Plurrrr

I’ve been participating regularly in Advent of Code for the past couple of years. It’s one of the highlights of my holiday season. The puzzles are fun, the stories are appropriately ridiculous, and it’s a neat way for me to keep the cobwebs brushed off some of the things I learned years ago that I don’t regularly use. Every year there are puzzles that take me a couple of minutes to solve, and puzzles that take me hours: I will forever curse the Intcode puzzles from 2019.

Last night’s puzzle was something new. The problem itself was pretty straight-forward (finding values that are common in multiple collections), but it resulted in a 45-minute debugging session that culminated in finding a bug in Swift’s implementation of Set.intersection(_:).

We're building an Active Directory server from Samba running on FreeBSD, free server software on a free operating system. We have set up the needed DNS infrastructure on an existing BIND master (or primary) DNS server. Our next step is to put together a system that we will make a slave (or secondary) DNS server, an initial step in building a Samba-based Active Directory server. We will do this with FreeBSD running on a Raspberry Pi.

Go is the programming language that delivers no empty promises for cloud applications and DevOps automation. It’s lightweight, the perfect match for parallel computing, and simple to use. We had to hop on the Golang bandwagon, as well. Over the past months of working with the language, we found out about its advantages and disadvantages we learned to manage including error handling and interfaces.