What xx0r was

xx0r.info started out as a novelty domain I purchased so I could have the e-mail address h@xx0r.info. It was on sale for a dollar at Dotster. I still enjoy having this creative e-mail address and occasionally make it show up randomly when I need a fairly anonymous address to put down somewhere.

What xx0r is (for me)

Since its purchase in 2008 or so, xx0r.info has become the root domain for my home-lab infrastructure, and a test bed for many experiments in which I have learned increasingly more about the broad field of system administration and reliability engineering. In high school this meant playing around with IPv6 tunnels, virtualization, DNS, etc. Things became more elaborate and serious through college and my twenties, and now in my thirties I have things like a real time DNS control plane that pushes updates over MQTT, mutual TLS between all my network services, a whole bunch of nspawn containers, and an increasing number of things running on Kubernetes.

From the start my goal with xx0r was to unify user and service identities as much as possible. This was ahead of its time in 2008, and although the industry has mostly caught up since zero trust became a thing, the idea of having "one username and password for everything" has been present for my network services since inception. I wrote a custom SAML/OIDC IdP to drive all of this, and integrated it with SSH access control, an X.509 certificate authority, and a custom asset, DNS and DHCP management database.

In other words, this project is the "skills and technical experience" portion of my résumé.

I am currently happily employed as a site reliability engineer at a tech company most people have heard of.

What xx0r is (for you)

If you know me, there's a good chance I have at some point given you, or offered you, an account here. I have a group of about 10 serious users who rely on xx0r's services. The xx0r project is primarily a shell host - that is, a Unix box you can log into and have a shell on for the purposes of running your various scripts, standing up a website, etc.

Which reminds me–if you found this domain because of a CNAME or something like that, chances are quite high that it's not my site, it's a site I host for a friend. (If you found something of yours hosted on the xx0r network without your permission, by all means make use of the DMCA policy!)

What's with the ninja?

His name is Harry. He started as an emoticon on a website I won't name, and after becoming my personal trademark there, was eventually turned into a gigantic fuckin' SVG.

Go back to the pretty ninja.