Well, it happened. I’m not sure what weighting the various components held (I’ve gathered that the amount of things I dove into as personal projects was the dominant factor), but however it played out, it worked. I’m now (actually, for about a month now - I didn’t want to jinx it) an Associate Site Reliability Engineer for LogicMonitor. They’re a California company, but have an office (two, for now, soon to be merged) in Austin....

For a school project, I had to install mongoDB. OK, no big deal, docker pull mongo. Since I run a home server, and the purpose of this mongo installation was to create an app that uses it, I figured installing it there and making it available to the rest of my group would be beneficial/helpful. Hmm, might want to also install some kind of GUI management tool - nosqlclient looks like it’ll work....

UPDATE: See the end of this post for a discussion on new revisions. Every Professional Computer Toucher has a just-so way they want their environment. When I was but a wee lad, that environment consisted of Windows XP with various arcane registry tweaks applied (I vaguely recall changing my TCP congestion control algorithm to Westwood solely because of Red Alert 2), and Notepad. Things improve with age. My current environment is a non-Retina Macbook Air, which suits me just fine....

This will be quite short, but I wanted to put some new content out there. Healthy checks are a vital part of any organization, be it your homelab, a small office network, or a datacenter. Knowing the status (availability, load, temperature, etc.) of a server is critical in not only being aware of its health, but also of the potential need to scale. For my home server use, the only thing I’m really concerned with is availability, mainly because my toddler delights in pushing the power button....

UPDATE: See end for an update on the method I settled on. I run a home server, primarily as a NAS using Plex. It’s an old Dell T310 (X3430 @ 2.4 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 25 TB usable disk with n+1 parity, RAID1 SSD boot drives) which I’ve shoved HDDs into. It’s also my Linux environment when Mac just doesn’t quite cut it, and I don’t feel like starting a VM on the Air....