# man michele-branchini

MICHELE-BRANCHINI(1)     Useless User Commands     MICHELE-BRANCHINI(1)

NAME
       michele-branchini - mass deployer of mass destruction 💣

SYNOPSIS
       michele-branchini [--coffee=LITERS] [--sleep=false] [--yolo] task

DESCRIPTION
       Italian-based liability 🇮🇹 Sticks pieces of IT together and
       watches them burn 🔥 Somehow still employed — presumably
       because nobody else wants to maintain what he built.

       Operates AS215288 🌐 because breaking things at home wasn't
       enough — needed to do it at internet scale.

       Runs a "datacenter" in his garage 🏚️ Air quotes mandatory.
       Proxmox cluster, Ceph storage, UPS that beeps at 3am ⏰
       Cooling strategy: open the garage door 🥶

       Owns more MikroTik gear than an average ISP, but has it
       configured worse than an AVM Fritz!Box running factory
       defaults 🤡 Runs RouterOS 7 exclusively — if you're still
       on v6, we have nothing to talk about 🚪

ROLES
       ~ Poor Network Engineer 📉
       ~ Crappy Infrastructure Architect 🏗️
       ~ Overconfident Hacker 💀
       ~ Unauthorized MikroTik Evangelist 📡
       ~ General-purpose Peasant 🧑‍🌾

OPTIONS
       --coffee=LITERS ☕
              Mandatory. Minimum 3. Below this threshold, output
              is undefined behavior. Above 8, output becomes
              indistinguishable from a DDoS attack.

       --sleep=BOOL 😴
              Defaults to false. Cannot be overridden. Has been
              deprecated since 2005. Maintainer shows no intent
              to fix.

       --yolo 🎲
              Skip all validation, testing, and common sense.
              This is the default in production. Passing --no-yolo
              triggers a panic attack, not a kernel panic.

       --budget=0 💸
              Hardcoded. Not configurable. All infrastructure
              runs on spite and second-hand hardware.

RETURN VALUES
       0      Success (theoretical) ✨
       1      Generic failure (Tuesday) 😐
       2      DNS. It's always DNS. 🧬
       127    Command not found in $PATH or in life 🤷
       418    I'm a teapot (actual HTTP status of most services) 🫖

ENVIRONMENT
       LOCATION       Where the Adriatic sea meets bad routing decisions 🌊
       TIMEZONE       CET (but operates in "whenever I wake up") 🕐
       EDITOR         nano (yes, really. judge me.) 🔪
       SHELL          /bin/zsh
       PATH           /usr/bin:/sbin:/opt/regret

FILES
       ~/.config/impostor-syndrome  always present, 100% CPU 🎭
       ~/.ssh/authorized_keys       surprisingly well-maintained 🔐
       /dev/null                    where my documentation goes 📄
       /var/log/mistakes            error: disk full 💾
       /proc/self/status            State: R (running on fumes) ⛽

BUGS 🪲
       Yes.

       Cannot estimate time. "5 minutes" means anywhere between
       5 minutes and the heat death of the universe ⏳

       Frequently says "it works on my machine" with zero
       irony and full confidence 🤝

       Has deployed with --force in production and would
       do it again without hesitation or remorse 🫡

       Opens 45 browser tabs to fix one issue. Closes none
       of them. Ever 🗂️

       Deletes resources on the first try, restores them
       on the fourth. Calls this "experience" 🎓

CAVEATS ⚠️
       Do not ask for ETAs.
       Do not let him near production on Fridays 🍺
       Do not mention Kubernetes at dinner unless you have
       3 hours and no will to live 🍝

SEE ALSO
       stackoverflow(1), chatgpt(1), kubectl-get-pods(1),
       tcpdump(8), wireshark(1), nelson-pass(1), caffeine(3),
       regret(8)

AUTHOR
       Self-taught. For better or worse. Mostly worse 🤷‍♂️
       Restarted multiple times. Each reboot comes back
       slightly more opinionated and less patient.

🧠 things I pretend to understand

🌐 Networking — BGP, OSPF, MPLS, VLANs, and other acronyms I use to sound important at dinner parties. MikroTik enthusiast (read: hostage).

🏗️ Infrastructure — Kubernetes clusters that occasionally serve traffic. Proxmox, Ceph, and enough YAML to make a grown man cry.

🔐 Security — RPKI, DNSSEC, TLS everywhere, and a healthy paranoia that borders on clinical. If it’s not encrypted, it’s not deployed.

⚙️ Automation — CI/CD pipelines, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code. Because doing things manually once is a mistake, twice is a skill issue.

🏠 Self-hosting — Running 40+ services on a homelab cluster. If a SaaS exists, I’ve probably deployed a worse version of it at home.

🤖 Troubleshooting — Gave up. It’s all on AI’s shoulders now. I just approve the pull requests and pray.

🎵 Audio / Music — Passionate about music, too broke to buy gear. So I built it all — DACs, amplifiers, speakers. Disciple of Nelson Pass — the man who proved that Class A single-ended is the only topology worth burning electricity for. If it has a circuit board and makes sound, I’ve probably soldered it together at 2am with questionable flux and zero regard for my fingertips 🔥

🔨 things I’ve built (and occasionally break)

🌍 AS215288 — My own Autonomous System. Because getting a /24 and peering with the internet seemed like a reasonable weekend project. Dual-stack, BGP, RPKI-signed, and mostly operational.

🏚️ The Garage Datacenter™ — A Proxmox cluster that runs Ceph storage, a UPS that screams at 3am, and my entire digital life. Cooling is provided by opening the garage door. PUE ratio: incalculable.

Exhibit A: the "datacenter". Cable management by natural selection 🧬

🕐 NTP Pool Contributor — Two-node Stratum-1 NTP server in HA, feeding accurate time to the NTP Pool Project. Because apparently my homelab wasn’t extra enough — now I’m responsible for telling the internet what time it is. Two nodes, because even time deserves high availability.

Exhibit B: two boxes whose only job is knowing what time it is. They take it very seriously ⏱️

☸️ The Homelab Cluster™ — A k3s cluster running on top of the Proxmox cluster. INCEPTION TIME, BABY! 🌀 Dual-stack networking, MetalLB with BGP, 40+ self-hosted apps. It’s like AWS, but with more emotional damage, less uptime guarantees, and exactly one disgruntled SRE who is also the CEO, the customer, and the guy who forgot to pay the electricity bill.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 A Family — Most ambitious project to date. Zero documentation, no rollback strategy, and the forked processes consume 100% of available resources. Wife has root privileges and uses them liberally. Uptime: permanent. Maintenance windows: non-existent. Cannot be containerized.

🦇 This Website — A Hugo site served by a 6MB Rust binary because Nginx was too mainstream and WordPress was never an option. CI/CD auto-deploys from Git because I’m too lazy to SSH into things. Dracula theme, obviously — because 99.9% of tech YouTube thumbnails feature a terminal with Dracula, and I’m preparing for my inevitable career pivot to content creator.

📬 contact (if you must)

💬 Telegram: @winkelwoss
🚨 NOC: noc@as215288.net
🤝 Peering: peering@as215288.net
🔍 PeeringDB: AS215288

⚖️ disclaimer

No production systems were harmed in the making of this website. That’s a lie. Several were harmed. Some are still recovering 🏥

All opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent anyone with better judgement. Uptime is aspirational. SLAs are fictional. Backups are… probably running 🤞

Yes, there are emojis everywhere. They reconnect me with my inner child 👶
The one who didn't mass-delete production databases. Yet.