ownyourdata

This morning, I took my wife to the hospital for routine blood tests that had been scheduled for some time. Everything was going smoothly: check-in, number, waiting room. Suddenly, everything came to a halt and shut down. I was connected to the hospital’s public Wi-Fi and noticed that my connection also went down.

Having managed a couple of similar facilities, I immediately understood what had happened. I saw the staff panicking and calling the technicians, but they quickly reorganized within 10 minutes. They managed to process everyone who already had a number and then proceeded with the others in the order of their arrival. Despite the ten-minute delay (even though people started complaining right away), they were extremely efficient.

I later confirmed that the entire booking, check-in, and queue system is “in the cloud.” The hospital experienced a connectivity interruption, and all related services stopped. The staff no longer had access to anything, so a technician sent the lists to a manager via another channel, and everything resumed manually.

For years, I’ve insisted that certain things MUST be local. The healthcare facilities I manage have all the necessary systems for the operation of the facility internally, including patient records. External services like websites, emails, etc., are secondary.

Everything essential must always be accessible locally and, in special cases, it should be possible to physically access the servers and connect directly to them, bypassing any network/switch failures.

There has been only one interruption in the past, due to human error. Today, we have redundant servers (not HA on virtualizers, but two machines running the same software with replicated databases - on separate power lines) so such an issue shouldn’t happen anymore.

Not everything can be anticipated, but history is a great teacher. The Internet connection will eventually be interrupted :-)

When it comes to the health and survival of people, there are no compromises.

#IT #Internet #Networking #Outage #Health #HA #Cloud #CloudComputing #OwnYourData

In my opinion, every government, public entity, association, foundation, etc., that needs to communicate with the public should have its own communication channel, with full control over its data and the messages it delivers. When I read “my Discord server,” I feel like responding “there’s nothing ‘yours’ about it - tomorrow morning they could shut everything down, and you would have lost EVERYTHING.”. Own your data!

Sometimes, I read that instances are not opened because of “costs not balanced by the number of users.” But even public television channels are often economically unprofitable, yet they are considered an essential service for public communication. Open, decentralized technologies that ensure control over one’s data should be treated the same way.

#OpenData #OwnYourData #Fediverse #CommunicationFreedom

Make Your Own CDN With NetBSD

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/09/03/make-your-own-cdn-netbsd/

#NetBSD #RunBSD #OwnYourData #CDN #Varnish #VarnishCache #IT #SysAdmin #ITNotes #MyNotes

While I was upgrading my BSD email servers, the postman came and delivered this.

Thank you, @mwl !

#ryoms #OwnYourData #ThankYouTuesday

ALT

Saturday relaxation: I'm doing some tests to see if I could use the Google Pixel 7 with GrapheneOS - and without Google services - as my main phone. I've solved many of the issues:

- F-Droid for downloading main apps
- Aurora Store for Play Store apps
- For push notifications, I already have the ntfy server on my own server. By using UnifiedPush, many apps can use it
- Tusky (or moshidon) perfectly supports UnifiedPush (although I usually have notifications turned off for social apps)
- FluffyChat and Element support UnifiedPush and work well on my server
- Whatsapp works perfectly with the Matrix bridge, so I don't need to install it
- Mercurygram for Telegram perfectly supports notifications via UnifiedPush
- For email, I'm unsure whether to keep a separate connection (also to receive email notifications if my ntfy server is down) or use NotiMail to redirect them to UnifiedPush
- 2FAS Auth for 2FA

I will probably create a profile with Google services only for the apps that strictly require them, but it won't run in the background and I'll only use it when needed. For example, everything related to banking apps comes to mind.

Some apps remain out, mainly intercom apps. However, I could integrate them into Home Assistant and use that for sending notifications.

Yes, I think I could use a device daily without Google services, being fully in control of my data.

#Pixel #GooglePixel #GrapheneOS #OwnYourData

Outdated Infrastructure and the Cloud Illusion

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/10/19/outdated-infrastructure-and-the-cloud-illusion/

#ITNotes #Cloud #IT #SysAdmin #CloudComputing #Virtualization #NoteHUB #OwnYourData