Stephen Harris

New blog post in which my old college at Oxford sends me an email that looked totally like a phishing attempt. And I've seen corporate HR departments do this in the past as well. We've spent 20+ years training people to be careful of business email compromise, and yet at the same time we're sending out emails that suffer from the exact problems we're warning people about!

https://www.sweharris.org/post/2026-09-20-your-email-phish/

I'm not really a big worrier about post-quantum encryption. I don't think we'll see a practical breach of RSA2048 in my life time.


But _customers_ might be, so we need to know how to do this properly.


To my surprise I found my previous Debian 13 configuration was now being flagged as offering post-quantum ciphers, despite me not making any changes; the previous work I'd done with getting RSA and ECDSA working together was enough!


So I figured I should document how I achieved this feat :-)


https://www.sweharris.org/post/2026-06-07-pqc-compliant/

New blog post in which I talk about how hard it can be to self-host everything and why some people must just want to outsource to Google/Microsoft/Apple. https://www.sweharris.org/post/2026-04-01-should-i-homelab/

When I retired in May 2024 one of the things I was hoping would happen is that I would start reading more books. When I was a kid I could easily get through 4 books a week (4 books was the most the local library would lend at a time).

As I became an adult I had less time to read. Getting up at 6:30am to catch a train to go to London to work, then drinking with co-workers and getting home gone midnight... yeah, not much reading time there!

And, of course, books got larger. A 1960s Asimov story.. oh, let's say "The End Of Eternity" (a book I loved as a kid) was 72,000 words long. A modern SciFi book starts at 100,000 words and can easily be 120,000 or more. Peter Hamilton books, maybe 170,000 words :-)

And, bluntly, stories became more sluggish. You can sprint through an Asimov story because they're pretty shallow; they have one point of view, they have a singular story vector... it's easy to read. I would get a Discworld book for Christmas and consume it in 3 hours. Something to do after Christmas dinner when people would fall asleep in front of James Bond :-)

Compare that to, say, Alastair Reynolds; we have multiple points of view, the story might be sluggish by design, to emphasize the struggle of the viewpoint character; the world might be dirty and slimey and it doesn't really encourage you to be there. Is it a more textured story? Definitely! Is it something I can read as quickly; no. Is it something I might reread? Possibly not.

Since 2008 I've been tracking the number of books I've read each year. I kinda tried to normalize the numbers ("2 Peter Hamilton Books is the same as 3 Charlie Stross books" just based on word count). Yeah, it's not a real number. But a good estimate.

And this year, I finally broke my record in that time period. I'm at 56 books and climbing. Now part of that might be because I'm re-reading the Simon R Green books (Nightside and Secret Histories). Green's writing is "quick and easy" to read.

But part of it is because I've stretched out on my sofa, put on some background music (maybe Tubular Bells, maybe Jean-Michel Jarre) and then just read for a few hours. And then gone to bed and read some more.

I think I'm getting the hang of this "retirement" lark!

The recent DNS issue at AWS made me recall a DNS issue I had to deal with as part of the Unix authentication team, and how I'd deal with it differently today. I guess I've grown as an engineer/architect! https://www.sweharris.org/post/2025-10-26-its-dns/

New blog post in which I get pretty technical and into the weeds on how I do hands-off automated deployments of Rocky and Debian Linux in my home lab, complete with example kickstart/preseed files and the `virt-install` commands


https://www.sweharris.org/post/2025-08-13-hands-off-linux-install/

New blog post in which a (broken?) bot scraper tries to DoS me, and what I had to do to prevent service degradation. https://www.sweharris.org/post/2025-06-16-scrapy-dos/

After banging my head on the wall for a couple of days, I finally worked out how to "remote desktop" into an existing X session and not create a new one. So I documented it! https://www.sweharris.org/post/2025-06-08-vnc-x-desktop/

So I wrote a bit of Go code to make mpd work in a way I'm used to

https://github.com/sweharris/go-mpd-music

This lets me keep the music organised the way I like (the way I've done it for 25+ years!) and control it from the command line the way I used to control iTunes.

So "music dj" will shuffle all my songs and play them. Or I can do "music play /mp3/SONGS/ALBUMS/Annie_Lennox/Medusa/*" and it will play that album.

(It doesn't replace "mpc", it just makes the day-to-day usage simpler)

Next step is to write a program that will handle IR commands. I have a FLIRC and have configured it for Kodi so I'm going to have to be careful; I don't want my code to control mpd while Kodi is active.

(This is one thing MacOS sometimes got confused about; the remote would control iTunes while DVD Player was active, so both would play audio at the same time!)

I have 4 access points in my house. I've tried to arrange them so there is minimal interference. In theory Library and Garage might fight on 2.4Ghz but the Library is upstairs at the very front of my house and the garage is at the back of my garden (maybe 50ft from the back of the house and through a metal door).

Living Room:  36 VHT40 (5180 Mhz) /  1 HT20  -- (2412 Mhz)
    Library:  44 VHT40 (5220 Mhz) /  6 HT20  -- (2437 Mhz)
   Basement: 153 VHT40 (5765 Mhz) / 11 HT20  -- (2462 Mhz)
     Garage: 157 VHT40 (5785 Mhz) /  6 HT20  -- (2437 Mhz)

I thought I'd look at what's on those APs.

57 entries found.

  AP: living room - 25 (16 on 2.4Ghz, 9 on 5Ghz)
          library - 15 (10 on 2.4Ghz, 5 on 5Ghz)
         basement - 15 (11 on 2.4Ghz, 4 on 5Ghz)
           garage -  2 (both on 2.4Ghz)

  Network:    WAN - 21 (5 on 2.4Ghz, 16 on 5Ghz)
            Guest -  2 (both on 5Ghz)
              IoT - 34 (all 2.4Ghz)

Some of the stuff on WAN are really IoT devices but they had to be on that network just for things to work (SSDP, mDNS discovery).

Actual breakdown of devices:

        Phones/Tablets: 3
           Amazon Echo: 13
         Guest devices: 1
                Chumby: 2
        Home grown IoT: 15
           Smart Plugs: 16
  Other Commercial IoT: 7

(I have other IoT devices on wired networks; a lot of Philips Hue bulbs that are zigbee, and Lutron Caseta switches which are their own protocol... but they're not WiFi. I also have an aircon that isn't currently connected so it's not showing up)