awa

When the sniper in the Texas Clock Tower started shooting men stopped and grabbed rifles from their trucks and returned fire.

Today, it is the odd of us that carry a truck gun.

There are many topics which generate strong feelings. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years, is that people on the left can find a reason to hate you and that is it. You can have one “bad” opinion, that is enough to remove you into their subhuman category.

People on the right seem to be more accepting. As some have said, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” We are the big tent side of the body politic.

With that said, I do hope that I do not chase away any of our readers by having positions they disagree with.

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The weekend is upon us, just a few more hours.

Allyson is off at another event. This time as a vendor, selling her cookbooks, and having fun.

The blue-haired fairie is with her, they are going to have a grand time.

On the nerd side of things, I am in the processing of ditching AWS. Amazon Web Services is a gateway drug. You can get started for just a few cents per month, then you suddenly find yourself shelling out serious coin.

For me, the big cost was backups. When I was at University, I was introduced to “comprehensive backups”. The idea being that we should be able to recover a file for a very, very, very long time.

When most services describe backups, they talk about having “daily” backups. That means you have 24 hours to realize that something is wrong, and recover it.

My backups are different. If you have created a file, and it is on disk when backups run, it will be backed up.

Monday through Saturday go into the daily backups. These backups are preserved for 30+ days.

Sunday backups are different, on the first Sunday of the month, backups go to the monthly backups. These are kept for 2+ years.

Finally, all other Sunday backups go on to the weekly backups. These are kept for 6 months.

So, comprehensive.

All of that takes disk space. I was exceeding 10 terabytes of data on AWS. It was running me excess dollars.

No more. I now have a local ceph cluster with multiple nodes on multiple switches, in multiple power circuits. There are over 70 Terabytes in the cluster. Two hosts have room for another 12 TB each. Two hosts can be upgraded from 12 TB to 48 TB, each. There are spots for four more hosts, each of which can handle 48 TB each.

Backups are now going to my ceph cluster. This is very redundant. I can take an entire host out of the cluster and the cluster still functions. At some point, I will configure the cluster so that I can take out multiple hosts at one time and still be fully functional.

Sorry, this is about feedback, not nerd babble.

The site is still not stable enough. The work I’m doing with ceph locally, will transfer to ceph on remote systems. Tuning ceph on the remote systems and moving the ceph cluster, proper, out of K8S will improve things greatly.

What feedback do you have for us?

I am so pleased that Ally has stepped up her postings. It helps me keep going.

I’ve had way to many 503 errors recently. This is the service is temporarily unavailable error message.

At issue is a resource allocation problem. I’ve added a couple of new sites to the mix, added a mail service, and suddenly, there aren’t enough resources to go around.

There are two fixes, more hardware, or to reduce the load. I have reduced the load somewhat, I’ll be reducing it still more.

The issue isn’t even that the pods are dying. That I can work around with replicas. It is that an entire node is going down. When that happens, it is 5 minutes before the node is fully up and all the pods repopulate.

On the great news, Miguel has found a place to post his thoughts. It is good to see him posting again.

From a personal perspective, I know that it seems like it was just one tweet that killed GunFreeZone.net. It isn’t.

Miguel ran out of go juice for the blog over two years ago. He wanted to kill it then. J.Kb. and I asked if we could take over his baby and he agreed. Over time, the site morphed from Miguel’s baby to something else.

I’ve read remarks about how GFZ was so much worse, once I started posting regularly. That’s fine. It hurts at one level, but I realize that I am not Miguel.

One of the things that I have noticed, is that there isn’t a Vine of Liberty “voice” yet. I’m working towards it.

We are still looking for more guest posts. Poor Elrod was the first victim. His well-written comment was promoted to a front page post. I hope he takes it as the compliment I intended it to be.

Which leaves the two questions of for the day:

1) What one thing is missing from the site which you want back, right now? And no, you can’t just say “Miguel”, I’ve already told him that I want him here.
2) What topic do you think is in line with The Vine of Liberty, which isn’t being covered?

Thank you for being here, it means a lot.

In two days it will be July 4th. The 4th of July holds a special place in my heart.

It is one of 365 days of the year when I give thanks for being privileged to have been born in these United States.

I live in a country where there is more freedom than in any other country. I have the freedom to travel, to speak, to defend myself. I have the freedom to grow, to learn, to sing (badly), to laugh and to love.

The amount of freedom I have is unrivaled.

I do not have the talent to put my love of country into song or verse. I can only say, I am proud to be an American.

Well, we made it another week.

The site still isn’t to where I need it. But it is functional. I have imported all of my posts from GFZ. This is a step forward.

I am in the process of writing a Vine Of Liberty plug-in to handle theming and some other missing features. The one that irks me the most is not having a quick link to the comments section of the page.

We’d like to hear what your thoughts are on the banner and icon. The Icon is likely to change, but Ally did an outstanding job getting the banner done. That was based on the prompt “Modern American patriot guarding a vine in a barren field”.

I’m starting to see the state file F.A.R.P. 28(j) letter, “Citation of Supplemental Authorities”. This is the official way that a party tells a circuit court that something happened that they need to consider before issuing their opinion.

The gist of most of them is, “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited”. Followed by “we are the exception to the rule(s)”.

I am slowly gaining a more in-depth understanding of how ceph works. It is an amazing file system.

It uses replication and I found that it also has “erase coding” capabilities. The erase coding capabilities allow you to reduce the amount of disk space required to achieve full redundancy. The default redundancy is via replication, that is a 3x multiplier. The lowest erase coding is a 2x multiplier and that gets as good as 1.5, when there are enough hosts and OSDs.

We are soliciting articles, you can send your word/LibreOffice articles to awa(at)vineofliberty.com.

Thanks for sticking with us.

There are days…

I accidentally deleted The Vine of Liberty k8s deployment. I’ll have to make some updates, but I’m working on it.

Sorry,
AWA

Ok, Ok, I know it’s not there yet. Thank you so much, everybody, for your support.

Base functionality is here. I’ve done no theming yet. I had all the security plugins up and running before the site opened. I’m working towards getting the rest configured.

• The site is supposed to have an edit option. I think there is an issue with the ingress configuration which is stopping that.
• There is no store yet.  There will be soon, donations will be available there and on the sidebar.
• I’m accepting images for the banner.  I am terrible at that sort of thing.  What I would like is something similar to the current American patriot with mask, tricorn hat, AR-15, defending a vine growing in a desolate location.
• I need to set up some cross blog feeds.  I am not sure how that works.
• I will be pulling the PDFs from GFZ and having a PDF here.  I will add my collection of FMs, and firearm blueprints.
• I will be pulling all of my past postings from GFZ and adding them here.
• Email is mostly working, except for mine.  *Sigh,* nothing is easy.
• There is likely to be some sidebar advertisements.  I get a few gun related ads regularly.  Putting something in the sidebar to help offset costs doesn’t sound horrible.  Please let me know your thoughts.
• I am soliciting articles.  The requirements are simple, you have to have registered on the site.  The article needs to be provided in a word type document (Word, LibreOffice, Google Doc, etc.). It cannot be a sales article. You have to answer, “What is your favorite cartridge?” in the submission.
• The subscriptions will be back as soon as I figure out how.
• The posting schedule is 0630 Eastern Time, USA for me, plus random postings.

Thank you again for being here.

For those of you coming from GunFreeZone.net,  thank you for following us here.

Miguel has kindly allowed us to forward GFZ to The Vine of Liberty.

The story of why GFZ shutdown is below the fold.

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