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: ...
In case you haven’t been following my work (I absolutely can’t blame you, as this blog is self-congratulatory at best), I have a 25U rack with some stuff in it. In short, it consists of a Supermicro 2U X9, and a ZFS pool, with an almost-identical second Supermicro 2U X9 that exists as a cold spare, and a ZFS backup target. There’s also a Dell R620 1U that I’ve done absolutely nothing with yet beyond installing Proxmox. And, of course, networking gear. ...
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. Their product is an extremely impressive device monitoring solution, allowing companies to easily view the status of their servers, cloud instances, switches, and anything else with a heartbeat. I’m using it myself to monitor this website’s health, as well as the mongodb container on my home server, as I’m using it in a school project. It sends an email and Slack notification when it detects an outage. The product can also interface with PagerDuty or anything else with an API to send out escalations to the needed personnel. ...
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. Sadly, my version of iDRAC doesn’t allow the button to be remapped. I could disconnect it, but that leads to annoyances when actually having to use the button, so… ...
Before Reddit, there was Digg. Before Digg, there was /. Anyway, moving on. This site aims to share some of the more interesting stuff that I do, and also, a way for me to play with AWS, because #marketability. I’ll have to figure out Azure and Google Cloud later. When the .dev TLD launched, I thought, “self, you should get one of those, because all the cool kids have a website as a shrine to their hubris.” After an agonizing decision of whether to use first.last, firstLast, firstInitLast, or firstInit.last, I settled on the latter. My name is Stephan, and I like to pretend I’m a software developer. You can read more about my background in my About Me page, but suffice it to say, I’ve been playing with computers long enough to be able to write an autoexec.bat file without the help of the internet (don’t test me, please, it probably won’t work). ...