#286
Mar 10, 2024
Books
This week I read:
Twin Spirits: The Complete Weird Stories of W. W. Jacobs edited by S. T. Joshi
That’s the guy who wrote The Monkey’s Paw.
I hadn’t heard of any of his other stories, and I don’t think I’d actually read The Monkey’s Paw before, but it’s a book of short stories edited by S. T. Joshi so I figured this was right up my alley. And it kind of was, I guess.
W. W. Jacobs definitely writes in that old-fashioned horror / mystery story style where care is given to how the narrator learned the details of the story (the story-within-a-story framing device is very common) and nothing too mysterious happens, all the weird happenings can be explained as coincidences or tricks. They were mostly a bit mundane for me, some were more entertaining than others, but ultimately in most of the stories very little happened.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
We had a B-team adventure this week, with some of the party heading deeper into the dungeon, but most hanging out at the inn near the Arena waiting for the Lord to get back to them about a meeting. He won’t. The guard captain they sent a letter to will swing by in a couple of days, eat and drink at their expense, and explain that the Lord is very busy and only cares about putting on a good show, not about anything the PCs think they might know: if they want a meeting they’ll have to get his attention by doing something for the Arena first, like buying them some new gladiators or capturing a cool monster.
So, the exploratory squad went down another two floors, and things went pretty much as I expected. Everywhere they went looked very dangerous, so they turned back, until they accidentally triggered one of those dangerous things. Now one PC has a cursed stone torch stuck to their hand, and the party are being pursued by three high-level adventurer-bandits.
The players hope they can get sanctuary from the troll who operates the lifts down here, but I’m not so sure about that…
Miscellaneous
It’s been a very productive week for thing-doer, this week I’ve implemented:
- Actually running containers, not just processes, along with resource limits (and scheduling based on those limits) and port forwarding.
- Container networking, using flannel, so that every container can reach every other container.
- Cluster DNS, built atop my resolved, with worker nodes serving records for pods and nodes.
And just today I reached a really cool milestone: I set up worker nodes on two different computers, scheduled an nginx container to one and an ubuntu container to the other, and was then able to curl the nginx container via its autogenerated domain name! That’s a true end-to-end test, and it was not easy to get there: I think I’ve learned more about Linux networking in the last two days than I have in the last two years.
I’ll put the code up on GitHub shortly, as soon as I’ve resolved a few niggles—how I got the networking working was very manual, maybe I can automate it more—as I’ve now reached the minimum set of functionality that a container orchestrator needs.
I think the next feature I want to implement is a cluster-accessible API server, so that containers can call out to create new pods (and other resources); but the next thing to do is probably to set up a group of two or three VMs, with configuration as code, so I can do end-to-end testing without a load of manual work.