Category: Nerd Babel

  • Network Nerding

    Network Nerding

    You might have heard the phrase, “He’s forgotten more than you will ever know.” When dealing with somebody who is quietly competent, that is almost always the case. I was there at the start of the Internet. I watched our campus get X.25 networking. Later, BITNET. I watched email get dumped into the UUCP queues…

  • WYSIAYG vs WYSIWYG

    WYSIAYG vs WYSIWYG

    I started my computer career with the command line, or as it is known today, the CLI. Almost everything I do is done via CLI. I’ve had clients that had hosts in China, Ukraine, and London. They all look the same to me because they are just another window next to the other windows on…

  • Filler

    I’m exhausted. I’ve been pulling fiber for the last two days. All part of an infrastructure upgrade. Normally, pulling cable in a modern datacenter is pretty easy. This is not a modern datacenter. The original cable runs were CAT6 with RJ45 connectors. When the cables were installed, the installation had to be nondestructive. No holes…

  • Networking, interrelationships

    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…

  • Docker Swarm?

    Docker Swarm?

    There is this interesting point where you realize that you own a data center. My data center doesn’t look like that beautiful server farm in the picture, but I do have one. I have multiple servers, each with reasonable amounts of memory. I have independent nodes, capable of performing as ceph nodes and as docker…

  • High Availability Services

    High Availability Services

    People get very upset when they go to visit Amazon, Netflix, or just their favorite gun blog and the site is down. This happens when a site is not configured with high availability in mind. The gist is that we do not want to have a single point of failure, anywhere in the system. To…

  • For Lack of (nerd post)

    For Lack of (nerd post)

    Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceivebe a system admin I’ve been deep into a learning curve for the last couple of months, broken by required trips to see dad before he passes. The issue at hand is that I need to reduce our infrastructure costs. They are out…