Posts on geekgonecrazy

A Decade at Rocket.Chat: Looking Back on 10 Years

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After 10 years at Rocket.Chat… I’m saying goodbye. I started contributing to Rocket.Chat after it appeared on Hacker News in 2015. Some of my first pull requests were fixing image stretching bugs, hubot integrations, jitsi integration and many others. Then quickly became the Cloud/Deployment guy after being hired.

When I joined my world was pretty small. I hadn’t been out of country much, and I only ever worked with people I had met in person. Now i’ve traveled and worked with people from all around the world.

Year In Review: 2024

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024 is now in the books!

In previous years, I wrote internal posts at work to reflect on the year and highlight accomplishments. This exercise was revealing. It was often a great way to see how much we’d achieved that you might lose sight of in the daily grind. This year, I decided to apply the same reflection to my personal life.

Here’s a TL;DR of 2024:

Personal Life

A Year Free From Caffeine
Returned to Martial Arts
Increased focus on Working Out
Lost 12 pounds
Traveled to Brazil and London

Professionally

Emphasized Production Readiness
Grew as a Staff Engineer
Changed jobs after nearly a decade
Explored New Technology
Adopted a Streamlined Tech Setup

Personal Life

2024 was full of ups and downs, but I made meaningful progress in key areas.

Fedora Iot, Greenboot, Systemd and of course DNS

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post is mostly as a resource for future me. But maybe it’ll come in useful to someone else.

This weekend I was working on provisioning a new NAS/Media box setup after having to do a bit of hardware shuffling. Long story.

I decided to try Fedora iot on a whim. Fedora iot has an interesting project called greenboot. The objective of the project is to define some checks for the state of the machine. When the machine is booting and the machine isn’t configured or working as expected it reboots and tries to correct. From what I understand it does this several times and then if unsuccessful it rolls back to the previous ostree commit. In an edge deployment scenario where you can’t always have your hands on the device and it almost assuredly will break… I can see ostree commits + this to being great to rollback when something gets broken. Much easier than in my previous post:

How to Set Up Client SSL Certificate Authentication for Rocket.Chat

Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Are you looking to add an extra layer of security to access Rocket.Chat? One way to do this is by implementing client SSL certificate authentication. This authentication method requires clients to present a valid SSL certificate to authenticate themselves to the server.

In this post, we will walk through the steps to set up client SSL certificate authentication using Nginx.

Prerequisites

A server running Ubuntu
- Allow HTTP/HTTPS/ssh in security group
- Create a public IP and associate it.
A domain
Domain pointed to the server

Step 1: Install Docker

Lets do a quick and easy install of Docker if you haven’t already.

Adventures of the Geek: Remote Password Reset

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Our adventure begins on a Monday evening. I received a call from a family member that lives a bit over 8 hours away.

I powered on my laptop today and it won’t take my password

Unfortunately the laptop runs Windows 10. I have made it a point to not use windows and haven’t for last several years. Primarily using linux or osx. Leaving me at a bit of a disadvantage.

Rocket.Chat and the Matrix Protocol

Mon, 30 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Rocket.Chat now has federation support via the Matrix protocol.

This announcement is an exciting one to me. I’ve been working with Rocket.Chat since I found it almost 7 years ago. One of the things I recall from early on is the vision of being as ubiquitious as email. One of the beauties of email is not everyone is on the same domain or let alone even the same kind of mail server. Just all speaking the same language.

Rover Project: Update 3

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:03:00 +0000

Finally a more eventful update!

Last time I worked with building parts in CAD I was using solidworks or AutoCAD. I have no desire to buy either one of those right now plus I need something that will run on linux. So started investing some time into learning my way around FreeCAD.

Creating first iteration of the wheel

50mm radius for a 10cm/100mm diameter wheel

3mm thick

Based on the specs of the motor:

Rover Project: Update 2

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:02:00 +0000

So the robot parts sat in my closet for a few months. I kind of forgot to order the parts.

Recently realized I really need to disconnect more fully from work in my off hours. When your hobby includes coding and in same language as you write for work.. Its a bit harder to keep your brain from making that jump to thinking about work.

So i’ve been on the look out for new hobbies.

Rover Project: Update 1

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:01:00 +0000

Parts came in!

Finally got time to work on it again. We wired everything up.

We gathered up some cardboard. We found something to trace and cut out 4 wheels. (you’ll notice this is defintely a deviation from the original sketch. But this was insisted on once the additional motors were spotted).

We also put together the transmitter on another breadboard

Now if you do electronics seriously at all you’ll probably notice straight away two different issues. I was tempted to omit it and just have the build log with final parts.. But this is part of the journey. I think it was important for kids to go through as well. Not everything works first time around. In fact probably doesn’t most of the time.

Rover Project

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My family is very STEM oriented. I grew up learning hands on at home. Taking things apart. Questioning how things worked and eventually learning how to actually fix those things I took apart. As much as possible we’re trying to encourage this for our kids.

They are pretty fortunate as they have good examples of this on both sides of the family. So they come by their curiousity about the world around them very naturally. Now days its not surprising to get asked questions about things even we don’t know or remember the answer to.

OVH Serial over LAN (SOL)

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Its been a while since I’ve worked with physical servers and typically when something happened I could pretty quickly get physical access to the box if things went pear shaped.

But when you buy or lease servers from a provider like OVH. Those servers might be sitting half way around the world. So if something goes wrong you need to some how virtually be in front of the keyboard.

OVH has a few different ways to access your servers console to interact with the machine directly.

Tinkerbell or iPXE boot on OVH

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Recently have had to work with a number of physical servers that need to be treated more cattle like than a bunch of pets. I need to be able to quickly and easily provision servers to fit a specific role with out having to go through a complicated setup process.

For this type of thing PXE or iPXE comes to the rescue. Allowing you to boot over the network. Simply rebooting the machine and then having it pick up its instructions and be provisioned like needed.

Decision Fatigue in 2020

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This last couple of weeks I finally took some time off of work to try and reset. I’m not always the greatest at taking time off. I take an extra day or two combined with the weekend for a mini-vacation around the Holidays to see family and it’s often the minimum time needed. This year with everything going on really had to force my self to step back and try to reset with a staycation.

A k8s Migration Concept

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Surprisingly I don’t have a lot of kubernetes related content on my blog yet. This might just because I’m too busy using it to talk about it. But i’m a heavy user of it. To me it just makes orchestrating work loads easier.

One thing in general I don’t see a lot of talk about is migrating between infrastructure. Especially don’t see much for kubernetes.

So I wanted to share a high level concept set of steps that i’ve followed a couple of times to migrate between a couple of kubernetes clusters with minimal to no downtime.

Quarantainment

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t think its likely a surprise to anyone if I say I’m typically an introvert. I stay at and around home a lot in general. But when its no longer by choice.. kinda takes the fun out of it.

We identified early on that we needed to keep our selves busy and entertained.

Started out the quarantine with me teaching my wife to play chess. So pulled out the ‘ol Mario chess set. Yes its awesome!

Respecting Privacy in Analytics

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There is a reason why people tend to add analytics to sites. I’d say most people add for completely honest reasoning. They just want to be able to see how their site is doing and if anyone actually shows up.

But its really important to go down the path with caution. If you dont carefully select and think through your analytics… You end up spying on your users likely without even realizing it.

De-Googling: My Progress

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a bit about my reasoning to De-Google here. Now I want to write a bit about my progress, the struggles and what I ended up with.

Search

Or Google as many think of it. This one I have toyed with off and on with over the years. But a while back probably around a year ago.. I was listening to a podcast. I think either Ask Noah Show or one of the Jupiter Broadcast Linux podcasts and was inspired to challenge my self to switch and see how it went.

De-Googling

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is not by any means a new idea. A quick search around the web will return many results of people doing this. My reasons are likely similar to many others. Privacy being the most common shared reason.

Ok that’s it I spoiled it! Now you don’t need to read on 😜 But I’ll explain anyways.

Privacy

Google gives their applications and services away for free. This is extreeemly attractive! We humans are cheap! That’s not totally fair.. But I think in regard to software it holds true.

Hacking in the Physical World

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hacking is often a term used to mean malicious behavior. But I believe hacking is a mindset. It’s about trying to be creative.. Taking things and making them work in a different way. It’s about not letting your self be your own limiter. Just because you’ve never done something before… doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

I don’t consider my self good at carpentry. Or using screws, hammers, power tools etc.. I’m also sure ~~some~~ most of the work makes professionals cringe just like I do at code by a novice.

100 Day writing challenge

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello its me again your friendly neighborhood Geek Gone Crazy.😜 Its been a bit less time since my last post than normal. Recently I came across a challenge on mastodon to do a 100 day writing challenge. Inspired by the 100 days of code.

The idea being much like 100 days of code it encourages a person to sit down to write more often. Of course by doing this you get better at it.

Rocket.Chat + Kubernetes + Traefik = :heart:

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

You could say I’ve been a docker / container fanboy for a while now… I started working with containers in a couple of previous jobs. Primarily only as aids for the build process or for maintaining the same environment between dev and production. But at my current job I got the opportunity to really go all in. At Rocket.Chat we wanted to build a cloud offering to allow people to quickly and easily deploy Rocket.Chat.

Fedora Setup

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Install nvidia drivers (oss drivers on this card fail miserably)

Install gnome tweak tool sudo dnf install gnome-tweak-tool

Enable global dark theme

Enable minamize and maximize buttons

Enable workspaces span displays

Set screenshot area to clipboard to ctrl+shift+4

Install tilix

sudo dnf install tilix

sudo dnf install tmux

sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"
sudo dnf groupinstall "C Development Tools and Libraries"

sudo dnf install zsh

Install oh my zsh sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

My OSX Setup

Sat, 19 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’m an on again off again macOS / OSX user. This started off at some point as a blog post, but its grown into more of a living page of the programs I install when on macOS / OSX.

OS tweaks

Changed Scroll Direction

If using a normal mouse with a scroll wheel. The default “natural” feels very un-natural.

Unchecked “Scroll direction: natural”

Change Modifier keys

If not using an apple keyboard.

Format Machine over ssh

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Lets say you have data on a remote linux machine, and for what ever reason you need to format the drive. Like for instance you decide to switch VPS hosts. If you just let them delete it, you have no way of knowing what really happens to your data. So providing you have ssh access here is a way to eliminate your data.

One of the beauties of linux is that everything is represented as a file or folder. So if you need to store something in the RAM you can do so by copying it to: /dev/shm.

Getting public ip from CLI

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve found my self on occasion needing to find the public IP of a machine while in commandline(CLI). Most of the time its just because i’ve spoiled my self with DNS entries, and haven’t memorized it.

You need to have curl installed. If you don’t have it, it should be in your package manager. In Ubuntu its easily installed via:

sudo apt-get install curl

Then just simply run:

curl ifconfig.me

I figured since I hadn’t posted in a while, this is a useful enough tidbit to share.

Childrens Distro sneak peak

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I was assigned the task of creating a children’s linux distro for use here at the library(where I work). Here’s a sneak peak:

I’m basing it on Linux Mint for now. I think i’ll probably move it all over to straight Ubuntu before finalizing. The dock is called docky. Can be installed from apt-get.

As you can see I’ve loaded it up with games. Once i’ve finished i’ll give a better break down of what i’ve done.

IPv6 keeping tunnel connected

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Put together a script to keep your ip updated for the tunnel. This is for Hurricane Electric. Just plug in your info from your tunnel info page.

If Ubuntu, copy this file to: /etc/init.d/updateip
Then, sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/updateip /etc/rc2.d/S95updateip

Will now start up with the computer.
Hope it helps someone.

IPv6 Connectivity in Ubuntu: Setting up

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

With ICANN recently announcing the end of IPv4 addresses to allocate, its time to take a look at the future.

What is IPv6? According to Cisco IPv6 is:

IP Version 6. Replacement for IPv4. A next generation IP protocol. IPv6 is backward compatible with and is designed to fix the shortcomings of IPv4, such as data security and maximum number of user addresses. IPv6 increases the address space from 32 to 128 bits, providing for an unlimited number of networks and systems. It also supports quality of service (QoS) parameters for real-time audio and video.

Project Opacity: Prototype to Production

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

About a month ago at work we started a project internally known as Project Opacity.

Opacity by definition: is the quality of being opaque to a degree; the degree to which something reduces the passage of light

Anyways, on to what Project Opacity actually is. Through out the library there are computer stations from which patrons can access the library catalog. Which we call Opac’s or kiosks. Come to think of it, this probably is where the name comes from.

Destroying a hard drive

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Not very often do I get to be destructive at work. So when I do get to I get slightly excited! Had an old pentium 3 desktop they planned to give away. But it their copy of xp on it as well as some somewhat sensitive information. At first we were going to put the linux distribution of our fancy on it(this changes from day to day). But it wouldn’t boot from the cd. Thought the cd drive was shot. Tried it and an external neither work. After 30 minutes of messing with it my boss gives up. Told me to just pull the hard drive out and trash it! :D

Dedicated Virtualbox Host

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I posted about Building first desktop from scratch. In it I mentioned installing Xenserver. I have no doubt that it is amazing. Just wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

Long story cut extremely short, I went with virtualbox. Reasons being: Its fast, so far has supported everything I throw at it, stable, cross platform, live migration, snapshots make backup easy, easy to use, and I like it.

Monitor Repair

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago I found a 22" Lcd screen that was being tossed out because it didn’t work. The thought of the beauty being thrown away didn’t set well with me. So I picked it up.

Before messing with it.

When turning it on, it would show its gateway logo and then go blank. Which was a good sign. But none of the inputs worked.

So I took it apart.

Building first desktop from scratch

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Most of my childhood I have built computers. But it was always from parts laying around. A motherboard/CPU from here, case from another one etc.

I finally saved up and planned out my own build from scratch. I’m posting to my blog because its a geeky milestone that every little geek must go through. A rite of passage if you will.

I ran into a couple of problems along the way. A case/power supply combo I ordered online was a dud! I sent it back and got a refund. Future advice for self and anyone building a computer… Buy your power supply locally! It’s a lot easier to run back to the store and exchange it than to buy it online and wait on shipping. Especially when you are this eager to get it finished.