Posts

Our team had a lively discussion yesterday around Kubernetes and the fallacy of innovation & ROI from tech. I am usually the curmudgeon old grey beard, but K8 is one of those stacks that make sense. Let me explain… The days before the containerised world, we sysadmins (remember when we were called that!?) had to deal with packaging and deployment in unique ways. Also, we had to monitor the systems to ensure uptime. This included networks, logging, firewall, monitoring, security, etc. ...

I landed at LGA Airport yesterday and, for the first time, had a Tesla Uber Model 3 I was a bit surprised to see. We lived in Brooklyn and drove a Model 3, and I find the charging infrastructure to be incredibly difficult to deal with. Let alone on a fleet level. From PlugShare, we can see that the only “true” (120kW+) SuperChargers in the NYC metro are in NJ or JFK Airport. If we lower the limit to 70kW, we get a few more options, but if we think that at 120kW, the bare minimum takes 2+ hours to go from 0-100%, it’s daunting. ...

In between calls, I decided to split some wood. I find it incredibly relaxing, and it’s a great workout. I was thinking about a conversation I had with a buddy about rural communities energy needs. It is a genuine issue in Michigan. My “fun” activity of splitting wood is life & death for some communities here in Northern Michigan. I am incredibly fortunate that this a hobby and not required for my family’s wellbeing. In all the discussions about energy, I find these communities often overlooked. ...

Background ZFS is one of those technologies that once you are introduced to it, it is challenging to think in the old ways again. One of the features I was always hesitant to embrace was snapshots as a mechanism for backup and recovery. I know that sounds a bit nutty given how powerful they can be, but my old tooling is muscle memory at this time. Bacula, rsync, and tar has been in my mind since I was a child. ...

Background I live in the boonies of Michigan, and my only option for unmetered and unlimited internet is SpeedConnect. The company is a smaller WISP that, for the most part, has been pretty solid. Over the past six years, though, they have performed a single network upgrade that doubled my speed to a blazing 6mbps down and 300kbps up. I began to look for other options to offset the lack of speed during these weird COVID-19 times, where my home internet became much more critical. ...