With the news that AWS will be now charging about $4 / instance-month for public IPv4 addresses, many developers who procrastinated ipv6 migration are finally updating both ends of their development setup.

It’s a great time to migrate, as all the intermediate infrastructure now supports IPV6 readily. Moreover, you’ll benefit from permanent , global addresses for your development instances.

Pros

• A single, global, stable address for EC2 instances that never changes. No need for dynamic DNS and other hacks
• No need to pay for Elastic IP addresses on dev instances
• Global addressing for mutual duplex services (no more NAT needed)
• Better flexibility and clarity for addressing, including Link Local & local addresses

Cons

• Time needed to migrate infra to IPV6
• Clumsier & less-memorable addresses, with unfamiliar idioms (e.g. no more using 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 – though there are replacements) inherent
• Bugs in legacy code that assumes 32 bit & string-representations of ipv4 addresses

Concepts & Approach

In theory, IPV6 uses 128bit addresses in place of 32 bit. Most of the intermediate infra (ISP, backbone) is now compatible. The two areas of attention for developers would be the server side with AWS , and the client side with your home/office network.

I recently set up a new SER6 and reviewed bloatware / spyware / malware prior to connecting to the internet. There were quite a few posts asking about spyware, and given it’s competitive price point, I was also a bit suspicious. I usually do a malware review before connecting any new device to the internet.

What I reviewed

• running processes and their signatures
• startup apps (Task Manager formerly msconfig)
• Installed Services
• Windows Features Enabled
• Partition Table Review (for malware)
• Local user accounts
• Confirm installed hardware components and brands met specifications.
• BIOS & Windows 11 Secure Boot, TPM & Enhanced Hardware Security settings (see Questionable)

tl;dr & verdict -- This Beelink is the cleanest windows machine I’ve purchased (including Dell, HP, Alienware). Nothing installed would be considered bloatware , spyware or malware. A few installed options (see Questionable, below) were probably added for user-acceptance testing.

By default, all Windows drives are mounted with read & write access (rw) within WSL . Though this is convenient for beginners, it opens up VM shell attacks on your Windows host files.

Instead, we can disable the auto mount feature using wsl.conf and selectively add read-only drives inside the WSL VM using /etc/fstab

Overview

1. Deactivate “auto mount” in /etc/wsl.conf
2. Enable fstab using MOUNTfStAB = true in wsl.conf
3. test config files and mounting work well
4. reboot the wsl VM to complete the setup

Example WSL Config wsl.conf

Place this inside the /etc/ directory on the WSL VM

Smokeping is a self-contained network monitoring app , capable of monitoring using ICMP/Ping, HTTP, DNS – as well as other signals generated from CLI monitoring tools (e.g. curl, dig, mtr etc). It provides a web-based monitoring UI to chart the probe measurements so no further monitoring apps (like Prometheus) are needed.

Running smokeping on a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero is a fun experiment in lightweight computing . Using Apache Mod FastCGI makes the app usable on the meager hardware.

Every app has that last inch (or mile) of code that’s not covered by tests. Usually it’s an interactive cycle of compile-run-inspect on the command line like

You Test

 curl -X POST https://reqbin.com/echo/post/json

##👀 You Expect:

{"success":"true"}

Despite having 3-4 testing frameworks for unit tests, e2e, regression etc– there’s always a gap where you find yourself re-playing commands in the terminal to test.

A common case is 🔥firefighting where ad-hoc tests are needed to validate an emergency config change or deployment.

Recently an old friend, with great experience as an IC, PM and EM, called me to ask for some advice. He had been running his business for a while and took up a new role as an engineering manager after some time. “What areas do you focus on as an EM?, particularly when joining a new team”.

I divided the conversation into three pillars: strategy & inventory, technical (aka going deep) and career / personal

One responsibility of engineers & especially leads is managing many channels of signals : emails, blog posts (internal and external), tags , push notifications, group chats, alerts from dashboards and more.

These signals tend to scale exponentially to the number of projects & people that you are responsible for.

Quickly you’ll need to set up a system to make sure that you are receiving high-signal information and filtering out low-signal noise. How do you do that?

Directory layouts are like log cabins that start from a basic shed, gradually adding a room at a time. When you start out on UNIX, everything gets thrown in your home directory. Over time you start to develop a structure for your sources, binaries, projects, data files (like CSV, images, tar files), config, etc

My layout is called TDL – because it allows me to juggle open source projects, partnerships and jobs in a consistent structure across machines and time.

Cloud instances bill by the hour (or the minute) – and right now you’re burning money. Use snooze to auto-shutdown your instances in 45 minutes.

Add snooze to your ~/.bashrc

alias snooze='sudo shutdown -c ;  sudo shutdown -h +45 &'
snooze

When you want to extend your session, run snooze

Broadcast message from ec2-user@ip-172-31-43-250
	(/dev/pts/1) at 2:50 ...

The system is going down for halt in 45 minutes!

How does this work?

shutdown -c cancels the shutdown, and shutdown -h +45 schedules a shutdown in 45min.

I work from about 7 different machines, including 3 laptops, ipad, chromebook and a PC desktop. Usually this means keeping credentials, config, build dependencies and IDEs in sync across all 3–and the iPad & Chromebook just can’t run my dev environment

I considered a few options to enable seamless work across devices

Solution

1. Launch Cloud9 Environment on AWS
2. Install VS Code + SSH Remote Extension
3. Install tmux

With this setup, you get the highest-fidelity experience when you can (with VS code), plus an adequate experience on iPad & Chromebook (cloud9 web ide). With tmux you get seamless handoff across all devices.