Non-Tech

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 This was primarily driven by three factors: referencing an outdated man page, tunnel vision, and missing the units on a graph.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 can’t fault them for this, as users are prone to breaking things. This is probably doubly so for the average TrueNAS user, based on reading through their forums. No offense to anyone who is technically competent and uses it (I personally know at least two such people), but it is designed as an appliance, and the fact that you don’t need to know how to navigate a CLI is a feature. ...

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. ...