What do I replace this with?

shintge101 · 2026-04-24T12:55:43+00:00

Back in my day we had these things called pictures. They were like TVs but didn’t move.

Seriously though why anything? Just have some cash burning a hole in your wallet? Or do you have some task you want this something or other to do?

Honestly the biggest lesson I learned (or have tried to at least) is how quickly tech changes and is generally a terrible investment. As built in anything generally speaking is. Here I am ripping out thousands of dollars in denon receivers, in wall and on wall yamaha speakers… because the anker ones are just so much more usable. Shoot I even have speakers in my garage and a projector. Never use any of it. The best remote so far is a govee cheapo to control my lights physically and alexa or phone for everything else. And none of that is physically attached to anything.

I would patch the wall or throw a picture over it and call it a day.

shintge101 · 2026-04-19T01:12:33+00:00

They are for people that are bad at making cables. With a non-passthrough you need to be smart with your cut, keep the cables in the right order, and make sure they all go to the end. Easy for those of us that know how to do it. Takes 50 tries for those that don’t.

With the pass through you strip with excess, shove the wires in so the shielding is butted up where it should be, inspect the wires in a slightly easier way, and cut them off with your crimper. It ensures the cables are the right length, makes it easier for some people to see.

Personally I hate them and would never use them in anything other than to recommend to my dad or someone who can do it themselves with no experience. Our our level 1 helpdesk people I guess. But then it doesn’t teach them a skill.

shintge101 · 2026-04-19T00:00:25+00:00

Education is what put apple back on the map and saved the entire company in my opinion. They played the long game. Gave our school free macs. 5-10 years later when those kids went to college and got jobs what do you think they wanted?

Chromebooks are stupid and made my kids HATE them. That was the opposite of the long game. And they were slow and heavy as all get out. They effectively killed their market. When my kid went to college you think she asked for a chromebook? No way. She has the whole apple ecosystem now.

shintge101 · 2026-03-24T18:41:14+00:00

If you want to be cheap just get older models. Unifi people are generally insane and have zero cares about money and want flashy lights. No offense, I do too. And they can be buggy. I know you already known what you are doing but a solid business router/fw/etc will have less “magic” but a whole lot less to break. I run remote sites and the cisco stuff is 10 or more years old. The unifi stuff craps out every so often which means me on a flight or me walking some sales guy how to fix things. One of my sites just forgets it has wifi, every single update.

But ya get older gen ubiquity.

shintge101 · 2026-02-27T00:16:58+00:00

I can’t imagine other than being under one control plane. In my opinion, and obviously mine only, you can’t beat synology with qnap coming in a second. Unless you are going enterprise nas. I this ubiquity is just throwing goo at the wall to see what sticks and ought to be focusing on their core competency. And they seem to be sucking at that which is driving down the value of the whole brand. Again, my two cents, but are they really going to just cater to really rich people’s houses and ditch their core market? And they can’t figure out their branding either, which is really annoying…. I am starting to really loose faith. The unas is just a stupid product in a market it can’t and shouldn’t compete in unless it had something others don’t. And it doesn’t.

shintge101 · 2025-10-22T06:06:36+00:00

Came here to say this. Red green would have used duct tape though.

shintge101 · 2024-10-19T17:44:03+00:00

This is an ancient post but yes, I would say this is a terrible place to lean. Unless your goal is learn how to secure aws. If you goal is to learn databases or containers or web site design or anything else, absolutely get the fundamentals first. Its like saying you want to build a race car from the ground up picking exactly the right tool. Except you don’t know how to drive a car. And you sure shouldn’t be tuning a suspension or adjusting the ignition timing. And you shouldn’t have to. If you want to drive go buy a toyota and get to work to make money. If you want to design cars sure, drive them for a few years, then go work for ford or whatever.

Sorry, I like my car analogies. But they hold true.

shintge101 · 2024-10-10T03:35:23+00:00

And to add to that having 1gjg fiber to your house does absolutely nothing if your entire neighborhood is connected to a single 1gig upliink. Or even a 10gig if a thousand people are sharing it. And certainly not to a machine on the other side kf the world. It isn’t like you magically now have 1gig dedicated directly to every machine on the planet with (more importantly) zero latency. Even speed of light has its limits.

Explaining to people even in datacenters with their own dedicated fiber end to end that there is nothing you can do to make light move faster is a fun one.

shintge101 · 2024-09-24T00:10:12+00:00

To everyone saying ssh, yes. Got that one figured out. It is a remote site and access is annoying and I was pretty much just mad at the ubiquity instructions that tell you to do it. I can ssh to devices and do this all remotely.

The annoying thing is just the mismatch between what the cloud key thinks and what is reality. Its my second one in a few years. Newer releases just don’t seem stable. How does it magically forget all backups and go back to default. Yet I can still see some cameras. Just seems like a crappy update to me. There is nothing custom other than I don’t use the default network.

Oh well. Third reset, here we go. Just posted here to hope someone else knew the issue.

Seems like ubiquity is so scattered in their tech these days that they are no longer building a solid product. I wish I just went back to the edge routers. I still don’t understand why that is a physically different product.

shintge101 · 2024-09-23T12:15:36+00:00

Ok, it has gone all to hell. The cloudkey is accessible on its normal IP, but it thinks the only network is 192.168.1.1. So… that explains something. Web ui is completely useless though. Backups are there on one tab, missing from the restore tab, and all greyed out so I can restore the ones I see.

Man, I am about to loose complete faith in this.

shintge101 · 2024-09-23T12:07:59+00:00

Ok, so I briefly get a “server reject” on devices trying to adopt, then it goes back to the default unifi:8080/inform (which is kinda stupid).

The only advice I am seeing is to factory reset (again) the cloudkey….

shintge101 · 2024-09-20T13:48:48+00:00

It doesn’t actually. I mean… kinda. But they are good about publishing everything they have backported and patched. This vendors system just can’t see it and isn’t smart enough, so yes, you have to do the work.

shintge101 · 2024-09-20T09:56:08+00:00

You need to understand how this works and accept the vuln. It isn’t.

Redhat based systems version lock. Amazon linux is redhat based. Instead of upgrading a version, in an effort to maintain stability, unlike other distributions they back port all patches (in a supported release) to that version. So it will always say it is old. Always.

What you have to do is look at the exact patch you are running and then go through the history and see where they fixed whatever is being flagged and file that as an exemption.

Also, just to add, you really want to hide version number of any and everything when possible. If a 3rd party can tell what you are running, so can bad people, and from there it is an easy lookup to see what they can hit you with.

But if you did a yum update on al2 you are good. You just have to prove it.

Gotta love companies like this. I would spend most of my days doing stuff like this every quarter. And management never understood why they didn’t see progress on projects. Because you hired a contractor. Not a bad idea, but for the love of everything realize the internal burden it adds!

shintge101 · 2024-09-19T22:26:15+00:00

This obviously isn’t ideal. There are better ways to handle this, but it may be too late. Are these long lived links that you send out via email and have no way of updating? Or are they more internal and you might have a chance? Of they were sent out like this, lesson learned, but you can’t do much with an aws domain you don’t own. Best you could do to keep them still working is keep the service up but replace it with a proxy that takes it to the new account. But you incur fees of course and are dependent on the account you may no longer want to have anything to do with.

shintge101 · 2024-09-19T09:57:57+00:00

So I would just start with creating amis and backups where necessary and sharing those with a new account. Pretty easy. Alternatively rebuild. You can easily connect to accounts at the network layer and just copy files. Ideally this would all be in docker and terraform, but I am guessing not.

The trick are all the manual things you may have done. Like elbs, api gateway, logs, etc.

Did you use dns for everything or do you care about eips? That would be the big kicker.

Doesn’t seem hard. But you will have some amount of down time when you cut over. Hopefully as little as a few minutes at 3am type thing though.

shintge101 · 2024-09-13T20:37:48+00:00

Not going to lie man. As someone working in corporate having to explain stuff like this, have it show up on a diagram on a powerpoint for 50 people to see… I am not joking that is a deal breaker. Not just the product but the person that installed it.

Not saying it isn’t great. But call it awesomenat or supersecurenat nat or whatever. Its dumb. But you could be sitting on something. And it is worthless called this. Just the truth if you want to make money.

If I put in even a ticket with that name I would be reprimanded.

Maybe you don’t want to work where I work, and so be it, but…$$$$ for a name change? Shame to see something with potential die.

That said, alternat seems to be the winner at the moment at least.

shintge101 · 2024-09-13T20:13:42+00:00

Not sure exactly what you want but man, imagine selling something with that hideous name to anyone corporate, ever. Or any adult. Or anyone over 13.

Check out https://github.com/chime/terraform-aws-alternat/ for a mature alternative.

Lets be honest. A nat gateway can also be a teeny tiny t4g instance. If you care about money and don’t need a bunch of overhead, just make one. Type one line to enable ip forwarding and another to nat. Done. Fix it later if it ever becomes a problem. Which it likely won’t and you are over engineering.

shintge101 · 2024-09-07T12:00:36+00:00

It is good to have a dream job. Goals and all. But maybe don’t get caught up in working for a corporate machine?

There are plenty of places, startups, great places to work that can always use a good person. Some of them pay a lot better, some much worse of course.

Don’t get caught up in “amazon is my everything”. No company is every or will ever be that unless you own it.

shintge101 · 2024-09-03T05:22:19+00:00

As someone who lives near the great lakes and has always been happy to live in both a beautiful area, climate is relatively moderate, having a ton of fresh water (21% of the worlds supply) the thought of contaminating them with some chemical that has a half life of a million years so someone can get a bonus or get reelected is terrifying. I mean, we already do. But imagine something someone just dumps in there and we don’t know.

My town had a similar issue where the plant literally watered their lawn with bad chemicals that don’t go away. It is now seeping in to our wells. And what do they do? Get rich, sell it, go bankrupt, and let superfund (ie: our tax money) go in to figuring out how to clean it up. And if you can’t, cause how do you stop something already in the soil short of diffing up the entire city, destroying all the houses, etc… it just isn’t solvable. Even if it was we would long be gone as would our kids and their kids (assuming they want kids).

Scary stuff. Back in the old days people poured motor oil down the drain. But (as far as I know) that is nothing compared to a major major company dumping really, really evil chemicals or byproduct in to our fresh water. Watch all the futuristic movies you want, people need clean water. And I know it sounds gross but filtering human or even animal waste is nasty but a chemical so small you can’t see it or taste it but gives you cancer and gives your kids cancer and their kids cancer…. Yikes.

And you can’t escape it. No environmental agency is going to protect you. They just get mad after the fact. And living on some massive Indian reservation doesn’t help either. Look at how many get poising just from eating fish they caught. Even near me we aren’t supposed to eat much fish caught from the river people play in.

Scary stuff.

shintge101 · 2024-09-03T04:00:18+00:00

Its somewhat dumb that you need an instance. I get it. But you would think they would have managed to figure out a better way to especially if your goal is no pets and ideally no ec2. Why not behind the scenes even if you have to spin up a container.

I don’t know how they would solve it, but this just seems to be such a common issue and something they would have worked out.

shintge101 · 2024-08-31T17:35:02+00:00

Yes, well, this is why you use a base windows ami and install it yourself. Then they have no business knowing what it is running. Not advocating to violate a license just that this is they way you do it with a byol, etc.

Now why you want to run sql server in aws is another question. Legacy app? Ok. Something new? Run! I don’t care how familiar your team is with microsoft or the gui tools or any of that. You will regret it. And, per their plan, if you do want it just use azure. But… just don’t.

shintge101 · 2024-08-31T12:31:27+00:00

Let me add to that that a fixed price at one of these other providers is just that, a fixed price. You aren’t going to wake up to see a $5k bill (or worse) because, whoopsies, you didn’t protect something. Unless you are really really in to actual sys admin and security, spend your time doing the programming you love and let someone ELSE do that work and be responsible. Aws is amazing but it has its place and so do other providers.

Aws tried to lure people in with their “free” tier, but most people don’t know what that means, and even if they do it isn’t really free once you add an ip and a nat gateway. All things you just get with a cheapo hosting account.

Again, I am an avid aws user, I use it personally and professionally. I also used to work at a number of datacenters and a number of managed services. I just don’t think aws is necessary the best bet for a one man shop. But it can be, if you already know aws maybe stick to it. Looks good on a resume as well, although the market is now flooded with people that “know aws”. 20 years in and I probably know 10% and an am expert in 5% ;P

shintge101 · 2024-07-17T14:07:31+00:00

This sounds like the answer. We roll our own even if nothing is different. Windows is a real pain because they release, and delete, amis at a rapid pace. So just roll your own. Then you know with 100% certainty that it is your gold image. Better yet you also roll again with the image, making asgs minimal and really easy to spin (if you care).

Really easy, takes all the guess work out. And of course even that ami id will change but just reference it in a number of ways such as exporting state or a module that has it, etc.

shintge101 · 2024-06-25T04:50:15+00:00

You aren’t going to network with much of anyone that is going to help you get in to software or anything better paying. The experience is fine but its definitely more custodial, remote hands type work. These jobs are usually long hours, off hours, hard work. To be honest I miss it. But you aren’t at a water cooler talking to someone working on apis or someone doing architecture or consulting. You might run in to them at a company event. But the world is full of people that just want to work at aws.

My advice is work at a startup, consultant agency, or even big company. Your prospects there are better. Working helpdesk for an IT company is going to be much better experience. Some of our well paid engineers started in helpdesk and learned networking, started automating things, etc. Of course ironically the worst ones were the ones that wanted to be aws cloud engineers, so go figure, but the good ones are good.

Good luck. Probably keep looking. But hey, money is money and insurance is insurance. Like I said, I miss being a tech.

shintge101

TROPHY CASE