linux

Recently, I wrote about being wrong. Specifically germane to this post, I wrote: Being wrong means I probably had some gross misunderstanding of a system’s architecture or the operation of a program, and that means I have an opportunity to learn more about it, and hopefully to be able to guide my decisions. I was involved in an incident where I thought that some EC2 instances had reached disk saturation. This was primarily driven by three factors: referencing an outdated man page, tunnel vision, and missing the units on a graph....

I wrote previously about how some things should just work, should not need mucking about with, and how I shifted my NAS’ duties to TrueNAS Scale. I must now inform you that I was incorrect, and have shifted back to running it manually on Debian. I’m a creature of habit. I also like knowing how things work, how to fix them when they don’t, and how to improve them. While TrueNAS (Scale, anyway; I assume Core also) does begrudgingly allow you to ssh in, the MOTD is a warning banner that they guarantee nothing once you’ve touched it outwith their blessed API path....

I grew up playing with computers. Our first computer was a Packard Bell 286, and I fondly remember getting a book on BASIC and trying to make a game with it. Later, we got a Gateway 2000 486, and on at least two occasions, I broke it by editing autoexec.bat and config.sys. A few years later, we got a Gateway (at this time, they had rebranded) Pentium III 550 MHz, which was an absolutely screamer for its time....