Happy (belated) Halloween: autumn updates 2026

Servus from Tara’s offline outpost!

It has been a while since I was here. Life has been hectic, and I’ve had very few opportunities to enjoy this quiet place.

Tonight is the evening I’ve been looking forward to for so long. The TV is on, playing one of those cosy winter YouTube videos, showing a fireplace in a wooden cabin in the mountains. A place I’ve dreamed of for years, and perhaps one that will remain just a dream. I’m wrapped in my favourite blanket, the one with “Love is Love” written on it that I bought in Brighton. Angie is beside me, with her paws and head peeking out from under the blanket. She’s looking at the fireplace on the screen, and she seems to be smiling. Perhaps she’s daydreaming too.

A feeble warm wind from the west has brought me a bit of relief in my chest. Not enough, but it’s something.

I have relatively few technical updates to share this season, although they’ve taken up a good chunk of the last three months.

Back to security architecture

One of them has probably given away which country the headquarters of my new employer is in. I already dropped a few hints in French in my summer update, but publishing an article (and patches) about strongSwan in a Diffusion Restreinte (DR) environment has probably made it rather obvious.

This is quite a different kind of architecture from the ones you’ve normally seen me working on in recent years. But it’s something I used to do in a previous professional life: security-focused architectures for sensitive and government environments. In theory, it’s not rocket science. Although, perhaps I should stop using that idiom now that I’m actually working with rockets and satellites.

If you zoom out, these architectures aren’t particularly revolutionary, nor are they especially compute or I/O intensive. But they have to be very secure. You have to think like a hacker, trying to understand what could go wrong, while working within the constraints of commercially available, certified products. And that isn’t always easy. Sometimes a custom solution might be more appropriate, but organisations are often reluctant to move away from established commercial products. After all, security is not something you can buy off the shelf. It’s a state of mind.

And even though I’m a little rusty and haven’t worked in this particular field for quite some time, I found myself addressing issues that were supposed to be handled by a specialist French cybersecurity supplier. That also meant navigating ANSSI specifications, technical documentation and meetings in French. It was rather satisfying to discover that I still know a thing or two about security architecture. Getting back into strict government security specifications was interesting, and understanding and modifying strongSwan to connect to a DR-certified firewall was utterly satisfying.

But before I turn this seasonal update into another code review, I’ll point you to my dedicated blog article and the Codeberg repository if you’re interested in the technical details.

Another innocent question

On another topic, perhaps the central one of this season, I spent much of late summer and early autumn trying to answer a silly but rather dangerous question. That question eventually led me down two separate, parallel paths. The first was an investigation into Realia COBOL 4.00, a remarkably small COBOL compiler for DOS.

What caught my attention was its size: less than one megabyte for the entire compiler, linker and libraries. Just eight files, no installation required, and considerably simpler than something like Microsoft COBOL. There was just one little problem: practically no documentation. So, instead of giving up, I got stubborn. You probably know me well enough by now: who am I to say no to a rabbit hole?

I spent three months trying to understand how to create a data-oriented TUI application along the lines of CrumbStation, from my Cobolito/400 project. And, just because that wasn’t enough, I ended up writing some fifty pages of field notes, documenting what I had learned about this little compiler. I wanted to leave something useful behind for anybody else who might stumble across Realia and decide to give it a try. The spirit of open source, just translated into a 1990s DOS compiler. :)

I’ve already published the article, and the field notes and example applications are available on Codeberg.

But that was only the first half of the story.

I won’t spoil the other one just yet. The article is already written, but I’d really like to get my hands on the actual target hardware and have some proof of life before publishing it. All right, perhaps a couple of breadcrumbs. This second investigation involved a handful of patches contributed to a project on GitHub. And, if you remember my summer update, I mentioned ordering a CardPuter Zero, which was supposed to arrive in November, although production delays are always possible. I’ll leave you with that. :)

A little infrastructure housekeeping

A few smaller updates from my infrastructure. I had left my DigitalOcean VM and the backup repository on Wasabi dormant for the last couple of months, while making sure the new VM on Infomaniak was behaving properly and the SFTP backups were running reliably. After a few successful backup cycles and no unpleasant surprises, I finally deleted the old VM and backup repository. At this point, I no longer have infrastructure hosted with US-based providers.

I haven’t actually paid Infomaniak yet, as I had a three-month voucher. But looking at the estimated bill, it will be slightly more expensive than the bare DigitalOcean VM, although that comparison doesn’t include DigitalOcean’s automatic backups. What surprised me was the price of the public IPv4 address. At the time of writing, the estimated monthly costs are €2.70 for the instance, €2 for storage, and €3 for IPv4. The address costs more than the virtual machine itself!

I also retired a small Stardust instance on Scaleway. When Scaleway first marketed it, it seemed like a bargain, and I’d been using it to host my websites. However, it was costing me only slightly less than a Hetzner Cloud VM with four times the RAM and twice the CPU. I already had a FreeBSD instance running on Hetzner for testing, so I decided to consolidate the websites there.

You might wonder why I keep a separate provider-hosted VM when I already have my own colocation and a dedicated root server with VMs. The reason is rather simple. Now that I’m travelling so much again, I can’t always deal with infrastructure problems when they happen. A failure in my colocation might require a physical visit, while a problem with the root server might mean troubleshooting remotely or opening a support ticket. And sometimes, particularly when I’m at a customer’s site or without reliable internet access, I simply can’t do any of that. I want my websites to remain reachable without depending on my ability to intervene at short notice.

The more systems you have, the more you have to maintain. And right now, I simply don’t have the energy for another workload.

But I’ve also learned, from my previous nomadic life, that getting rid of almost everything isn’t the answer either. Been there, done that. So I’m trying to find a balance between keeping my systems and data under my control, and having something I can realistically maintain while travelling.

For now, I’m rather happy with the result. I’ve consolidated most of my infrastructure between Hetzner, Infomaniak and my colocation. That should give me geographical redundancy, reasonable control over my data, and hopefully considerably less maintenance. At least that’s the plan.

A little travelling, hopefully

On other news, if I’m lucky, this month I’ll finally get to return to two of my other homes, London and Innsbruck. I wish I had more time, but it will be just an extended weekend in each. Still, after so many months spent travelling mostly for work, I can’t wait to be back.

I can’t wait to smell Glühwein and Wurst while strolling through the streets of Innsbruck’s city centre, looking at the Inn and the surrounding mountains. And I’m equally looking forward to visiting my favourite Chinese restaurant near Old Street, perhaps having a peek at the LEGO Store in Leicester Square, and wandering around London’s shops with their Christmas decorations. I love London at Christmas time.

Not much time, unfortunately. But I’ll take what I can get.

On a more personal note

I’ve already shared how returning to a more nomadic life has taken its toll on me, and how exhausted I am, physically and mentally. Unfortunately, that has somehow got worse.

Looking back at the last few months, though, I realise just how much energy I’ve spent on my research. Cobolito/400 occupied me for something like ten months. Along the way, there was also the storage rabbit hole with SeaweedFS, VersityGW and GarageHQ, followed by three months investigating Realia COBOL and over another month on the other half of that research. And that’s without counting the work on strongSwan and everything else happening in my life.

I enjoyed those rabbit holes enormously. I wouldn’t have spent so much time on them otherwise. But as much as I’d love to continue exploring, I simply don’t have the energy for another large project right now. So I think I’ll take a little break from the deeper rabbit holes until after the New Year, and concentrate on smaller things for my own sake. Perhaps adding a couple of features to DFU, crafting some probably useless little tools in COBOL, or simply improving and automating parts of my infrastructure. Nothing particularly ambitious. Just little things I can enjoy without turning them into another three-month investigation. Although, knowing myself, I should probably be careful with that last statement. :)

For now, I’ll close the lid of my laptop, enjoy the sunset view, listen to the crackling sound of the (virtual) fireplace, hug Angie, close my eyes and let my thoughts wander westward, towards a familiar serenity that has found its way back to me.

Tomorrow I’ll travel again, but for tonight, this is enough.

Ich wünschte, du wärst hier bei mir.

See you at the next season. 🌷💜