sgarland.dev

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:...

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....

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....

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....

Reluctant Servers

I may have mentioned this before, but I have two nearly identical Supermicro 2Us. One is the main server that hosts VMs under Proxmox to do various tasks - a NAS, a Docker host, jumpbox, etc. The other came about because I discovered that its motherboard hardware revision level was too old to support Xeon v2 (Ivy Bridge), even with an updated BIOS. I wanted the lower thermals that v2s offered, so I bought a newer motherboard, and then got another 2U case to throw the old motherboard and CPU into....