The website of Ben Tasker, IT Manager, Linux Specialist and software developer. I'm based in Suffolk in the UK but work with customers worldwide
About 4 years ago, I looked into how effective my SSH tarpits were. Since then, I've also deployed an AI crawler tarpit ( technically a maze - it generates an endless number of pages) to serve "content" up to crawlers who ignore my "No Entry" signs. I thought that it might be interesting to take a quick look at trends for both, so this post provides high-level analysis of the statistics that my…
Recently, we acquired a campervan conversion - a 2009 Citroen Relay with an interior originally installed by Olive & Oz (actually, it was their run-around). The van itself has done a lot of miles, but the interior really is quite beautiful. A few weeks ago, we did our first overnight and one of the things that stood out was a need for more seating - partly so there's somewhere to sit if it rains,…
Over the years, I've come to use project management systems quite heavily even for things with no code involved. I maintain projects to track things that need doing round the house, maintaining cars, the LAN and even financial planning. The ability to add comments (a link to previous issues) makes issue management far better than a simple todo list. However, I've always been a little concerned…
About five years ago, I migrated my project management from JIRA to Gitlab. There were some initial teething problems but, over the last half decade, Gitlab has served my needs pretty well. The urge to replace it, though, has been growing. Gitlab is pretty resource heavy and I've previously had to migrate other workloads off the host because they were impacted by Gitlab's RAM gobbling ways. Last…
I recently acquired a 2009 Citroen Relay van. Driving it home, though, I discovered that the cab cooling fans didn't work. Turning the switch to 1, 2 or 3 did nothing, going to 4 led to a whiney fan noise with very little output from the vents: default /> There are generally 3 possible causes for this Burnt out resistor Knackered Blower Fan Broken Switch The resistor is, by far, the easiest and…
Although most of my time-series data still lives in InfluxDB, I also have VictoriaMetrics running and playing host to daily todo list stats along with a few other things. However, I recently realised that I screwed up when deploying it: I'd assumed that de-duplication of data was a given, but actually dedupe is disabled by default. In order to fill gaps, my cronjobs tend to write data for multiple…
Our main solar install has now been active for three years. Although the beginning of this year under performed compared to the same time in 2025, we're currently in the middle of a heatwave and the pounding sun has driven yields up at the last minute. This post is a quick look at our solar performance over the last 12 months. Changes This Year There have been a couple of relevant changes this…
My Saab recently started to throw a warning when first starting the car: To clear the warning, I had to turn the ignition off and on again - the warning didn't fire the second time. The warning itself is triggered by the battery's voltage dipping too low under the demand of the starter. Just occasionally this led to a failed start and I'd need to jump the car to be able to get it started.…
Over the last few years, I've put quite a bit of work into our solar generation stats, tracking generated electricity value and calculating when the install will break even. The calculations marry each kWh generated with the Octopus Agile import cost at the time, using an additional calculation to account for the lost export value of anything charged into the battery. The logic used is quite…
This week, engineering attended an on-site in Virginia, USA. The schedule has been extremely meeting heavy - there is, after all, a lot that we need to get done. But, before things got started, I took a small group of the team to a gun range in the town. We rented three guns: a pistol, a semi-automatic assault rifle and a fully automatic MP5 machine gun. The visit was borne primarily out of fun -…