Chris Johnson

Part of the task of making a High Availability system is to make sure there is no single point of failure.

To this end, everything is supposed to be redundant.

So let’s take the office infrastructure as a starting point. We need to have multiple compute nodes and multiple data storage systems.

Every compute node needs access to the same data storage as all the other compute nodes.

We start with a small Ceph storage cluster. There are currently a total of 5 nodes in three different rooms on three different switches. Unfortunately, they are not split out evenly. We should have 9 nodes, 3 in each room.

Each of the nodes currently breaks out as 15 TB, 8 TB, 24 TB, 11 TB, and 11 TB. There are two more nodes ready to go into production, each with 11 TB of storage.

It is currently possible to power off any of the storage nodes without effecting the storage cluster. Having more nodes would make the system more redundant.

Unfortunately, today, an entire room went down. What was the failure mode?

DHCP didn’t work. All the nodes in room-3 were moved to a new 10Gbit switch. Actual 4×2.5 2×10. The four 2.5Gbit were used to connect three nodes and one access point. One of the 10Gbit SFP+ ports was used as an uplink to the main switch.

When the DHCP leases expired, all four machines lost their IP addresses. This did not cause me to loss a network connection to them because they had static addresses on a VLAN.

What did happen is they lost the ability to talk to the LDAP server on the primary network. Because they had lost that primary network connection, no LDAP, no ability to log in.

The first order of repair was to reboot the primary router. This router serves as our DHCP server. This did not fix the issue.

Next I power cycled the three nodes. This did not fix the issue.

Next I replaced the switch with the old 1Gbit switch (4x1Gbit, 4x1Gbit with PoE). This brought everything back to life.

My current best guess is that the cat6 cable from room 3 to the main switch is questionable. The strain relief is absent and it feels floppy.

More equipment shows up soon. I’ll be pulling my first fiber in 25 years. The new switch will replace the current main switch. This is temporary.

There will be three small switches for each room. Then there will be a larger switch to replace the current main switch. The main switch will be linked with 10Gbit fiber to the 3 rooms in server rooms. The other long cables will continue to use copper.

Still, a lesson in testing.

The final configuration will be a 10Gbit backbone with OM4 fiber, the nodes will be upgraded to have 10Gbit NICs which will attach to the room switches via DAC cables. There will then be a 2.5Gbit copper network. The copper network will the default network used by devices.

The 10Gbit network will be for Ceph and Swarm traffic.

I’m looking foward to having this all done.

This story showed up in my feeds. I took note of it because, of course, they blamed the death of this poor black man on the conservative Supreme Court justices.

The three liberals, would have granted the stay, but the six justices that insist on following the law did not.

So what is the actual case?

On August 11, 1998, F.G. was murdered in her home. A jury convicted Marcellus Williams of first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, and first-degree robbery, and two counts of armed criminal action.

The court then sentenced Williams to death for the first-degree murder.

The case was State v. Williams, 97 S.W.3d 462, 466 (Mo. 2003) (Williams I).

Williams then appealed to the supreme court of Missouri. After briefings were received, they issued a unanimous option denying Williams’s appeal and affirming the lower court’s judgement of convection and sentence.

In 2013, Williams filed a writ for certiorari with the Supreme Court, which was denied.

Williams asserted that DNA evidence would show that he was innocent.

The case went up and down multiple times before that issue was put to rest. Remember, the lack of DNA does not mean that a person did not commit the crime.

One of the most famous cases of this was the Central Park five. A young woman was stopped in Central Park by a pack of animals. They beat and raped her, leaving her severely injured. I do not remember when/if she died.

Of that large pack of animals, 5 were brought to trial and found guilty. The evidence that convicted them was their confessions. These confessions were given with their mothers present.

As an example, one of them stated, “I didn’t rape that woman, I just held her down while ??? raped her.”

This is an admission of guilt of the crime of rape.

Was his DNA found in or on the victim? No. It doesn’t matter. He admitted to doing the crime. He was found guilty by a jury of his peers.

Later, a jailhouse confession by a man serving life sentence(s), with no option to ever leave prison, confirmed that the convict did rape the victim.

This does not change the guilt of the original animals. The juries knew that there were unindicted individuals who took place in the gang rape. The juries knew that the animals on trial did not physically penetrate the victim. It does not matter.

20+ years after the crime, they were set free. They were “innocent”. No, they were not.

Back to Mr. Williams, his conviction was by jury. Multiple attempts to overturn that conviction happened. His case was before the Supreme Court, asking for a writ of certiorari 3 or 4 times. It was denied every time.

In the latest trip to the Supreme Court, there were 6 conservative justices. There was a majority of liberal, results-based justices on the court when the case was appealed originally. Those majorities did not grant cert. either.

The new appeal claims, not that Mr. Williams is innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted, no. It is a claim that he was only convicted because the prosecutor was racist.

When a case is going before a jury, the parties get to evaluate the potential members of the jury. These people are formerly known as “venirepersons”.

Each party has several peremptory strikes. These can be used to exclude any venireperson. No reason needs to be given. They can be excluded because the party thought they read too much, or too little. They are allowed.

In addition to the peremptory strikes, the parties can challenge a venireperson for cause. “Do you know any of the people involved with this case?” “Yes, you prosecuted my little brother last year.”

There were 131 venirepersons in total. Only 7 were black. The prosecutor struck six of them peremptorily.

What was the racist thing that the prosecutor did? He dismissed one of those six men because he thought the two men looked similar.

So, the left is very upset. They are very upset that a murder was executed for murdering a woman over 25 years ago.

They have not proven that he was innocent. He had the presumption of innocents when on trial before a jury of his peers. In his appeals he has to prove that he is innocent or that new evidence, if the jury had known about it, would have caused them to reach a different verdict.

This murder was long overdue, his chance to present his case to Saint Peter.

Creating rules for anything, a game, a business, the interaction between parties, there can be negative rules, or there can be positive rules.

You can have a set of negative rules. You cannot touch the ball with your hands. This is a rule in soccer.

What was the original intention? We don’t know. What we do know is that it is legal to hit the ball with your head, knees and body, as long as you don’t touch the ball with your hands.

This means that what is not forbidden is allowed.

If on the other hand, the rules are written in a positive mode. You can only touch the ball with your legs from the thigh down. You have inverted the restrictions. What is not permitted is not allowed.

You don’t have to state “you cannot touch the ball with your hands”. This is subsumed from the default negative. If it is not permitted, you cannot do it.

Our Constitution was written as a set of positive rules for the government. The government is authorized to do X, Y and Z. They are, by design and default, not allowed to do A through W.

When the Bill of Rights was ratified, we added negative rules. “Congress shall make no law…”

There is no conflict between the amendments and the original Constitution. The Bill of Rights made explicit that which was implicit. The government shall not do C, G, and W!

Unfortunately, this left the door open for the government to do evil. “Since the Constitution doesn’t say anything about A, B, and D, we can intrude in that area!”

The explicit addition to our Constitution made this argument possible.

Since the state always seeks to increase their power over The People, this is a fight that has been going on for decades.

In Bruen, the Court made it clear that the state must …demonstrate that the regulation was consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. —New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. City Of New York, Oops. Novel citation pattern. 8 (U.S. 2020).

The state bears the burden of demonstrating to the court that the law is consistent.

Not the plaintiffs, (Good Guys), nor the court, but the state.

For the state, this is a losing position. “Shall not be infringed!” is powerful language. They want that history to be as open as possible and as wide-reaching as possible.

In the early post-Bruen cases, they through the legal dictionary at the wall to see what would stick. In Duncan, the first iteration of “historically reinvent” regulations ranged from the 1500s through the mid-1900s. They were forced to reduce that for their second iteration, I think it was limited to 50 or 100.

Today, they are attempting a different path. Using the Rahimi language, Bruen was “not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.—United States v. Zackey Rahimi, No. 22-915 (U.S.) as amplified by Justice Barrett:

Under Bruen, silence in the historical record indicates that the current has no support in this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation. Now, the state claims that silence does not mean a loss. Instead, they claim that it just indicates that they didn’t wanna at the time. They could have, if they wanted to. Since they could have, the state is now authorized to do so today.

This shifts the burden to The People to show that the state in 1791 not only didn’t want to pass such regulations, but instead were prohibited by the Second Amendment.

Nasty stuff.

“We can’t afford… We can’t afford… four more years of this”

Every so often the masks slip and they tell the truth.

Note, the ellipsis in the quote are him pausing. Not anything being cut out.

Or Cultures of Honor.

Most people in western civilizations understand the concept of Honor. Or, at least, they think they do. Most understand, “do the honorable thing.”

It is a question of right and wrong. It is a moral decision.

The honorable thing to do is to return the wallet you find on the sidewalk. The honorable thing to do is to protect the lives of the innocent over your own. The honorable thing to do is to put yourself between the bad guys and the innocents.

This is honor in western culture and civilization.

An “Honor Culture” or a “Culture of Honor” is not about doing the honorable thing. It is about personal honor.

Scotland was an honor culture for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This is what led to clan wars. These people weren’t attacking other clans because they intended to take land or goods, so much as “honor demanded it”.

At some point in the past, the offending clan had done something to “dishonor” the clan. So the entire clan is at war with the offending clan.

There is new jargon, To “Dis'” somebody. This means to show them disrespect. To dishonor them.

Dissing somebody often escalates into verbal or physical violence.

You don’t disrespect somebody in an honor culture unless you are ready and willing to defend yourself. And to those members of an honor culture, you are the instigator.

Calling somebody the “N” word when not a member of that sub-culture is to dishonor them. It is to disrespect them. As such, you have invited violence upon yourself.

The Scots migrated from Scotland to the United States. Many of them came to live in the south. They brought their honor culture with them.

Thomas Sowell discusses this in —New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. City Of New York, Oops. Novel citation pattern. 8 (U.S. 2020).

One of the signs of an honor culture is a tendency to “defend my honor”. Dueling. When the south was fully invested in being an honor culture, duels were common.

Later, as the honor culture dissipated, the number of duels, both gun, knife and fist, decreased.

According to Sowell, that honor culture didn’t just disappear, though. It was adopted by the slaves. When the slaves became freedmen, they didn’t forgo that honor culture. Instead, they took it with them.

That honor culture survives today in “the hood”.

For the most part, honor societies in the west exist as a decoration we wear. It is blustering over a football game. It is taking a joking offense at some perceived slight.

In an honor society, you do not joke about some ones honor. “Them’s fighting words”

Other primitive cultures still exist as honor cultures.

It is dishonorable for a woman to have sex outside marriage. The woman’s owner is dishonored by this. Because his honor has been harmed, he is entitled to punish her. Like having her stoned to death.

He is dishonored if _____. Fill in the blank. A Jew defends himself and stops an attack. They have dishonored the attacker.

When I use the term “honor society” or “honor culture”, I am not talking about an “honorable society” or even a society that is governed by being honorable. I am talking of the horrific, barbarous, back world “honor culture” that hangs gays from construction cranes, and kills women who have been raped.

Years ago, my lady discovered that one of my co-workers was plagiarizing content. She brought it to my attention. I reported it to the owner of the company. I cc’ed my boss to keep her in the loop.

When I arrived at work that day, my boss was waiting for me, took me to a private location and started to berate me for going over her head. I listened and waited for her to wind down. “Is it my turn to talk?”

“Yes”, and as soon as I started to speak, she would start up again. I’d wait for her to run down, then ask again. At some point, I asked, “You’ve been yelling at me for 10 minutes, do I have permission to yell back?” “YES!”

She finally let me speak, “You gave me permission to yell, I am not going to…” I did my spoke to her softly, without anger, without pushing into her personal space. It broke her.

She was not prepared to deal with somebody not responding and realized she had gone over the line.

People of all types respond to emotional cues in different ways. One of the easiest ways to make people look bad is to be good when they are not.

Arabs are very “honor” driven. They do not deal well with insults. This is why their screeds against Israel and the United States are filled with so many insults. They expect it to cause us pain.

In the same way, they cannot handle being laughed at. That is a grave insult.

Israel pulled off some super serious psychological damage to the psyche of terrorists, everywhere.

Operation “Below the Belt”, which has been reported as the official name of the operation, is an incredible feat of logistics, intelligence, and technological sophistication.

Israel was so embedded in the inner workings of Hezbollah that leadership decided that they needed to ditch the smartphones that were being used. Instead, they would go low technology, using pager technology.

Pagers do not indicate where they are located. They are simple radio receivers. There is no way to know where an unmodified pager is located. This is the type of security that Hezbollah leadership wanted, and needed.

Israel managed to intercept the shipment(s) of pagers and modify them. At what point in the supply chain this took place is unknown. They were able to modify or replace thousands of pagers. The pagers that were sent on had two known modifications. A couple of ounces of explosive with a thermal trigger, and some modifications to the code to increase the power draw to heat the battery enough to trigger the explosion.

Pagers are carried in pockets or on belts. When leadership handed out pagers to Hezbollah assholes, those assholes put the pagers on their belts or in their pockets.

In the afternoon of the 18th, the devices were triggered. They sounded a beep for an incoming message. Many terrorists assholes were able to take their pagers off their belts or out of their pockets to look at them before the boom.

If they were just holding the pager, there was significant damage done to the hand. If they had brought the pager close to their face, then there was serious eye damage. If they left the pager in their pocket, well, they are looking for their balls now.

This is one of the greatest psychological victories in modern history. These assholes were not martyred. They did not die in battle. They weren’t even in battle.

If they lost their dicks, the 72 raisins they are supposed to get aren’t going to do them any good.

And with no hands and no eyes and no dicks, they are never going to be a threat to people again.

Moreover, the stress this puts on the medical infrastructure is immense.

Well done Israel.

This was a good win and a good place to take a victory lap.

We were doing that lap for Israel, laughing at those dickless, less than wonders.

Israel, was busy lapping the track, again.

On Thursday, they initiated another round of devices exploding. This time on two-way handheld radios. This was not as successful as the original attack, but it still added to the toll.

Again, well done Israel.

So Israel was doing that Victory lap. Well, no. They were busy.

You see, Hezbollah leadership really needed to discuss this new turn of events. They couldn’t use the phone system, they knew that was hacked, they were unable to use pagers to call a central number. And the radios were out too.

So they did the sneaky-sneaky thing. They sent out the word to meet in the super secret place, known only by the trusted leadership.

Well, it just so happened that an Israeli fighter jet was doing that victory lap when this meeting took place. And since they really, really, really, felt the need to celebrate, they decided to set off some fireworks. Mostly sound.

So they dropped some noisemakers. These big ass noisemakers just happened to land right on top of that super secret meeting location. And they were so big, that it disrupted the party.

20 top commanders are dead. The snake’s head has been cut off. The arms and legs (and sausage plus dingle berries) are missing as well. Everybody is scared, or should be scared of coming close to a communications device.

I look forward to learning what new surprises Israel has in store for us. This story can get better, but I have a huge smile on my face tonight.

There are three ways of making pasta shapes. You can extrude the dough through shaped holes, cutting the forms off as needed. You can roll the dough thin, then hand cut the dough to be shaped. The same can be done using a “pasta machine” which rules the dough to a known thickness. Or you can use cutters to cut sheets of pasta.

I’ve been making pasta dough for a couple of years. I stepped up my game recently by deciding to roll my dough instead of squeezing it in the pasta machine.

Since I was going to roll out the dough, I decided to get rid of my mixing bowl and do it on my board with the well method.

This is a step forward. One of the lessons I’m still learning is how small a batch can be made this way. If the batch is not large enough, there isn’t enough floor on the board to create a well with deep enough walls.

I was lucky, there were only two eggs in play, so the eggs didn’t go everywhere, just a slight panic.

Which brings us back to dough. Normal pasta dough is an egg and floor mixture. My recipe is 3/4 of flour to 1 large egg. Occasionally, it is two eggs plus a yolk. It really depends on how the dough feels.

Today, the dough was too wet. I should have added more flour, but I didn’t.

The eggs are mixed into the flour until it comes together. At that point, I switch to kneading. I knead for 10 minutes, by the clock. The sad thing is that I always check the time remaining at 2:30. I don’t know how I get there, but I do.

This egg pasta works well for rolling out or squeezing. This was turned into rigatoni.

I didn’t know I could make this by hand, I thought I would need to use an extruder for rigatoni. I am happy with my results.

It does not look like machine made pasta. The dough was a little wet. I also had some issues cutting it. Next time I will use the bicycle cutter to get nice squares.

Ally took the other half of the egg pasta and made beautiful bow tie pasta.

The other type of pasta dough is made with water and semolina flour. Bluntly? I just guessed at the amount of warm water to add. It came out nearly perfect.

This pasta dough doesn’t roll out as flat as the egg pasta, but it is used for other pasta shapes. We started with Orecchiette. Those were easy to make, but I didn’t like them. Ally loved making them, so I let her do it.

This is made by cutting a 1/2 diameter rope of dough into 1/2 long chunks. Then you roll the under your thumb.

Malloreddus is made the same way, but the pasta is pressed on a grooved board to make a wonderful pattern. This was my favorite shape to make. They go fast, they look nice, and they have a good bite to them. Plus they hold the sauce.

The Busiate was another fun shape. It uses a 1/4 in rope of dough cut into 3 inch long sections. These are twisted around a skewer and the rolled flat.

I think they look delightful, I want to practice them some more.

I’m hoping that Ally will do an article about the sauce she made for our homemade pasta. I will say it is the best I’ve had in years.

Barnett v. Raoul, 3:23-cv-00209, (S.D. Ill.) is one of the cases filed in response to the Illinois Bruen tantrum. It was opened January 24, 2023.

It was decided at the district court level in favor of The People. It was part of the group of cases that went to the Seventh Circuit where Judge Easterbrook and Jude Wood decided that the plain text of the Second Amendment actually means, something besides what the plain text says.

It was remanded down to Judge McGlynn’s court for a do-over.

The state went into the “we need more time” dance. Judge McGlynn was having nothing to do with delay tactics, instead moving the case towards final judgement as rapidly as possible.

Of note, he had the plaintiffs, the good guys, file extra briefings to counter what the circuit court said. He has done everything in his power to establish a good record for appeal.

The case went to trial on Monday, the 16th, and is continuing for a few more days.

Yesterday, they heard testimony from one witness, James Ronkainen. He testified for around 4 and a half hours. They presented just shy of 60 exhibits.

In addition to his testimony on Monday, Mr. Ronkainen was disposed for hours. The transcript of his deposition runs for 240 pages.

So what makes this strange? There was an hour of discussion to define what a MSR was? This was mind-numbingly difficult to read. I gave up after 80 pages.

I am eagerly awaiting to hear what Judge McGlynn has to say in a couple of weeks.

You can read James Ronkainen’s deposition yourself, if you wish.

From the YouTube description:

The following are a series of war correspondence films from the Simba Rebellion in the Congo in 1964/65 set to the tune of “Roland the Thompson Gunner” by Warren Zevon. The film features a platoon of mercenaries from Europe conducting a platoon attack on the town of Boende in the Cong. The mercenaries primarily come from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Of note, there is an ex-ss officer in the film according to the source, I can’t confirm this, though.

EDIT: The German officer is Siegfried Müller, one of the mercenary captains. He was a Wehrmacht First Lieutenant in World War 2, not an SS officer.

This is the type of war the leftists are pushing for. I fear for my children and grandchildren.

Allyson had picked up a wooden box a few years ago to take to events. It was a plain wooden box with just a bit of decoration and a porcelain knob attached to the sliding top.

The knob and screw holding it are not period. The rest was pretty period. Or more precisely, it was period-20.

It looked period at 20 feet.

Over the years, it has taken a beating. This knocked the back off, pulling out the brads.

She asked me if it could be repaired. TiteBond III to the rescue. I pried the back out enough to get glue where it was needed. Clamped the entire thing closed and called it a day.

Until I decided that it could be better.

Today, we use petrochemicals to create high-quality, strong, enduring coatings for our cabinetry and furniture.

Modern finishes are long chain polymers that have all the right characteristics for a long-lasting, shiny surface.

I’ve used polyurethane finishes. They can be polished to a near mirror like finish.

But that is the modern world? What were they doing 100 years ago? 200? 300? They were using some of the same finishing methods we use today.

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