blog.dasrecht.net

So obviously most of the countries suggest or force their citizens to stay home. Not a hugely big change from my side as I work from home regularly – but it’s pretty interesting when work from home (WFH) is forced upon a lot of people.

Notable things

• All windows were cleaned after 48 hours after starting to work from home full-time
• Fixed my bike (finally!)
• Improvised a standing Desk after 3 Days – To get moving around sometimes
• We cook a lot!
• We also bake a lot of bread – Don’t underestimate a good fresh bread
• Good Internet matters (always)
• A shift in “what’s considered normal” e.g. seeing an advert where people stand in a crowd feels like from a distant past
• An interest in Gardening – Let’s see where that leads to.
• Getting to know our Neighbours and sharing food or even baking a loaf of bread too much and passing it on.
• The first week where the majority of the population was forced to work from home were not really productive as everyone started to communicate on any channels and ask for best practices on video conferencing stuff and how to use chat
• Limiting media usage is key – see Screentime
• Taking breaks and enforcing lunchtime is needed – it’s too easy to just work through it – Thinking about getting back and trying out the Pomodoro technique again.
• Good Media Outlets like Public Broadcasting (e.g. SRF, Swissinfo) or Republik are priceless
• Good Podcasts as well e.g. NDR Coronavirus-Update mit Christian Drosten
• After 10-14 days I stopped paying attention to the concepts of weekdays

Currently, I’m into this somewhere around 37 days. And I originally started typing this list 17 Days ago… so there will be a followup.

A lot has been written in the past about static websites but the past few weeks showed this pretty clearly – the web needs to adapt and change. Dynamic websites can only hold up to so much traffic and in then end – ask yourself – Does the website really need to be dynamic.

It’s been an interesting week so far. But I was saddened by the fact that the website of the Federal Office of Public Health in Switzerland was fighting and couldn’t withstand the traffic that was coming in. To be fair, I don’t have the slightest idea on how much traffic was coming in – but having run quite some big websites in the past few years I feel this issue could have been prevented. Needless to say that this is critical infrastructure and should be available. After a few Tweets Chregu setup a cache via Cloudfront and extended it later with an Nginx/Varnish combination. His mirror is available on https://bag.rokka.io/

I didn’t have too much time on Friday during the day to play around but had some ideas and always wanted to try out the Nginx proxy caching.

Enter bag-cache.nrdy.ch

It’s pretty simple but needed a few yak-shavy moments I used the nginx-cache from Paweł Mendelski as a starting point to get everything going. Currently, it caches every request for 10 minutes and tries to refresh content in the background and also trying to serve stale content if the cache can’t be updated after those 10 minutes. The core-config of the whole thing:

    location / {
      expires 30d;
      proxy_cache cache_zone;
      proxy_cache_lock on;
      proxy_cache_revalidate on;
      proxy_cache_background_update on;
      proxy_cache_use_stale error timeout updating http_500 http_502 http_503 http_504;
      proxy_cache_valid 200 302 301 10m;
      proxy_cache_key $scheme://$host$request_uri;
      proxy_pass https://www.bag.admin.ch$request_uri;
      proxy_set_header User-Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.132 Safari/537.36 (never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down - bag-cache.nrdy.ch - operated by bastian@amazee.io)";
      proxy_set_header Host www.bag.admin.ch;
      proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding ""; # no compression allowed or next won't work
      sub_filter "<!-- begin: container -->" "<p style='width: 100%; height: 100px; padding: 30px;'> ⚠️ This is a cached version and non-authoritative mirror of <a href='https://www.bag.admin.ch'>www.bag.admin.ch</a> for faster access during demanding times. It should be up to date around 10 minutes of delay.</p><!-- begin: container -->";
      sub_filter "https://www.bag.admin.ch/" "https://bag-cache.nrdy.ch/";
      add_header X-Cached $upstream_cache_status;
      add_header X-Cache-Server "amazeeio/nginx-cache";
      add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow";
      add_header X-LAGOON $hostname always;
      proxy_ignore_headers "Set-Cookie";
      proxy_ignore_headers "Expires";
      add_header set-cookie "";
      proxy_hide_header "x-content-type-options";
      proxy_hide_header "Set-Cookie";
    }

Way too much time was spent on figuring out why the sub_filter of Nginx didn’t work. This was in the end because the sub_filter does not unpack compressed backend requests. Fixed that by setting proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding "";. Also trying to be a good citizen and letting them know in the User-Agent string who to reach out if they don’t like the traffic from my mirror. Plus I switched off access logging of the Mirror as I don’t care about who visits the site – I only see Hits/Misses and the URI that has been hit.

The whole thing is built into a Container and then spun up on amazee.io.

Code can be found on Github – After all, It’s not rocket science and far from being perfect – Just a little bit of elbow-grease and trying to handle caching gracefully. I hope it’s of use for anyone.

Being on the road regularly comes with a few challenges. The main one would be charging all the things and a lot of tech changed since 2013 it seems 🙂

My daily driver remains a 13′ Macbook. And I’m pretty happy that most of the devices moved from proprietary connectors to mostly USB-C 🎉. I used the Apple USB-C charger for a long time but it feels wrong to use the notebook as a charging hub for my other devices and it’s sometimes a bit error prone. So I looked into a few new chargers to get an easier setup and landed with the Satechi Travel Charger. This gives me 2 USB-C and 2 normal USB Ports which is usually enough.

My setup currently:

• Satechi Travel Charger 75W (2x USB-C and 2x USB-A)
• USB-C Cables (good ones! – If you go cheap you won’t get far)
• One of those Multi-USB Cables (USBC, Lightning, Micro-USB)
• OmniCharge 13 or 20 (I backed those things back when there wasn’t a USB-C Version) The OmniCharge 20 has a variable DC Barrel Output and I used that for a while with a Dell Barrel to USB-C Adapter but after a while that started to fail and now I’m back to reverting to 220V HVDC or AC to charge things. HVDC works with most™ power supplies.

This is it. This part of kit gives me enough freedom to run on and off grid for quite some time. Bonus for the OmniCharge is that it can be charged via a lot of power sources so I sometimes hook it up to my Solar System to get the batteries replenished.