Archives

Antranig Vartanian

January 14, 2026

I can’t sleep. Let me rephrase that — I am so tired, that I can’t even sleep. I have spent the last two weeks upgrading and reconfiguring the infrastructure at ABI, while at the rest of my time, trying to answer the question “what do I need to be independent on the internet?”. I still don’t have a complete answer, but something is moving towards that direction. I applied for an ASN, and did the payments, now just waiting for my paperwork to go through. Let’s see how it goes.

The last couple of months have been really interesting. I start seeing changes that I both like and hate at the same time. And well, what should I do if I can’t sleep? blog about these changes.

These are not good always good changes, like I’ve said, some of them I do indeed hate, but most of them should be fine.

Last year I got a Valve Steam Deck. Actually, I kind of “won” a Steam Deck? One of our projects was over-budget, and my friend joked with the vendor saying “can we get a PS5? we’re redoing the office”. The reply was as expected — “no, that’s categorized in the Gaming Console section, I can give you anything you want in the computer section”. So I asked, as a joke, again, “can I get a Steam Deck if you have any?”, and to my surprise, the vendor say “actually yes, and I think it’s categorized in the PC section”. It was. I got it. Totally love it.

This change is nice, if you have it under control. Gaming for 12 hours a day? Not a good thing to do, unless its Sunday, and you have no plans. But gaming every day for 12 hours? Well, some people, I’m sure, have the luxury of doing that, but not me. Even if I had the luxury, my brain would crave for a challenge, on a Unix system — a bug to be fixed, a setup to be complete, a research to be read.

But I have to confess — going to bed every day, knowing that I will be using the Steam Deck to play a game, instead of scrolling on not-very-social-media, is one of the best changes in my life.

You’d think a computer like the Steam Deck — portable, tiny, with mid-size fans — would not be very powerful, but oh my how far have we become. I can play all of the games that I was never able to play on my top-of-the-line laptop from back in 2015, and I can even play some of the games I was able to play on my PlayStation 4 Pro from just less than 5 years ago.

I mean, sure, we’re a Unix household. The computers are a Mac, the TV is from Apple, the mobiles are iPhone, the routers are OpenBSD, the servers are FreeBSD, and I’m sure I have NetBSD and illumos somewhere, but seeing Linux do its thing as a gaming machine is absolutely fascinating.

Not only I can play my favorite MMORPG game — Star Wars: The Old Republic — in a pretty high quality, but I can even play Star Wars Battlefront II while I’m on the toilet in the taxi. And no, I don’t mean Battlefront 2 from 2005, I mean the one from 20… something.

You’d think that things are going well, but oh no, the bad changes can become terrible if you don’t get them under control, and I have not been able to get them under control for a while.

Not so long ago, I started using the GTD methodology as a way to organize my… life. It was all going very well, until it just didn’t I forgot to do my weekly reviews for weeks, and then I started forgetting to do my monthly reviews for months. I am still not sure what happened there, but I started feeling like I lost control of my life. Luckily, my brain started going into “auto-pilot” mode and just doing the actual daily things that I needed to do. Follow up with a customer, call a friend, boot up the game for 30 mins, reply to that SMS as soon as you got it. Nothing… major, nothing… new. Just an auto-pilot to keep things running.

Where does that get us to? Well, I stopped blogging, I stopped checking up with my projects, I stopped even to read books for a while. Actually, forget books, I even forgot to listen to the podcast that I care about. I forgot to upload pictures to my photo blogs, I stopped caring about my home servers.

It’s almost mid-night, and I haven’t had a proper sleep for the last week. Yes, I am proud of the new setup, yes, I will document everything I did (even tho I never do, and haven’t, for years now), but for now, all I need, is just a bit of sleep, a proper wake up, and a good morning coffee.

And if I can follow that with a morning, more of a happy blog post, then I can finally say “I’m back baby”.

Good night.

Antranig Vartanian

October 9, 2025

I started getting into retro computing again, but this time also for phones, so I’m blogging from a BlackBerry phone 🙂

Let’s see if it works!

Antranig Vartanian

September 21, 2025

There’s a lot of work that needs to be done on Jailer.

To start with, I have finally decided on the release model. The main development branch will be main, similar to FreeBSD, and then the releases will be tagged.

I’m not sure how I feel about branches, as I don’t want to have any kind of LTS versions, but I might need to understand if there’s anything missing in FreeBSD that I would need.

Another problem that I have right now is the fact that we don’t have a Port. I’m not happy with Jailer enough to make a Port for it, but maybe in the coming days.

  • Fix the Git stuff that I don’t care about but I should
  • Create a stable non-development version/tag
  • Create more lists like this, because, let’s be honest, no one can work without lists.

I do wonder if I can pull an all nighter and finish everything that I hope to finish. Lets see.

Antranig Vartanian

July 19, 2025

Sometimes all I need to do is

sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots / \
  | grep TimeMachine \
  | cut -d . -f 4 \
  |  xargs -I% sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots %

And suddenly I have like 70GB of more storage on my Mac.

I wish macOS was less… black magic-y.

Antranig Vartanian

July 7, 2025

Sometimes, when I have a long running process on my computer, like scp, rsync or curl I need to know when it’s done, so I don’t check the terminal every minute. That’s when I realized that this is a perfect fit for Apple Script and pwait.

Basically, it looks something like this:

pwait `pgrep xargs` \
  && osascript -e \
    'display notification "Extraction Done" with title "large xargs"'

Now I can go back to work, and I don’t have to check if the job is done every minute. A notification will appear when it’s done.

For remote jobs, I have realized, that I can send a notification to myself, kind of like a self-hosted Pushover, using XMPP, I don’t want to go into the details, but that seems like to be a good solution as well. Maybe I should just use Pushover anyway.

Antranig Vartanian

June 12, 2025

A while back I needed to get the input voltage from one of our UPSes, so I used bsnmpwalk(1) to get the information needed and ran it in a script with a loop and sleep. Running it in tmux(1), of course.

#!/bin/sh

lastoff="maybe"

while true;
do
  inpvol=$(bsnmpwalk -o quiet -s public@172.20.42.101 1.3.6.1.2.1.33.1.3.3.1.3)

  [ $? != 0 ] && \
    curl -s -X POST \
    https://api.telegram.org/botXXX:YYY/sendMessage \
    -d chat_id=-ZZZ \
    -d text="Something is wrong with the SNMP server"

  [ "${inpvol}" -lt 200 ] && \
    curl -s -X POST \
    https://api.telegram.org/botXXX:YYY/sendMessage \
    -d chat_id=-ZZZ \
    -d text="Power seems to be off. I see Input Voltage as ${inpvol}" && \
    lastoff="true"

  [ "${inpvol}" -ge 200 ] && [ "${lastoff}" == "true" ] && \
    curl -s -X POST \
    https://api.telegram.org/botXXX:YYY/sendMessage \
    -d chat_id=-ZZZ \
    -d text="Power back on. I see Input Voltage as ${inpvol}" && \
    lastoff="false"

  printf "%s  ---  %s\n" "$(date)" "${inpvol}"
  sleep 60
done

This got the job done, but I guess there’s place for improvement (leave a reply).

Anyways, I kept forgetting that I need to run the script in tmux after reboots, so I decided to use daemon(8).

touch /etc/rc.local
chmod +x /etc/rc.local
cat - >> /etc/rc.local
#!/bin/sh

daemon -u nobody -r -R 5 -f -t ups-notifier -o /var/log/ups_notifier.log /usr/local/bin/ups_notifier.sh

Again, there’s a place for improvement, specifically I can use a proper rc.d(8) script, yet again, this gets the job done.

Gotta say, I love the simplicity of FreeBSD.

Antranig Vartanian

February 27, 2025

For years I’ve been a night owl, staying up late until 5AM, hacking on code, chatting with friends and even drinking coffee at that late hour. I’ve been told that it’s a genetic thing, that people don’t choose what kind of a person they are, morning or evening. And yet, when I tried to find my “natural sleep cycle”, looks like I’ve been functioning at my best when I sleep around 10PM and wake up at 5AM. This has been a very weird experience, but what else do I not know about myself? I am not sure. The unknown unknown is a very weird place, unlike the known unknown.

In either case, I will keep a detailed log of my sleep for the coming months and see how if I actually function better, or is it just an illusion.

What’s your sleep cycle? when do you hack on code? or do you stay up late watching YouTube videos and doom-scroll on social media?

Antranig Vartanian

January 3, 2025

Here are some issues I had, which I fixed in the last three days

  • Email client not updating properly on phone. Fixed
  • Too many apps on phone and programs on computer. Deleted
  • Too many notes here and there. Collected and centralized
  • Too many packages outdated. Upgraded
  • Too many messages from friends left unanswered. Answered
  • Too many wires and cables in the cabinet. Organized
  • Too many cameras unused. Pictures Captured
  • Too many things on my TODO lists. Clarified.

Sometimes all you need is to sit down, clean up your laptop’s monitor and get to work.

Wish you all the best in the coming year. And if I ever missed your message, I’m sorry. If I ever texted too much, I am not.

That’s all folks…

Antranig Vartanian

December 22, 2024

We’ve organized a CTF (again), but this time it was way more interesting than the previous years, not just because of the newly introduced challenges, but because finally we are seeing the effects of LLMs in our industry, both the good and the bad, and we can now predict one of the possibilities of the future.

I need to articulate my thoughts for couple of days, and a long post might be published soon.

Antranig Vartanian

October 20, 2024

The story that Stefano shares in Outdated Infrastructure and the Cloud Illusion is a very sad one. I’ve seen this happen even at governments.

Current hypes aside, the NIST definition of Cloud Computing is actually under-hyped. A cloud should be on-demand, broad, elastic and measured. However, it can be Public, as well as Private. People keep forgetting that we can have Private Cloud deployments, and systems like FreeBSD, even Proxmox, have the ability to do that.

We can do better.