• The history of the race to the moon is amazing. There is so much that happened behind the scenes, out of sight of the public because it was that dangerous.

    My parents kept me awake for the moon landing. I remember watching Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon.

    I am currently following Elon Musk’s personal goal of putting men on Mars. In 5 or so years, I hope to be watching man set food on Mars, to stay.

    The short of it, watch the movie. It does a good job of telling the story of Neil Armstrong.

    Then visit https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/apollo-11-what-we-saw to listen to the story of Apollo 11 or watch it:

    https://www.facebook.com/share/v/WGmyPedxhacbTcmu

    Well worth the time to watch all four parts and the movie.

    Enjoy!

            

  • 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.

            

  • I’m all about prepping canned and dehydrated food in advance of any emergency. I’m more interested in learning to garden than in having 20 years of supplies on hand. My goal is to have enough food (“food” being defined as the proper ratio of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins to keep a person not just alive, but thriving) in my pantry that I can last for 18 months. That’s the longest time I would be without a garden harvest. These are good plans, but I also like to know what I can get from the world around me.

    Eastern hemlock fir tree leaves
    Eastern Hemlock, a fir tree bursting with vitamin C.

    I live in New Hampshire, and there are lots of things to eat that can be foraged easily. Starting with the easiest, there are blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries pretty much all over the state. They’re largely free for the taking, and there aren’t any “look alike” poisonous versions. Eastern Hemlock is a type of fir tree that is indigenous to the area. You can tell it by its flat spines/leaves (see the picture). It contains a lot of Vit C, and makes a very nice tea. In the spring, dandelion leaves are a great source of fresh greens. While a little bitter, they’re full of vitamins and minerals, and can be added to salads and soups. Don’t forget fiddleheads, though they’re only available in the spring for a very short amount of time. Cattail (you know, the “corndog” like things growing in ponds and slow moving rivers) is also edible. Different parts of the plant are good at different times of the year.

    There are many mushrooms that are edible, but all mushrooms come with a caveat. Mushrooms, all of them, are edible… but some are only edible once. Meaning, there are poisonous mushrooms, and ones which will mess with your gut in bad ways even if they don’t kill you. As an example, I found a stand of amazing looking fungi at the base of a tree in my back 40. I asked a friend of mine, who is an expert mushroom hunter, if they were edible. They looked very much like an edible mushroom I know about. She laughed when she saw the image, because the shroom in the picture is more of a “draino” style medicine. Basically, if your stomach needs to be cleaned out entirely, it’s a really good mushroom to eat. It doesn’t harm you, but it goes right through your system, taking everything with it. I’m glad I didn’t make those into mushroom soup…

    (more…)

            

  • Personal

    It has been difficult for me since my Father passed. It isn’t that I interacted with him that much, it is that the safety net is gone. In addition, it turns out that my brother is pretty darn evil.

    This is as close as I’ve come to talking about his actions in public.

    In the midst of this, a client I work with stepped up as a friend. The 30 minutes of dumping and ranting made things a little better.

    Thank you my friend.

    What you don’t know (Nerd)

    I started doing network administration in 1985 time frame. We were using 10base2 and X.25. Most of our equipment communicated with the mainframes via 9600 baud connections.

    Having blazing fast 5Mb connections was spectacular. We used NFS extensively.

    Our long haul communications were done via a 56Kbit connection.

    When I started work in Maryland, we were still using 10base2 with a few 10baseT hubs. It was “fast enough”.

    Later, some of our machines started showing up with high-speed networking, 100baseT. With jumbo packets, we were starting to get there.

    Still later, we started using Fiber, this got us up to around 155Mb. This meant, for the first time, our network was faster than our local drives. Using NFS was no longer a bottleneck, for those machines that were fiber attached to each other.

    The house network has been a 1Gbit network for a few years. I found out in the last couple of weeks that my primary machine is actually 2.5Gbit. Unfortunately, all the switches and routers in the house top out at 1Gbit.

    Today I installed my first 10Gbit switch. It has 4 2.5Gbit RJ45 ports and 2 10Gbit SFP+ ports. This has 3 ceph nodes plugged into it. Those nodes will get NIC upgrades in the future to take them up to 10Gibit speeds.

    I have one SFP+ module, it is a 10Gbit RJ45 connector. This means that it connects back to the main house switch at 10Gbit. The main house switch only supports 1Gbit today.

    So what is the plan? I will be deploying a dual network system in the house. The server boxes/nodes will have 10Gbit NICs in them, each with two ports. One will connect to the high-speed network, the other to the 1Gbit network.

    The 10Gbit net will handle all the Ceph and Docker traffic. Locally mounted ceph file systems will use the loop back connection, or they will be attached to the 10Gbit network.

    This will make the ceph file systems seem much faster.

    This will be accomplished with 3 4+2 switches and one 8 SFP+ switch. It should all just work.

    Except, I had to learn all about fiber. I’ve decided to connect these switches with fiber. After far too many pages of documentation, I’ve decided on LC to LC connectors on OM4 cables. Some cables will be rated for outdoor, underground. This is basically an armored cable. The others will be properly rated for the areas they are in.

    According to my reading, these OM4 cables should be good to around 40Gbit with the right transceivers and switches.

    It is all Trump’s Fault

    I’m getting disgusted by leftist idiots thinking that everything is Trump’s fault. Somebody shoots Trump? It is his nasty words and tweets that are the cause. Somebody sets up an ambush for Trump? His fault for pointing out that illegal immigrants are eating pets.

    Trump is doing a meet and greet at a grocery store. The lady checking out loses track of the total and goes over budget. Trump peels off some bills and hands it to the cashier to take care of that lady’s shortfall, as well as others in the store.

    The left accuses him of buying votes.

    The Supreme Court respects the law, the outcome-driven leftists on the court spit and sputter and the left screams that Trump, who is too stupid to tie his shoes, foresaw these cases and picked justices to rule in this way, per his bidding.

    If Trump were to run into a burning building to save a child, the media, and the left would scream he was stealing jobs from hardworking Firefighters.

    In the same vain, a group representing the immigrants in Springfield, Ohio have filed suit against Trump and Vance for defaming the poor hardworking immigrants.

    Note, they are “legally” in Springfield because they entered the US via a port of entry and claimed asylum.

    Take a look at —HVGIQ: Haiti, Human Varieties, (last visited Sep. 27, 2024) to see the probable quality of these immigrants.

    Assassination Attempts

    This is getting old. Trump is currently averaging two assassination attempts per month. This does count Iran posting a fantasy about how they are going to use their super high-tech equipment to kill Trump.

    Skills

    Ally was doing her look through Craig’s list and such when she noticed that somebody was giving away a floor loom.

    We are now the proud owners of a 4 shaft, 6 treadle 40″ floor loom in excellent shape. We will need to replace the reed, get some shuttles, and make a raddle and then dress the loom.

    I will need to dig up my weaving books and likely purchase a few. Ally wants to make some period dishrags and a Hudson Blanket. Both of those sound like fun projects.

    It Wasn’t My Fault!

    I’ve been fighting some new infrastructure and deployment things. In physical premises, we use physically different networking gear for isolation and redundancy. If we want to get fancy, we can set up VPCs and pretend that one physical network is multiple logical networks.

    I’ve been using VLANs to accomplish the isolation I want.

    On the cloud, I would like to use VPCs. The datacenter I use doesn’t support VPCs. They do offer VLANs. I choose to use them.

    The magic of their VLAN is that you create them on the fly. In the GUI, you say “attach a VLAN to interface ETH1”. It then asks you to name the VLAN. All other nodes then use the same name, and they are added to the same VLAN.

    The downside is that there is no explicit method to delete a VLAN. If all nodes that were using the VLAN detach the VLAN, then the VLAN is deleted.

    For testing, I have a script that deletes all my nodes and all the volumes associated with those nodes. This only takes a few minutes to run.

    After I verify that the nodes and volumes are gone, I can start the ansible script to provision the needed nodes, configure them, boot them, configure the OS, install ceph on 4 nodes, docker swarm on 3, and then install the database engines.

    Pretty cool. The process of provisioning an instance includes saying that I want a VLAN with a particular tag.

    When I ran the playbooks, everything worked correctly. Except that one of my nodes refused to talk to the other nodes on the VLAN.

    After escalating, it turns out that some nodes were attached to the old VLAN, which was in the process of being deleted, and the others were in the new VLAN.

    It is my belief this was cased by a race condition. Some nodes were assigned the old VLAN while the VLAN was being deleted. The other nodes requested the old VLAN and instead were granted a new one, with the same name as the old one.

    *ARGH.* That was many wasted hours.

    When was your last range day? What did you take with you

            

  • 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.

            

  • Update – Wed. Sep. 25, 2:39pm:

    So it turns out that each state has its own election rules, and there are several places that you cannot do what is suggested in the video below and the post. I encourage everyone to find out BEFORE the election what you should do if you find out someone has stolen your identity. Also, if you’ve had family members move out of state, pass on, or change voter status, make sure your local pollsters know that. It behooves us to ensure this stuff before each election, so that only the people who should vote, do vote.

    I also urge people who live in states that only allow mail-in ballots to change that. There should always be the ability for a citizen of the United States of America to step into a polling station and cast their ballot in person. Always.

    __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Original post, unedited:

    I’ve never had it happen to me, but I know a couple of people local to me were told at their polling place that they had already voted. This is, essentially, a form of identity theft. There are things you can do. What you should absolutely NOT do is harass the volunteers at the voting station. It’s not their fault and they are just following their rules. I was trolling on TikTok while I’ve been sick, and ran into this video, which I suggest you watch. The sound can be funky on it, not sure why. Works on my phone but not my computer.

    https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTFjSh3rx/

    There’s a lot of other stuff on the video, such as advice on checking to make sure dead relatives aren’t on the rolls, and making sure that someone who’s changed their name (due to marriage or whatever) doesn’t have someone steal their pre-change identity.

    So apparently there are people out there, professional looking people, telling the populace to fill in their voting oval, and then to draw a line to their candidate. Please know, that will INVALIDATE your vote. Do not do that! Just fill in your oval.

    If you make a mistake, do not scribble on it. Go request another ballot. Yes, it’s a hassle. No, it’s not stupid. Yes, it’s worth it.

    If someone makes any kind of mark on your ballot, request another one. You do not take a ballot that has been marked on by another person, because it can invalidate your ballot.

    For those who don’t do TikTok, here’s the step by step written explanations on what to do. Please note, I am not a lawyer, and I literally got this off TikTok. It “passes the sniff test,” as Chris often says.

    (more…)

            

  • 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. —HVGIQ: Haiti, Human Varieties, (last visited Sep. 27, 2024).

    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.Missing citations for GE7W7FBY as amplified by Justice Barrett:

    Many courts, including the Fifth Circuit, have understood Bruen to require the former, narrower approach. But Bruen emphasized that “analogical reasoning” is not a “regulatory straightjacket.” 597 U. S., at 30. To be consistent with historical limits, a challenged regulation need not be an updated model of a historical counterpart. Besides, imposing a test that demands overly specific analogues has serious problems. To name two: It forces 21st-century regulations to follow late-18th-century policy choices, giving us “a law trapped in amber.” Ante, at 7. And it assumes that founding-era legislatures maximally exercised their power to regulate, thereby adopting a “use it or lose it” view of legislative authority. Such assumptions are flawed, and originalism does not require them.
    Missing citations for GE7W7FBY Barrett, concurring.

    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.

            

  • Ally here, stepping in for Chris for a change. I ran across this on TikTok, and then went and found it on YouTube to get the full effect. I found myself tearing up while watching and listening. I’m impressed. The song itself is amazing. The video is… yeah. I’d love to see Trump walk into an event with this playing. Regardless, I really wanted to share it.

    At the end, when they show the iconic moment where Secret Service hustle him off the stage, I saw things I didn’t in the color version. The black and white gives you a look at Trump’s face that you just do not get in color. He’s obviously afraid. And then he stood up and did what he knew he had to, to reassure those who were there. Damn. Never thought I’d hear myself saying the words, but thank you, Trump. I hope you win.

     

    Header image attribution: Office of the President of the United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

            

  • I made this one this past week, and was thoroughly impressed by it. The flavors were good, though it needed a bit of tweaking to make it perfect. It was a VERY good “dump meal,” meaning all I had to do was stuff things in the crock pot and set it to high. I’ve been sick as a dog this week, and needed stuff that was simple to make. This fit the bill, and was healthy and tasty as well!

    Ingredients

    • 1-1/2 cups barley
    • 1 lb mushrooms, sliced
    • 2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken (thighs, breasts, or a combo)
    • 4 cups chicken broth
    • 1/4 cup lemon juice
    • 1/4 cup dry white wine
    • 6 garlic cloves, smashed and chopped
    • 1 tsp dried thyme
    • 2 tsp salt
    • 1 tsp onion powder
    • ½ tsp red pepper flakes
    • black pepper, to taste
    • 10 oz frozen sweet peas
    • 1/4 cup creme fraîche, sour cream, or plain yogurt (dairy free works well)
    • 2 tbsp Dijon mustard, plus more to taste
    • 1/2 cup fresh tarragon or dill, minced
    • Parmesan cheese

    In your crock pot, combine all the ingredients from barley to the black pepper. Stir well to combine, and then cook on high for about 3 hours. Stir again, making sure to immerse the chicken in the liquid. It’s going to seem a bit soupy, but trust in the recipe. Cook for another hour on high, or switch to low to cook for up to another 3 hours.

    Remove the chicken to a plate and let sit for a few minutes while you do other things. Stir in the frozen peas and let them heat for about 2 minutes.

    While the peas are warming, whisk together the creme fraîche and mustard. Taste, and add more mustard to suit your palate. Fold this mixture into the barley and mushrooms in the crock pot. Now, shred or pull apart your chicken. It should fall apart easily. Return the chicken to the pot, then taste to see if you need any more salt or pepper. Stir in the chopped fresh herbs, and serve immediately.

    Add the Parmesan at the table, for those who wish it.

    Notes:

    I found the tarragon to be a bit strong in flavor, even though I only used about a tablespoon of it. The slight liquorish flavor just overpowered the rest of the dish. I would omit this next time, and use either all dill, or a mix of dill and Italian Seasoning instead. Another suggestion would be Herbs de Provence.

    Even though you’re only adding about a half cup total of “creamy” stuff to this dish, it comes out incredibly creamy tasting. I used a cashew based yogurt, because I’m not able to eat dairy, and it was delicious. I used a smooth traditional Dijon, and I think I might try a more stone ground style next time. This was great as a stand-alone, and could easily be put together in a morning before running out the door. I think it would also be nice paired with a light salad.

            

  • “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.