ADHD? In my brain? It's more likely than you think.

WARNING: This has absolutely nothing to do with tech, short of a mention of GitHub. First, I need to give credit to something I never in a million years thought I would be crediting: Twitter. Specifically pre-Musk Twitter, but anyway. Second, and more importantly, a person: Jaana Dogan. I’m linking to her GitHub profile because a. she’s a Distinguished Engineer there b. it’s less weird. Not like she’s ever going to read this blog anyway, but it still seems more polite....

2023-07-17 · 3 min · Stephan Garland

A Return From A Lengthy Hiatus

It’s been awhile Specifically, it’s been 484 days since I last posted. Things have changed a bit. In short: The site is hosted on GitHub Pages instead of an EC2 The site uses Hugo instead of WordPress The site is fronted with bunny.net instead of Cloudflare I’m now a Database Reliability Engineer I was diagnosed with ADHD What happened? Yak-shaving, mostly. I’ll have ChatGPT turn it into a run-on sentence for fun:...

2023-07-15 · 3 min · Stephan Garland

K8s Misadventures, Pt. 2 – Ceph is easy, and other lies people tell themselves

Ceph is a distributed storage system. That severely understates its complexity and capabilities. Here is its documentation, and if you’re intending on trying Ceph out, I strongly recommend you spend some time thoroughly reading it. All of it. I spent about two weeks on and off studying it, along with Red Hat’s docs (which are much the same, but different enough that it’s worthwhile), various Reddit posts, random Medium blogs, etc....

2022-03-19 · 5 min · Stephan Garland

K8s Misadventures, Pt. 1 - Distributed Systems are Easy

It’s finally happening - I’m splitting compute and storage up, and using k8s to do so. I bought two more Dell R620s, bringing my total to three - behold, quorum. This will be a multi-part series, focusing on different things I did wrong. I want HA, or as close as I can. I know I still have SPOF with power (aside from my UPS), internet, and switching, but my real concern is the ability to drop a node and not notice....

2022-01-19 · 4 min · Stephan Garland

Testing VM immutability, secrets storage again, and a brief ode to ZFS

I’ve had my dev VM upgraded to Debian 11 for a few months, and have fiddled with from time to time. It’s not that I distrust Debian stable in the slightest to not be stable, but I also am not going to just throw prod a sudo apt full-upgrade (yes, with updating sources first…) and hope for the best. As I didn’t experience any issues with workflow with the upgraded VM, I decided it was time to bake some new images....

2021-12-23 · 3 min · Stephan Garland