So I don’t talk about this much, mostly because I didn’t know how it was going to pan out, a recent google search means I have several legacies now attached to me. Some making a difference and some not.
For those wondering, I joined my local Parish Council, if you want to be nosey and look (trust me, its nothing to do with trains – well sort of does as we have a railway line where I am), have a look for my mug shot (hint, ginger hair, dead giveaway!). https://www.fishbourne-pc.gov.uk/the-parish-council/councillors/ . I just realised, I didn’t mention Trainz in that and none of the councillors know about my Trainz work, they do know about my IT work as I put a suggestion forward for IT equipment, because of GDPR reasons, FOI reasons, SAR reasons – there are loads of reasons. I use a VM for this task as I try to keep my personal and council work separate. My SWR work is kept separate using a different laptop that they provide.
This was suggested by my mum as she is on Southbourne Parish Council, which is not far from here, about 6 miles away, as my parents are divorced for 20 years, both ended up in different houses. Out of 3 children, one went to live a separate life and has 2 children of her own (my older sister), one went to live with my mum (younger sister) and one went to live with my dad (me). Both my younger sister and myself have been unlucky with relationships and housing, so we both ended up living with parents, both of us are now pretty much 40, so that’s how life went.
Anyway, my mum moved to Southbourne – I can’t remember the date from Fareham and had this idea of joining the local Parish Council in May 2025. She did, got co-opted (elected by the council not by the public) and has been getting involved in various tasks since. Then suggested I join the local parish council. What could go wrong? Well, they were looking for someone in June 2025, I put my name forward against another candidate, but I couldn’t join the meeting as I was “flying high” – to Northern Ireland for my leave. Fine, waited, prepared for the next meeting and the other candidate dropped out. Went to the next meeting, introduced myself and some things are unexpected, this was one of them. I thought I was going to be rejected and sat in the public gallery. Co-opted by nearly all of them. Yes… all of them.. I was shocked.
Took my seat, became part of the council and had lots going on. I mean lots. Had my first say which was about a development which is next to “Palace Crossing” Fishbourne (here: https://abcrailwayguide.uk/palace-public-level-crossing-west-sussex) which I raised serious concerns about the development, because of the level crossing impact. Considering either side is Automatic half barrier and that has no gates, no lights, the only warning you get is a horn blast and some of my photos are taken from there – the right side of the line.
Since then, I’ve done more and more stuff, representing my community, in my first year, I didn’t do a lot, attended meetings, put suggestions forward, etc.
However…
That changed in May 2026, I had loads put onto me and some of it was topical and what I wanted to do, so, since then, I’ve been trying to deal with crime. It worked. The big issue we had is escooters and ebikes, which I’ve been hot on, so hot, in a magazine called the “village voice”, I wrote a short article on the train to work explaining the legal issues and the safety issues on these. For the record, not EPACs. In my first meeting with the police, it was a very hot topic. The previous meeting was actually fatal fives (driving).
For those wondering, fatal fives:
Speeding
Driving under the influence (drink/drugs)
Driving while distracted (Mobile use)
Not wearing a seatbelt
Careless/inconsiderate driving.
So called, because one will lead to an accident and are more likely to be involved in a serious or fatal collision. Most of the time, its one of those 5’s involved. That will be an article in 3 months time, that I’ll be writing as the Village has problems with speeding, in particular Salthill Road as it is quite straight and those going to Goodwood Festival of Speed – in fact, quite a few events, use it as a race track. The mentality that some have on the road is that “I paid for the road, the road is mine!”. Actually, the road is a shared resource with everyone else, you lease your small slot on the road through VED (not road tax, doesn’t exist). Vehicle Exercise Duty (VED) is a duty levelled on the vehicle. You don’t own the road, if you did, you’d be paying billions for it and pay billions to maintain it. That is the difference between ownership and leasing. As it is a shared resource that you lease, you got rules, they apply to everyone, like the highway code, what you can and cannot do, these rules are to keep everyone safe and help reduce or eliminate casualties. On top of that, you have driving licences, these are “fitness tests”. Are you fit to be on the road and do you possess the required knowledge to be on the road? Train drivers have their “competencies” renewed often for similar reasons, but if you drive on the road, you don’t. Work that out. Cars have to have a fitness test, for similar reasons, what happens if you lose your brakes? Suddenly, that great big tree that you are heading towards looks very appealing! You can’t stop any other way, so that is the only place you can stop. Or someone else. Then you cause injuries or death. You think “Run, no one will find me”, then the law catches up with you and you have to compensate people out of your own pocket, because you didn’t have any form of insurance.
“But I’m poor, I cannot afford insurance” and take the risk… Ok, lets put the ball onto the other foot: You get hit by an uninsured driver, the driver does the usual runner and cannot be found. You are in hospital for several months with serious injuries, with no income because you are off sick and getting statutory sick pay, which doesn’t pay a lot per week. Plus its an arse to apply for with loads of hoops and hurdles. You are now heavily in debt because you can’t pay for anything and you require specialist care. Who is going to pay? The other driver? The other driver goes “f _ _ _ off, I’m not paying anything.”, positively identified as the person in the collision and they use the same quote you used. “I’m poor, I have no money”.
Now what? Demand they pay? They refuse, you take them to court, you got massive fines, lose the case, or win it and still get nothing? Then they go to prison and you are still in hospital in pain?
That’s a life. That is why insurance exists.
I also been co-ordinating deliveries with the magazine and contributing to it, organising it has been quite fun on tight deadlines, especially with work problems too, but I’ve managed it.
So, I do have a life outside of Trainz, even if Trainz is the main thing – or the railway these days, hopefully this gives you an idea what I’m doing and why and I’ll stop ranting about other drivers and their mentality. In fact, I did get a suggestion of standing as a councillor more recently. Yes really, because I made a change. Just don’t talk to me about Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) which got shelved the day before I wrote this. Thank god. Turning 2 tier councils into single tier councils (unitary authorities) in my PERSONAL view, wouldn’t deliver the savings they want, if anything, in my PERSONAL view, would cause more problems financially than it would solve.
Time to talk about work as I mentioned it on my CV.
In the “about me”, an unfinished page, you may of noticed my CV. Now I try and keep work off this page but sometimes its relevant and today is one of those days it becomes relevant. It’s also an interesting and rather funny story (Sorry if anyone is offended, but please do laugh at my expense.)
So from today, I make the jump from CO4 Short Term Planning clerk to CO5, about the highest I can go, I totally wasn’t expecting this and my boss always told me – by the way, I’ve said this soo many times and I have told him directly:
“You’re the best manager I’ve ever had” And I said that in my interview feedback.
Because he is finally a manager that understands my issues and my viewpoint. I understand his as well. Oh we talk about Pompey (Portsmouth, UK) a lot as we both know the area, along with another person.
Yes, I’ve been told off but he’s asked the questions and not put any blame, just annoying when things go wrong. I’ve caused a delay and his thought was “well, its something we need to look out and learn from” and he is actually right. Sometimes, mistakes happen once and never again and I did. Occasionally, mistakes slip through unnoticed and its nature really.
But lets go back a bit, why am I thinking this is an important step for me?
Well, here is my updated CV up until today (I’ll put a new one on my about me page in the future):
Now compare this to my HTML version, one of my managers suggested I have a complete history, but I have also themed it part of my site.
Then, notice something, my education is the big thing that stands out – “it doesn’t look unusual, but you were at a school for a very long time, did you attend secondary school?” and being in the UK, there is primary and secondary. The answer is yes, I did, but most people leave primary school and get educated from Year 7 to a secondary school, I didn’t, because in other blogs, I may of mentioned a disability that I’ve been diagnosed with, of Autistic Spectrum Disorder and ended up in mental health units several times in my life because of it. More higher functioning, but I have quite strong social issues, especially in my early years, so this is one of those issues that rear its ugly head.
I actually went to a school for those with what today would be considered “SEND” (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) as I was considered a pupil with Mild Learning Difficulties (MLD), yet, here I am, in control of a large chunk of the UK railway, dealing with train crew diagrams on a daily basis. The school has changed since, a lot, but it was this one: Link (St. Anthony’s School, Chichester, UK)
If I’m really honest, from what I got from those I have talked to in the past:
Not a great deal had jobs – I did.
Lots went to college but lower course levels – I went all the way to BTEC National
Not many went to University, if anyone – I did (University of Portsmouth and I took on a really difficult course, how many from the school know C++? I bet no one and that is a difficult language)
Not many I believe work in London – I do.
Some have jobs, I’ve gone further than possibly lot, the next step is management!
Not many have the responsibilities I do.
Those in jobs are on low end wages, there maybe a few that are in higher ends, but I am not 100%.
Lots actually live in the Bognor Regis, Littlehampton area. (I think I know why).
I drive, a few others do, but lots don’t. I’ve driven company vehicles more than once.
I’m involved in local politics – I’d like to know who is. (Councillor at Parish level)
I know I sound like I am boasting as they would call it, but there is a point, a big point and if anyone asked me now “How do I get to your level?”, the answer is simple.
Firstly, DISABILITY IS NO BARRIER. People put barriers up, you don’t and that will go onto my next complaint, because if I am honest, how disabilities are treated, we as a society have a VERY long way to go. It is thankfully getting better.
So for someone who left with 2 GCSE and broke the school record more than once, which if I went to a mainstream school, I wouldn’t (because the bar is higher) and possibly still breaking records, I’m getting somewhere and if I am honest, someone talking about it on a site, that’s a first. The downside? My mental health has never been great and very wobblily, its also one big reason that if you notice, I’ve never married, so my former peers do have one if not several positives over me, I’ll give them that, plus lots have kids, lots have their own place, lots have a lot better social life than I have, mine tends to be in London these days, but even in the office, I’m pretty quiet and I haven’t made many friends outside of it, I’ve tried to keep it strictly professional. However, I actually don’t drink alcohol either, so that goes against me in some cases. Them: “You must be boring at parties!” Me: “Yes, but at least AI understand me better than you will – so it is me and the laptop doing some crazy stuff that you won’t understand. At least these skills will take me further.”. Oh and I do need a LOT of mental stimulation which I believe counts as a reasonable adjustment, which is an issue with those with ADHD and ASD conditions, not all, however.
Secondly, the interview process, its not fit for purpose, I’ll be blunt about that. That is my biggest complaint is that when it comes to questions, at lot of informal interviews are about how you fit and your skills, great, you got a decision to make, I get it. It is a difficult one, but I am not one of those that can waffle my way through one. The problem I have is that I have lots of skills I can’t talk about, not because they are under an NDA or anything related, its because I physically can’t. It’s like going “Can you tell me how you created your latest setup?”, “no, but I can show you!”. It is explaining in their terms what they are looking for, key words, things I don’t understand (like SEOs on sites). I’m not the only one that finds the interview process flawed. I mean, if I was offered a tech interview and someone asks “tell me how you go through your process”, my thought would be “well, look on my site, I can describe it better in writing”.
The railway is better for this and it is the place where I have had a much better level playing field, in that you are scored on the STAR principle. In other words Stiuation
Task
Action
Result
Its not about going “so this is what I did”. It is a scenario, “Tell me a time where you worked effectively as a team, what was the outcome?” or “Tell me a time where you worked under pressure, what was the result of that pressure?”. A lot of them follow the core principle from the company and those would align to “Supportive of each other” (First Group) and “Setting the highest Standard” (First group again). I believe these are no longer in use anyway. Either way, its better, but you can be caught off guard, its not designed to be trick questions, its not designed to catch you out, it is talking about a time where you had to deal with a difficult situation, in or out of work. Then you are graded on that, obviously, the one with the highest score gets the job. Recruitment for us has been a lot better recently and its a good thing, they have offered support and if you are struggling to get into a job for a company that you really want to work with, give recruitment a call or an email. I must admit, I’ve had trouble in the past, but my current company, I’m honestly shocked they are willing to help. Again, another positive mark.
So, then comes to “how would I improve it?”, to be honest, demonstrations for some specialist skills and in my recent interview, if someone handed me a phone or tablet and gone “so, a customer hands you this and tells you its not working, what would you do?” and I could show them where I would look, how I would do it, etc.
Thirdly and an experience I had, once you start a job with an employer, I’m more inclined to stay and we need to think as a society of retaining workers. The job market is competitive enough but once you get skilled workers that are working up the ladder, keeping them becomes harder. Yes, we need low skilled workers for the entry level jobs to start with, look at my history, you can’t get any lower than agency on the gateline. I know a lot would say “but isn’t gateline higher than cleaning?” and the answer is on the railway “no, actually, its a “promotion” due to how the grading system works”. Yes, I given a rather negative comment when I worked the gateline at Guildford as an RO2 on the very rare occasion that I was basically ” a sweeper” and I thought “yeah, you see that, you don’t see that as a promotion due to your ignorance.” Then went on to cover the Supervisor role a handful of times.
So, I should celebrate this, but the question is, where next? I plan to be in this role for a while and I spoke to the other guys, told them about it and withdrew my application because of the situation.
The funny bit?
So, in between the interview and awaiting the result, I applied for a 6 month secondment in IT, I wasn’t expecting to get the job but did it to do something different and at the suggestion of someone else, I went for the interview but was advised the salary was lower than what I was offered! There was no salary listed. Plus the recruiter knew I was there, so had a talk about the role and went and did the interview anyway. Then gave them a long list of questions I wanted to find out about the role. The recruiter told me I’ll find out the next day if I was successful. So I wasn’t and this is the bit that is very unusual for a candidate. The job I was offered paid more than I went for, had better terms and conditions in that it is 6 months and was trasferring quickly!
The other one? Management grade but had they think a Std+ smart card for travelling with. (I’d love that).
If I am honest, I would love to do a 6 month secondment, just so I have the experience of working in an corporate IT environment. I passed the specialist questions, then come back for the CO5 role, but we will see what the future brings and as my skills are developing quite quickly now as I my network changed again, then that would be a conversation for the future, possibly a poll.
Still, it is great to be multiskilled and multiskilled in 2 specialist areas. Oh yeah, big tip, be multiskilled. if you are monoskilled and something happens, what do you do next? Being multiskilled does help, even if you use those skills as I do in your spare time.
I did contact the manager, but I also showed him what I’ve been upto in my spare time – I’ve impressed them! Seriously? I created an Active Directory server to manage my computers because I have a lot of them and it took me a lot longer than expected. I’ve also been messing with Cockpit Virtualisation and Proxmox Virtual Environment recently to do a lot of tasks like this, I’ve done a bit with Hyper-V in the past as well, so I’m having lots of fun. Not.
Its rare for me to talk about the universe or even take an interest in it, it doesn’t help that my dad has an interest in astrology. So when we had an Eclipse event, my dad couldn’t help but set up his telescope and I couldn’t help but get my camera out. These were taken in the Chichester area on the 12/08/2026. We didn’t get a total eclipse but a partial one. The telescope has a “refractor” (I think he said) on it, making it safer to use. Don’t stare into direct sunlight! It causes eye damage immediately.
More maybe dumped here later from my Motorola Thinkphone. I’ve used a Sony Cybershot HX220V hovering over an eyepiece. So some of it is out of alignment. (Plus the telescope tracking didn’t work).
I thought this was going to be a one part thing, not 2 parts! Ok, time to do some explaining.
(I broke it up into sections, so hopefully it is easy to read and its very technical on computing stuff).
Some ideas seem like good ones, I mentioned in this blog about the server I am still running in 2026 despite being 12 years old and still running. It crashes every so often as its got too many servers, its running Windows 11 and Hyper-V which is a resource hog and keeps getting hacked.
How it all started…. ..is that I wanted a computer to be accessible from anywhere and with my Trainz work, my council work and development work all separated. The plan was 1 Windows virtual machine, 1 Linux virtual Machine and one Linux/Windows/Whatever for my council work virtual machine as we don’t get issued computers in my Parish Council due to budget constraints, so have a BYOD policy.
The system looked like this:
How the topography looked afterwards was….. quite frankly a mess! But it works.
Somehow!
The plan was to move my server partially in the cloud to allow me to access the computer anywhere, I mean anywhere, so I looked for a cheap enough server deal, came across IONOS who looked reasonable, asked if I could use it for remote desktop which was fine, was asked if I was OK with Linux, recommended a package and got going. That ended up being a disaster but I got it working with XRDP. I’ll explain more. Then I needed more power, so got an upgrade, but ended up with 2 vServers. Ok, I’ve now got 2 vServers, now what? Put both to good use I guess.
Then came the fun.
The idea was to complete the whole lot in less than a week. That was late April/Early May. Fast forward to early June and I am near completion, plus a lot less hair, plus a lot more going on. The first thing I did was investigate “Proxmox”. That itself took about 3 weeks to get to a semi working state, which resulted in me face planting the keyboard at the end. The idea was to use Proxmox to host 2 virtual machines, Apache Guacamole to access the virtual machines via RDP and then have a separate Debian environment. For your sanity, if you don’t like the route of being restricted to a particular distribution, don’t chose this one. Seriously, don’t! Its not a beginner friendly route.
The concept works, don’t get me wrong, its a good idea if you need a full fat OS to work with like me. But the problem is, I was restricted to one of 9 images, all Linux and I couldn’t add my own custom image to the vServer (I get why, its for security.) So setting it up was easy, adding and converting a disk image was easy. Went from VHDX (Microsofts format for virtual disks) to RAW with little trouble. Import the virtual machine and no network. Do plenty of troubleshooting to no avail and restart from scratch.
Go through the same steps, the host now looses its internet connection (because you can’t use a network bridge – I knew that already) and almost every tutorial said to tie the network card to the bridge. No, I want a NAT (Network Address Translation) which required manual config editing which was easy right? Wrong.
Rinse a few more times, fix the issue, now trying to get the guests to talk, right, without a DHCP server (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), I eventually realised that each host needed to have its own IP address set. That worked, but then came a bigger problem, no DNS (Domain Name Server), so I could access anywhere with an IP address by pinging it, but I could not use web addresses to connect, nor was there any sort of basic web browsing.
The funny bit:
In between all of this, I helped clean a flat as this was largely done while working around other jobs and I’ll talk about that in another blog of “Unprofessional professional Cleaners” – I even thought of a title and one night I was travelling from Twickenham, London (where I worked for that day) to Chichester, UK which is roughly where I reside.
This was about 2 to 3 weeks in and I remember going into a public area of the train and during the journey, this just shows the mentality of some people. I was joined by a youth who I said nothing to – to begin with and the mentality of “anything is a threat” and going to Haslemere, guard knew where I was anyway and it was a Saturday. I had my headphones on listening to V2 Radio online (Great local radio station!) and being this was around 22:00 on a Saturday, there were loads of club tunes. I didn’t have my headphones on too loudly but I ignored them, kept typing command after command and said.
Me: “I got a DNS problem”. Youth: “You what?” Me: “I got a DNS problem”. Obviously, only heard of “I got a problem” and probably related to him. Youth; “What is that?” Me: (incorrectly thinking) “Directory Name Service” (No, I know, Domain Name Service, I was in a situation – shows if you feed BS, they believe it) Youth: “What does that do?”
Me: “Translate web addresses into IP addresses”
Youth: “Are you a hacker?” Me: “I’m a programmer and programmers are good hackers.” (I might have to explain my justification)
Youth: “Can you hack my phone?” Me: “I’m not interested in your phone” Then proceeds to turn the volume up on my headphones a bit louder, blocking him out. All I heard afterwards is a very faint “hello, hello… HELLO”.
To be frank, his phone is probably polluted with problems and I got better things to do than try and hack an iPhone, especially when I found out that he had been kicked out of first class in the middle and decided to join me instead. Some people think their phone is the most important thing in the world and they have to keep it charged, in fact, battery life and lack of features is why I went away from iPhones – strange to say, but no desktop mode, but my Android has it and you are locked in the Apple ecosystem which grabs you and you get trapped in it.
After that, I thought “I’m not getting anywhere with Proxmox” and it was a few days, then I thought “what about if I just KISS and go with QEMU? The other problem I had is that when I set up the Windows VM, because there was no DNS, I couldn’t therefore set up Windows and further more, because there was no DHCP, there was no internet and therefore no DNS to connect to on a fresh install, especially when you need to use an online account to even set up Windows 11. Painful? It was!
A new start.
So a few more erases then went for plain old QEMU, moved everything across and everything worked. Almost flawlessly, I started from scratch with the Windows VM again. But then installing Guacamole and getting everything working? That was a different matter. Found an online script and it worked, if it wasn’t the local computer, my remote desktop worked without issues, but locally? Forget it! Loads of searching, wiping again and then I went for a Docker Container. Nearly gave up with Guacamole after a few weeks even in a Docker container which I screwed up completely because I screwed up the SQL server on the hottest day of the year and head butted the keyboard in frustration. So I gave Guacamole in a Docker container one last go with a fresh install, it worked, it wouldn’t connect to the remote Linux machine anymore, I did a bit of searching and found 2 check boxes. It worked, it connected. Tried the local machine, with the same 2 checkboxes, it worked. I finally got somewhere on little sleep. At this time, I was also setting up an OpenVPN container as well, realising my dream may never come true. This was on the hottest May bank holiday we had in the south.
Now I overcome 2 problems, here came the third.
NAT.
NATS!
Network Address Translation (NAT) can be useful, however, they are a lot more complex to set up. Now here is an excellent tutorial (read me!) of how to deal with port forwarding on NATs in Linux. This bit was just as troublesome because, the moment you switch off the machine, goodbye to your rules. Have a text document with your rules that are tested as working saved with you!! You will need it. So, Debian in my case, comes with UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall), great, you can allow ports to be opened, type in a simple command and it works nicely with iptables (the other bit you need) until you kill the power and kill your rules. A fix? Simple, iptables-persistent which….
.. is incompatible with ufw! So needs to be uninstalled. ARRGHHH!!!!!!
Yes, really. So I ended up using firewalld and firewall-gui, manually adding the rules via command line first (the gui doesn’t save them either by the looks of it or did something wrong). And then nearly lost my last bit of brain cell with any sort of sanity. Now I got everything working, on one server, I followed the tutorial, got 2 port forward rules working, able to access my machines from Remote Desktop Client on my “thin client” and was thinking, “yay, a step in the right direction, it works!”. Guacamole didn’t, I tried the web address, IP address (which then suddenly worked for the local session, so I got now 2 servers working with 2 check boxes I mentioned earlier), then typed the local address on the third Linux VM, I suddenly had a third machine that worked. Then the Windows one that went:
NOPE.
A few mods later, yay, it suddenly worked. Windows 11 works by default with Network Level Authentication, i.e. you need to input your username and password into a box before you are allowed to connect.
Then machine no.5 was on the other server with a version of Linux, but when I tried to add a rule, the machine suddenly lost its connection. Worse it was now exhibiting “I don’t like the DNS anymore”, so started afresh again. This is why backups are important but I didn’t get that far so I didn’t shed a tear in losing a handful of files and my new Curriculum Vitae (CV) which is in an email somewhere. This is after I got rejected for a job role and found many issues with my application which was fair.
So started from scratch, did a similar thing to the other server, used all my experience and then set up the port forwarding rules. It worked, finally. I had got somewhere. Now, I’m able to access all my desktops from a web browser. Until I was bored again. Well, not really, but I somehow had been targeted with MS Azure services with my last brain cell with any sanity attached to it, so I thought I’ll get a free tier Windows Server and see what it is like (then lost my sanity), added it to Guacamole and to be fair, its not a patch on my others, but it works, I wrote this document on it (Windows Server 2022 Standard Azure edition) which I had to start from scratch because I installed the core version with no desktop experience.
But that took less than half a day to setup and it was wet when I wrote this.
Final result, full screen site, works on any device (see below) almost and I can access any computer listed. One more joined but that’s a physical server – photo because its from the Thin Client.
So, that was everything, it took me 2 months to build, it robbed me of my sleep, it almost robbed me of my sanity. Okay, it did! But it works. I only got one apparently easy bit to do, ngnix reverse proxy and a HTTPS certificate. That is it. Can I go back to modeling?
Why do it? Is it worth it? Actually, I’ve lost my sanity, I’m now typing in “ls” into a command prompt than “dir” and forgetting I’m in Windows, but why? As I mentioned, I wanted my computers to be accessible from anywhere and wanted to keep my council stuff, for Data Protection reasons, (GDPR you know!) and storing council stuff means I’m subjected to a FOI request. Because Freedom of Information (FOIA) includes storing anything on a personal device means that all documents relating to the organization means that my device is also subjected to a FOIA if it is related to the council. I found this out when I went for FOIA training with the company I am with. Coupled with SAR (Subject Access Request), I really do not want to take the risk.
Another point is to learn skills, I do intend to stay in Train Planning, but as I learned how to set up my own Linux system, I’m basically messing with stuff that organizations deal with, then there is a motion to get me into IT. I was asked by the Head of IT “why don’t you join IT?”, “Because I know nothing about ActiveDirectory” which is I guess easy to teach, I knew of Azure but never messed with it until now and I’ve done some seriously complex stuff. Who do you know for loads of computers created a bootable disk image using a virtual machine? Me! I deployed it to several physical machines, and it worked. It was basically a Windows 10 install with all my programs installed with a user account, ready to go, all I did was write the disk image to the disk and start. Anything else had a run once script in cmd and I did that easily. I also created scripts to automate installs for Windows, yeah, these are skills I don’t talk about, found a way to PXE boot (that was hard) with TFTP, so network installs. Etc.
Finally, my computer from everywhere. I’ve stopped using my desktop completely and for several years, I access that everywhere, OK, it was a security risk as I learned and wised up to security issues and always was worried about getting hacked as port 3389 was exposed to the internet. I previously used 3312 as well for other machines. But then I went and learned about virtual machines and putting them to different uses. I used Virtualbox which is a Type 2 Hypervisor and used that for nearly everything. It does the job, it’s great to learn from, but slow. I learned about Hyper-V and its differences (I’ve used Hyper-V before as a virtual machine, not in any complex layout but I found it consumed resources by the bucket load), it’s not until I started playing with it, I found out what it’s like and moved onto Linux KVM from there, despite my initial problems.
With multiple devices, having a server online, does help with accessibility. Also, I don’t actually carry a laptop most of the time in the strictest sense and it goes with a wider problem in the UK – policing. Think about this, you got your laptop, OK, 90% of your data lives on it, its not backed up anywhere, you go outside, you use your laptop, it disappears on some machete wielding, Sur-Ron riding youth with no identification and wearing all black. As in no number plate, can’t be traced, etc. You shout “Hey, Hey!” and you get the middle finger as they don’t look where they are going. Hopefully they will end up in the railings, you hope. But I’ve seen someone do exactly that in London with phones, losing a phone means you lost a lot of contacts. Losing a computer with your content on it would be devastating, so I’ve taken proactive steps to stop that, I’ve come close to losing it several times, not through theft thankfully, but hard drive failures. Now, I carry what s pretty much a “mobile thin client”, or a laptop setup as one, that gets nicked, I lose nothing. That gets nicked, it’s very well locked down, even I forgotten the password to access the admin account (truly!). So, it gets nicked, what have I lost? A relatively inexpensive device to replace. What does the thief have?
Not entirely theft proof, but you don’t lose your data.
A VPN certificate (easy to revoke), a load of links and no passwords. Now you may go “but you are more likely to be hacked”. Yes, true, but I’ve thought about that, hence why I use Guacamole and with MFA enabled. Furthermore, the virtual machines are restricted to 2 IP addresses, so I cannot use remote access via RDP anywhere else apart from the web browser or at home. That works and works well. I’ve got more to do, but that will be for another blog another time.
(You know its bad when I’ve restricted SSH on port 22 to one IP address)
Its a Coolpi Genbook RK3588 and I did a video of it.
Coolpi Genbook RK3588
So if you watch the video, I really couldn’t find much or if anything at all on this hackable, programmable computer.
I didn’t get much time to spend with it, all 20 minutes worth, but I finally unpacked it.
I’ll edit this post when I’ve taken it apart so you can see the guts and how it performs, its got a few programs I don’t like and if you hadn’t noticed or hadn’t watched yet, it doesn’t like my dual monitor setup, it mirrors both, it’s suppose to support 3 monitors. Then again, I am using a Dell Ultrasharp U2520D and a Dell Ultrasharp U2518D. Oh and it’s very unprofessional, if you like to see more, please do tell me. I am looking at a RISCy purchase next, being a MUSE BOOK as in this day and age, components are getting quite expensive.
(Oh and the use case, I do plan to run Blender and some interesting programs, despite having 8GB ram and an ARM64 CPU – the battery life is more what I am interested in.)
For something not meant to professional, the preview that I can see, the Sony Cybershot HX20V doesn’t do a bad job, I thought it was going to be worse than that.
As an offshoot of my previous post and getting my VPS working (Virtual Private Server click me to see what I mean), I’ve been trying to play with my latest asset from Blender. The good news is that the 10T tank Wagon is in Trainz, with LODs, with now rotating axles, bad news is that it isn’t textured yet and I as I write this, I have to fetch the screenshot to show you which is on another computer that isn’t available. Also unusually for my stuff, it actually has LODs, be it 4 levels. I’ve always kept away from LODs because of the problems with A) reducing detail which makes development time much longer, B) as mentioned, makes development time much longer. At least in this case, it was much easier to do and the performance isn’t too bad with 4 LOD levels. Level 4 was built from scratch but the other 3 were gradual reductions.
So as an offshoot of this, I had a go at the rectangular tank wagon. I thought it would be a case of a new body and same frame, but what I didn’t realis is how many detail differences there are! The frame is different. This is how it looks.
(Feature image downloaded from Pixabay (Edgar Oliver), not my own image, so credit to the author for providing a royalty free image for me to use as I don’t have any server images that are suitable!)
So I paused 3D modelling, well sort of, to work on a computer as I wanted to put my stuff in the cloud. First problem was finding a cloud provider cheap enough, I didn’t care what it was, it just had to be something. So, did a Google search and got in contact with a company called “IONOS” and a quick chat to say that I wanted something to mess around with online (basically to replace my home lab, I’ll talk about this in a bit) to run Blender mostly and for personal use.
Recommended a 6 vCore, 8GB vRAM server, ok, not bad for the price, but the question was “Do you have any experience in Linux?” and the answer was “Yes, Debian and Arch”. I prefer Arch as AUR is the most useful tool ever for Linux. The problem with Linux is a lot of programs you want don’t come “precompiled” to install. You have to build it yourself, which means, if you have any issues, you have to find all the dependencies yourself. AUR can help, but my god, can you end up going down that rabbit hole of finding all the dependencies. On a download page on this site, I came up with a script for that problem, Proton VPN (which has a free tier to use). So I can use Proton VPN on the train without worrying about my data. VPNs have become more important for me as I adapted my network for my uses. Before, I just connected to a desktop via RDP and that was it, exposed to the net, for about 15 years when I really got into it, on the default port, left on 24/7.
I knew about VPNs, but I felt they were way more complex to setup, so I generally tended to avoid them. Then I went into Train Planning, used a VPN solution, then thought “actually, I can use this at home, the benefits are fantastic!”, now learning also I can do far more with a VPN, then that allowed me to access my NAS from the outside. That allowed me to download files from the outside. Now I’m going all online with offline too, part of that plan was a long standing one, hence the vServer. Well, I am learning new skills for potentially my next job, its selling myself to my next employer- well, I already have a reputation at my workplace. Its a case of selling myself when I don’t have much experience in a corporate environment. I just been super interested in VDI, except my network isn’t large enough.
So, I started playing with Virtual Machines more recently – I always did using VirtualBox so I can run my windows software on Linux and Mac OSX, this came from Virtual PC when I had a proper Power PC mac – which wasn’t particularly good for Max, yes I tried it. So, I decided to start playing with more and more VMs, I created a development environment for a program that never happened. Why? Because if I am to hand over the source code, I would want to use a VM with everything set up and avoid the problem of “well, it worked on my computer” scenario. So lets go onto more recent ideas.
I became a councillor and I thought initially “so, lets repurpose my VPN server which had Windows 10 on it that’s now out of support for something else”. (Yes, I ran a Debian VPN in a virtual machine for security reasons and backed it up). So I turned that into a Linux then windows server, then used KVM initially which I started having problems, then used Hyper-V. Loaded it up with VMs and let the problems begin.
Now my personal work is in a Windows VM and my council stuff is in a Linux VM which is behind a VPN. What was the point? Well, I am a lover of thin clients, as I write this, I am using one right now. A Dell Wyse 3470 Mobile thin client, the data stays in one location and with the power of remote desktop, you can go from location to location, room to room and you don’t have to shut your PC down. Great! Performance however? Is something else. In corporate environments, this sort of thing is used to the max! Think of a couple of big servers, running Windows Server, in a large chain containing several Hyper-V Virtual Machines for a number of employees, in some cases, just to run ONE program. Yes, one program, with a remote connection. I’ve used remote desktop but not remote app. That is something for future me to get interested in and gets a bit complicated to set up. Now that means you can have a laptop or a desktop, that goes from several hours to set up, to a matter of minutes, as long as you got a good internet connection!
So you hear me rambling on about my skills and thinking “well, whats the point?”, Trainz. That’s what, more specifically, one point to develop my work, to store my work, to use my work and it doesn’t matter what device I use. Thin Clients are useful for this as it means you can do all 3 in one go. 2 things I am worried about that I am trying to mitigate.
1) Data loss 2) Theft
This is where VMs come in, does both, but putting it online, also means that you swap one for another, likely to get hacked. That I am going through and finding a solution for.
And what would I say to someone thinking that they want to learn some new skills? JFDI! I mean, guess what my server that runs all my virtual machines? You’ll love it! (Its below the 3Com Switch)
A 2014 Lenovo small form factor desktop, M73 from memory. 4th gen Core i5 4570-T, 12GB ram, 256GB SATA SSD. Yes, really, that is it! Does it do the job? Yes! Is it slow at times? Yes! Can I run more virtual machines? Yes and I’ve run upto 5 at once. Will it die? Sure, but I got a back up of it online for when it does eventually kick the bucket. All I have to do is then get a new machine, install the OS and then restore the backup. Everything is saved.
I guess that gives you an insight of my environment I love to mess with and give some of you some ideas of how you can use your skills for a long drawn out project. Oh and I now use Linux more than ever before, I am looking at replacing Windows with Linux and I have tried to.
Oh yeah, does the vServer run Trainz? Yes! Not very well which I think is down to the Bochs graphics drivers, but it does it via Debian, it has an AMD EYPC CPU in it, along with other machines and it seems to be OK. I’ve not tried the Lenovo M73 which I should replace. (Anyone want to help me?)
Final thought, you do realise that what I am doing now is the future of computing? Microsoft is already trying with Windows 365, having your data in the cloud on a virtual machine with all your programs. Its a good thing as you have a high performance computer which is replaced when you migrate off that server onto another, so you don’t get much performance degradation as it is anyway. Its also more efficient, a thin client doesn’t have to do much, just repeat frames from another computer of some sort. So you go from a computer that is like 60W to one that is less than 5W. My desktop probably pulls 200W then the screen ontop. Which sucks a lot of juice – for something that basically idles most of the time anyway. Yeah, computers do idle a lot, the more you share the resource, the more efficient it is, bearing in mind, a lot of office applications actually don’t consume much processing power, in fact, if someone asked me what computer they should buy for their budget and shops won’t like me for this, but buy what you need, don’t buy unnecessary power because its a waste. Do you need a nVidia or AMD graphics card for Office documents? No way! Save your money, get something like an Intel Celeron N100 or Core i3, or a low end machine. Even an AMD Althorn 3000 is enough. Most of these sorts of CPUs may not last as long but long enough to consider replacement in 4 to 5 years when Microsoft changes the system requirements again. Although by this point, you can just go down the thin client route. (And a virtual machine is more than viable for that sort of thing).
EDIT: If anyone wants me to, I’ll try and produce a detailed explanation of how everything worked. Including a previous server build that failed miserably and some tips I’ve learnt as the default server packages that IONOS provides have some features missing that would be useful as a general purpose system. Other things, online storage is a must and Windows Server which is what is often packaged with these virtual servers is far more expensive – bear that in mind. Nothing says you can’t slap Windows in a VM though, I did that.
That was a bit unexpected, I got some serious optimisation to do!
While trying to learn blender, I almost bar a few small things before it goes to the next stage, completed my tank wagon.
It was an interesting project and the modelling took a week longer than I wanted, most of it is because I am trying to undo the way Max works as this is now muscle memory (GMAX which got me into modelling works way differently than Blender) and the unique ways that blender works. For example, the way you start an object in Blender requires working from primitives, I work mostly with splines in *max these days which is massively different. When I completed a spline, I can add a surface modifier or an extrude modifier. Blender so far, from what I noticed unless someone wants to leave a comment, you have to convert the spline to a mesh (curve in Blender) which means you can’t edit the spline once its a mesh without undoing everything, whereas in max, you have a modifier stack and you can go back several iterations to make a minor change
Blender has more advantages though, it works on anything, I have it on my tablet, phone (as I am avoiding the iPhone at the moment), in fact, anything that includes OpenGL – that isn’t my remote desktop annoyingly. Plus Blender 5.0 completely changes the file format, making it incompatible with earlier versions apart from 4.5 LTS. Which means the version on my tablets is Version 3.6.22. Yeah, annoying. The version on Ubuntu ARM from what I tried is 3.0.1 from memory, which is even older!
Getting it to work on my Windows On ARM laptop – the Lenovo Thinkbook X13s is a royal pain in the arse and requires some hackery and I’ve not tried the Mac yet.
Max? If it runs Windows, it works. If it runs Wine, it doesn’t, even more frustrating as I have had 3D Studio Max 5 working for a demo in Wine – once. That’s it. Otherwise, Virtual Machine time for Windows. More space needed, more overheads for limited resources and more hopes and dreams needed. It does work without Open GL on the 2 old versions I’ve tried – and they work in a virtual machine.
3 file formats included, blend (original), glb (used on this site) and FBX (if you fancy a different program as well as the blender iterations I went through. (3 of them)
I didn’t think I’ll get this far with Blender, but I am making progress.
The “spur of the moment and I want to learn a new skill” thing is actually getting somewhere, once I got the hang of Blender.
However, some bits have made it in that shouldn’t on export like the sky box, hence why there are a couple of things that most certainly shouldn’t be there. The polycount is also rather high for my liking. Now I am getting on with Blender, my next challenge is to buy an ARM based laptop for Linux and for a big reason, battery life as I spend more time away from a plug that actually on it. (Anyone like to help? Theres a donation button available)
Hopefully, I’ll have this out in the next month when/if I finish it. There is already a space for it on the page.
