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Work Experience

DevOps GCSE Work Experience Tasks Day 1 Get logged in Setup a GitHub account Setup a DockerHub account Setup a ChatGPT account Install Brew Install Git Create a GitHub Repository for any notes or code snippets you want to keep Install Docker Desktop Introduction to Docker Day 2 Install Minecraft Java Edition Run a Minecraft Java Edition Server under Docker Play some Minecraft on your Server Where is your server storing the World data? Can you access the server logs? What happens when you start/stop your container? Play with backing up and restoring your world data to revert changes you make in the World Try to run another containerised game server, see examples

Thursday, February 20, 2025 Read
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CS2 Server Docker Image

When CS2 launched, I wanted to run a private tournament for my friends at Jagex. We had quite a few teams interested and so needed at least 12 servers to accomodate all of the parallel games. Rather than spinning and configuring 12 VMs, my preference was to use AWS Fargate, but for that I would need a container image for the CS2 dedicated server. None existed, so I made one, which has been adopted as the community’s preferred server image.

Sunday, September 1, 2024 Read
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Fun with simple ciphers

A bit of fun playing with a simple caesar cipher in Python3. The following text has been encrypted using a simple Caesar cipher: aur r-%n!-n-p|z}#"r -"un"-p vrq9 /Z'-"rpu{vpny-ov"!-un$r-nyy-orr{-s vrq9 V-"||x-"||-zn{'-w|y"! S |z-"||-zn{'-$|y"!;;;/ 5[|-%|{qr -"ur- #qq'-"uv{t-qvrq6. Only printable characters with a unicode value >=32 and <=126 have been shifted. Any shifted character value that overflows these constraints is is wrapped to the opposite end of the range. The code I wrote to encrypt, decrypt and brute force this cipher can be found on my GitHub.

Friday, May 21, 2021 Read
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AWS SES, S3 and Lambda: A Serverless mailserver

Introduction I wanted a simple way for members of a tabletop gaming club I run to communicate with each other in order to arrange matchups, RSVP to events, etc. I’m somewhat averse to the Facebook Hegemony and its social media ilk, so I turned to the last sleepy titan of the pre .com age, whose might, though waning, still comes (mostly) without privacy strings attached: Email! There were two modes of email operation I wanted to support:

Sunday, February 7, 2021 Read
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Ubuntu Multi-seat Steam Streaming Server

My wife and I like to play games together. Before kids, we had two gaming PCs with their own desks etc, but there isn’t room in the house for that kind of setup these days. I decided to setup a single dedicated gaming server based on Ubuntu 18.04 which would use the Remote Play feature of Steam to stream games to our much lower spec Ubuntu laptops. This setup has some cool benefits:

Sunday, February 7, 2021 Read