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....

2021-10-16 · 4 min · Stephan Garland

Terraform 0.11.x --> 0.12.x

Anyone in the SRE/DevOps world is likely at least aware of Terraform, if not actively using it. While Pulumi’s ability to write IaC in Python seems lovely to me, my company uses Terraform, so HCL it is. If you aren’t familiar, I’ll give a brief overview. Terraform is an IaC (see link above) tool. You know how installing an OS from scratch requires human input? Everything from the partitioning scheme to what services to launch requires configuration....

2020-08-04 · 9 min · Stephan Garland

Tag, but with less running

The last project I had during my time as a Distribution Engineer was to map out a nearby town’s electrical system. They had contracted us to handle their maintenance and construction, and their maps were… well, they weren’t. As an aside, here’s a brief explanation of rural electric membership cooperatives (REMCs), municipal power districts (munis), and investor-owned utilities (IOUs) that nobody asked for. Feel free to skip a paragraph or three....

2019-05-30 · 9 min · Stephan Garland

Adventures With 811

For those of you unfamiliar with 811, it’s a public service that attempts to prevent people from hitting buried utilities. Some utilities, like internet (at least on the to-the-home branches) are frequently trenched minimally at best, and with little to no protection. Electrical is usually adequately buried, but a. you never know b. a big project like adding a pool, a deck, etc. will easily surpass the required depth for any utility....

2019-05-20 · 8 min · Stephan Garland