N40l on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

State of the Nerd: Pens, Homelab, Docker/Rancher, Intel NUC

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 07:43:26 -0400

This is just a quick check-in round to cover an assortment of subjects.

Fountain Pens

Last time I checked in, I let you in on my dirty little secret about loving cheap fountain pens. Well, that was so much fun that I went ahead and set up a new blog just to focus on great values in analog writing tools (especially fountain pens, inks, and paper). Enter: Chronicles of a Cheap Geezer.

fruits of insomnia

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 07:56:48 -0400

One of the common struggles that goes with being autistic is maintaining a regular sleep schedule. For a lot of us, it just doesn’t happen. Last night was a rough night, in which I did get a lot of sleep, but it was at the wrong time: 6PM to 1:30AM. After getting a full night’s sleep, I was ready to kick some ass. What to do?

I know! I’ll start working on my Jenkins CI server!

State of the Nerd Report / Homelab Update

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 00:15:08 -0400

The last few months have been quite a ride. I’ve been busy, both at work and at play. And both influence one another. Of course, if I were going to write about work tonight, I’ve got another outlet for that. So let’s catch up on what I’ve been up to in my personal nerding.

I’ve largely pulled back from photography. This isn’t so much on a permanent basis, but long enough for me to catch up on some other geekery. My home office was looking like something out of hoarders, though, so I took drastic action before my family could stage an intervention.

devices have different sector alignment

Sat, 27 Jun 2015 16:40:55 -0400

[root@dogface ~]# zpool replace zones /dev/dsk/c0t50014EE2072AB3D4d0 /dev/dsk/c0t50014EE2B66D775Ed0 cannot replace /dev/dsk/c0t50014EE2072AB3D4d0 with /dev/dsk/c0t50014EE2B66D775Ed0: devices have different sector alignment

And that’s where things went wrong.

Oh, it all started as a really great weekend to be in the homelab. Four new Western Digital Red WD60EFRX 6TB disks had arrived, and I was ready to replace my four 2TB disks with them. I’d replaced the first two of four disks without a hitch. They were Western Digital Red WD2002FAEX 2TB disks. I’d been assuming for some time that I had four identical disks in this zpool, but forgot the compromise that I’d made way back when I first set this machine up: I’d used two Red disks and two Black disks (Western Digital Black WD2002FAEX 2TB). So when I tried to replace disk #3 of 4 in my zpool, things didn’t go as smoothly. devices have different sector alignment

bonnie++ on on Frankenbox vs. HP Proliant N40L

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 20:18:46 -0400

I’ve got a few OpenIndiana boxes kicking around at the house, and I got to thinking that maybe my rather modern HP Proliant N40L with mirrored Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB disks and 8GB of RAM wasn’t all that speedy.

So I installed bonnie++ from the package repository and decided to see how the N40L, dogface, measures up against tuna, an old frankencomputer that I built from parts sourced from many places over many years.