Russ also talks about REST APIs and SOAP.

We all talk about Cloud reliability and cost.

Jerry brings up RINA.

Russ talks about his home network. Jon talks about “Becoming your own WISP”.

Al asks Russ about Amateur Radio and how you use it from Linux. Russ talks about different transmission modes and encoding/decoding. He then explains a bit about the Linux In The Ham Shack podcast.

Al talks about setting up a new server for hosting WordPress and how he’s moving away from FreeBSD to Ubuntu (or RedHat/CentOS). He asks for guidance about Ansible and authentication. Russ suggests OpenSUSE as an alternative to review as well. Jon mentions about commercial support. Jon also talks about the recent history of SUSE. Al asks about running sudo to become root. Jon talks about setting up TOTP (Google Authenticator) and enabling it for PAM authentication.

Al also asks about Linux permissions. Russ talks about setting permissions. There is a talk about SetUID and SetGID. Jon suggests using containers or chroot instead of trying to harden a whole machine. Jerry talks about ACLs.

Al goes on to ask about whether he’s in the right job. Jerry, Jon and Russ all provide their viewpoints.

Al mentions about a telegram group which he heard about on Tuxjam Podcast which alert you on the latest security alerts  https://t.me/itsecalert

We read some feedback

• Gary Williams talks about naming conventions on servers, dnsnames for SQL servers
• Mike Bickerton says we’re good 🙂 Mentions we’re very Windows, likes the audio, and asks about the theme tune (it’s “Now It’s Over” by “The ClayFoxes” as listed on our “About” page.) He mentions he asked our telegram channel for help with getting DNS hosting on Hurricane Electric, and then blogged about it. Jerry mentions some alternatives. Russ asks about IPv6 records.
• Paul Tansom mentions his naming conventions

We ask a question for a follow-up podcast – if you have got some suggestions about how you would do a backup for your clients and customers which doesn’t involve spending money, or at least, as cheaply as possibly.

We mention FossTalk Live (9th June at King’s Cross, London), OggCamp (18th and 19th August in Sheffield) and Podcrawl Glasgow (28th July in Glasgow).

Please consider spreading the word about the podcast. We have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. The team chat on Telegram, and if you want to support the show, we have a Patreon account.

What would you would like to see on the podcast? Is there anything we should change? Please get in touch via our Telegram group or email feedback@nospam.adminadminpodcast.co.uk (remove the filter to send the mail…) 🙂