new workshop

2016-01-05

When we first moved to our place, there was an existing shed on the property: Old Shed... It was in pretty bad shape: a tree branch had crushed part of the roof, the plywood foundation had rotted away and most of the organic material inside was moldy. I suited up in the nice and humid mid-june weather and took it apart (which is also when I found out how bad the mosquitoes are in the area…), leaving a giant mess of sheet metal, tiny nuts and bolts, and decomposed wood.


sump pump

2015-07-24

There is something strange about moving to a new area. Everything is different, even the bugs in this area are drastically different that what I grew up with. It can be unsettling even though it is mostly harmless (except termites, they are not harmless). Other areas of difference order on the side of natural catastrophes. In the east bay, Antioch specifically, the weather did not seem to destroy anything. Pipes froze one cold winter, and the hot summers were tolerated because we all had AC


zfs failed array recovery

2015-07-10

I have had a nice ZFS RAIDZ in operation for the last 7 years now, 4 1TB Drives. The 2.6TB or overall storage I had was very sufficient, and while the drives were starting to show their age and performing less and less, I had no reason to replace them yet. After all, I don’t need MORE storage. Then one evening, my desktop failed to mount a mapped drive. Specifically to the storage path.


ceph cluster

2015-05-22 | #Ceph #Storage

One thing I have leared over the past few years: if you do not have a solid data management policy, at some point, there will be disasters. At work, we currently have two different types of storage. One I call “Tier 1”, is a beefy ZFS file server with very fast 900GB SAS drives. While the amount of storage is relatively small (~9TB), it is not meant for long term storage.


the chernobyl of boulder creek

2015-03-31

todo Okay, so its not exactly a nuclear reactor encased in a sarcophagus in our beautiful neighborhood. It is however, a closed down public school. The Redwood Elementary School of Boulder Creek CA was shut down around 2003/2004 when it merged with Boulder Creek Elementary. That is according the the SLV school district notes. It is in very good condition for being effectively boarded up and shut down for over a decade.


more custom salt grains

2015-03-09

At my day job, we’ve taken some large steps into the modern web application era. We have a great in-house development team, with fantastic leadership and direction. One of the best parts about my role, is that I get to help move obstacles out of our developers way. Simply put: when they are busy, I am busy. After a full year and a half, Don and his team have been very productive.


using salt grain to help manage passengers

2015-03-09

At my day job, we’ve taken some large steps into the modern web application era. We have a great in-house development team, with fantastic leadership and direction. One of the best parts about my role, is that I get to help move obstacles out of our developers way. Simply put: when they are busy, I am busy. After a full year and a half, Don and his team have been very productive.


freebsd 10 dot 1 upgrade trouble

2014-12-15

I’ve used freebsd-update(8) since its release, and I can only recall having one issue where I had to take extreme action (rolling back, due to driver issue with an intel 10Gb ethernet card…) Both my co-worker and I faced the same upgrade problem between FreeBSD 10 and 10.1, and it turns out, we were not alone. Here is the scene. Its Friday afternoon, which means the fantastic idea of upgrading a vm used to build our custom FreeBSD packages popped into my head.


openldap upgrade

2014-11-14

We use LDAP for a few things at $JOB, and I do my best to take care of them and keep them up to date. As I get more surly and burnt by the bleeding edge, I have started to adopt the no-frivolous upgrade policy. With that, one of our LDAP nodes was running a little sluggish. I have our ldap service load-balanced, so it was easy to direct all queries on one while I took some time to investigate why one (a VM no less) was running so slow.


photos are back

2014-10-08

I’ve re-deployed my old photo galleries: http://m87-blackhole.org/photos/ The reason they went away was mostly because I was using Zenphotos (for YEARS), and all of the overlayed upgrades became unmanageable. It was also a high-risk application to run, and had basic spam mitigation tactics. I also moved away from PHP in general, and started working with static site generators (this blog being octopress). The technical issue with this, is that most of these do not have built in tools to manage photo galleries.