Debian has an autoinstaller. With some difficulty, you can even get it to automatically install Debian. What the autoinstaller actually does under the hood is interesting in its own right since Debian doesn’t technically install from Debian, but instead from a different operating system that uses a distinct package collection and its own distinct package manager.

This distinct system, which as far as I am aware doesn’t really have a name beyond “debian-installer” is a very compact system that is not designed to be particularly user editable, after all its sole purpose is to install Debian, which is designed to be extremely user modifiable. To accomplish this installation in an automatic mode, the installer makes use of debconf which is an extremely extensible framework for prompting for user input normally used during dpkg transactions. To perform the automatic installation debconf just loads all the answers to the questions it would normally ask from a file rather than prompting them to the screen. While there is virtually no documentation for this beyond the source code itself, it takes surprisingly few toggles to get an automatic installation. The bulk of the config goes into answering the questions in partman the partition manager.

Though I don’t have a huge amount of time for playing computer games, I do spend a lot of time playing minecraft, as well as a number of retro games and point and clicks. As my desktop is optimized for compiling code and having many terminals up, it doesn’t exactly fit the bill of a gaming optimized machine. It doesn’t help either that I built my most recent desktop at the height of the 2019 GPU craze.

I was recently going through deprecation warnings and doing some housekeeping in one of my personal projects, NetAuth. In the process, I came across that I was using a deprecated import for the protocol buffers support libraries. As the major version number hadn’t changed, I assumed that the update was safe and changed my import. Given that the import was changing from github.com/google/protobuf to golang.google.com/protobuf I made the assumption that the import path had been changed for aesthetic and branding reasons. This seems line with other changes Google has made.

I am fascinated by most network technologies, and having spent several years at this point looking at the latest and greatest I’ve now decided to look back at some of the technologies that got us to here. Circuit switched networks have always fascinated me and as I’ve recently gotten into running my own local phone systems, dial-up networking seemed like the logical place to jump in head-first.

First off, lets define some terms and concepts that are central to this kind of network. The best place to start is probably a brief explanation of circuit switched networks. Unlike packet switched networks like Ethernet or Internet Protocol networks which use small units of data that may take different paths to their destinations, circuit switched networks are continuous paths that are point to point and set up and torn down as channels are requested. This means that there is a dedicated path from the source to the destination for information that wishes to flow between those points, but also means that for every two points that wish to communicate we need another dedicated circuit. This would get expensive quickly and so this isn’t quite how the public telephone network works. The phone network uses aggregation switches which connect to many subscriber lines and then peer at a higher level using interconnections called trunks. A trunk can carry some fixed number of circuits at any given time, sometimes referred to as calls or paths.

I’ve seen over the last few days a lot of comparisons being made between the power outages occurring in Texas and the power outages that are an annual event for parts of California. These events aren’t particularly compatible due to the wildly different circumstances at play, and I want to talk about why. This post will get into what engineers look at when designing a system, the concept of calculated risk, and how black swans can really come from nowhere.