https://www.lair.be/Tales from deep down the dragon's lair…Sun, 21 Mar 2021 20:13:25 +0100clj-rsshttps://www.lair.be/posts-output/2021-03-21-reformatting-520B-sector-size-emc-drives/https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2021-03-21-reformatting-520B-sector-size-emc-drives/For my new VM server I acquired a couple of 100GB retired EMC SSDs. These are formatted with 520byte sectors, and are not usable in most normal hardware without reformatting them.OS DetectionSun, 21 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2020-12-13-raid1-migration/https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2020-12-13-raid1-migration/While going through SMART data on my machines I noticed my old server I had been migrating stuff off of hadn't been running smart tests in a while due to a mistake I made while merging the smartd configuration file. I had merged a DEVICESCAN statement into the configuration, resulting in my manual settings further down no longer getting used. Oops. :(So after fixing that I kicked of a manual long selftest, which got stuck at 90%. Apparently that's a known issue with these drives. And, in case you're wondering about the age of that ticket, the warranty on this drive expired in 2012 (I put the serial in Seagate's website for laughs... ;) )Sun, 13 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2020-11-22-sparc64-linux-monitoring-with-prometheus/https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2020-11-22-sparc64-linux-monitoring-with-prometheus/Prometheus and Grafana, running in Docker (using docker-compose) are how I monitor my systems.For GNU/Linux on x86 hardware all data is scraped by Prometheus from node_exporter instances running on each machine. Unfortunately node_exporter is written in Go, which does not support the UltraSPARC architecture on GNU/Linux (it does on Solaris).Sun, 22 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2020-10-31-truenas-scala-alpha-infiniband-support/https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2020-10-31-truenas-scala-alpha-infiniband-support/With the launch of FreeNAS Scale's Alpha version I started digging into some of the things I had hoped a Linux launch would give us that the FreeBSD based version doesn't, and which have lead to me using Proxmox for my file sharing needs.One of these is Infiniband support, specifically RDMA-over-Infiniband support. The former lacks the tooling in FreeNAS Core, the latter is not compiled in, as far as I'm aware.Sat, 31 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2019-12-31-svn-homedir/https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2019-12-31-svn-homedir/Why version your home directory?Aside from the usual benefits of version control: the ability to roll back changes, document the why of changes there's some additional benefits to doing it to your home directory:Tue, 31 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2017-12-10-a-year-with-a-powerbook/https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2017-12-10-a-year-with-a-powerbook/IntroductionFor a bit over a year now I've been using a MacBook Pro and while it's a decent piece of hardware the way people react when they notice it you'd think I was provided a Lamborghini as company car. I really didn't appreciate the status-symbol-ness of Apple's hardware until I got to experience it first hand.Sun, 10 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0100https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2016-12-05-experiences-with-logitech-g610-keyboard/https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2016-12-05-experiences-with-logitech-g610-keyboard/As I was looking to replace my aging Cherry rubber dome keyboard I ended up picking up a Logitech G610 mechanical gaming keyboard from Bol.com with Cherry MX Brown switches.My main reasons for picking this particular keyboard:Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0100https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2016-06-24-what-is-a-full-stack-developer/https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2016-06-24-what-is-a-full-stack-developer/With the "agilification" of software development the idea of a full stack developer, a developer that masters all layers of application development has become increasingly popular with businesses.What exactly this means is rather vague. In the narrow sense it's often used for a developer comfortable working on the front-end, the middleware and back-end, in other words someone who can write SQL, fiddle with Hibernate/Spring (or equivalent) and the JS framework being used. One could argue that full stack programmer might be a more accurate description.Fri, 24 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0200https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2016-06-17-do-you-like-tooling/https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2016-06-17-do-you-like-tooling/This was a question I was asked at some point during a job interview and that took me entirely by surprise, so my answer was likely less than statisfactory...In retrospect I probably shouldn't have been so surprised: everyone complains when the CI environment is wonky, the build is slow or contantly trips over its own feet, but few developers care to actually do something about these problems.Fri, 17 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0200https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2016-06-17-new-site-and-blog/https://www.lair.be/posts-output/2016-06-17-new-site-and-blog/As you might have noticed I have replaced the old, XHTML-based website with a statically generated one. In the process I've gotten rid of a lot of outdated and unmaintained content as well.I also decided to move my blog away from the Wordpress hosted solution. Being able to write my blog posts in markdown should reduce the friction when doing so, meaning possibly more output, or at least less lost output, as I had quite a few posts floating around in my brain that never actually got written down.Fri, 17 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0200