I once had a dream.

Relaxing somewhere at the edge of a hill looking ahead into mountains, sipping a cold beer while procrastinating on my laptop.

Tatra Mountains seen from Pieniny, Poland

But not just some crapass laptop!

Dual Xeon or a Threadripper, tons of RAM and an entire f**king disk array. All that, of course, working on Linux, with battery lasting at least half a day and being mobile enough to put into my biking backpack.
And don’t forget a high resolution IPS screen 😉

Today, you actually can purchase a machine that pretty much meets these requirements. Some vendors offer Mobile Workstation Laptops with a Xeon CPU, up to 64GB of RAM, at least one SSD and a good ol’ 2.5” HDD. That being said, getting a new one may require selling your leg and liver in the DarkNet, and hitting a gym to get fitter for carrying around a power adapter of a size of a large brick and extra swappable batteries, so if you value your liver more or not a fan of exercise, you need to find a different solution. (more…)

(Hey, for Part 1 have a look here: https://cepa.io/2018/02/10/linuxizing-your-windows-pc-part1/)

Last week I presented how to setup basic Linux features on Windows through the Bash On Windows aka Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). You should be now able to run variety of Linux apps both command line and with GUI. Also, presented how to install Docker and Vagrant which are popular tools to isolate your host environment from development playground.

Let’s install essential tools for variety of modern software development technologies and get prepared for some hardcore coding battles!

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(Hey, just finished Part 2, have a look here: https://cepa.io/2018/02/20/linuxizing-your-windows-pc-part2/)

On 30^th of March 2016 hell officially froze. Microsoft, the eternal rival of the open source movement, has officially announced that form now on you can run Linux apps on Windows! Just like that.

Those of you who are in IT for years may recall a famous sentence Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, said in 2001. He called Linux a “cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”.
Well, times have changed, and so have the large companies.

Yeah, but who cares about some new geeky stuff in Windows?

(more…)

Can you code? If so, do you remember your first working programs? Have you asked yourself how the hell could you wrote this crap?
I just did 😀

One lazy Saturday afternoon, decided to do something more productive than trolling on social media and finally clean up the mess I had in backups, some of them were actually pretty old, 2006 and earlier. While performing backup archeology I unearthed a few jewels from the past.

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Ever visited r/homelab at Reddit? Folks build computer labs and keep them in their basements.

Well, I do have one myself.

I’ve started building up my DevOps skills a couple of years ago and to have a sandbox to play with started buying networking and virtualization hardware.  While buying more and more stuff, it turned out that packing it into an industrial but portable rack cabinet might help keep the space cleaner and look more ‘professional’. And here it is, my dev lab aka “The Garage Cloud”.

(more…)

New year, new blog, new challenges. Aye!