Failure happens. Its a part of working in technology, and as a techno worker bee, my job is to ensure that those failures have as little impact on my team and my company as can be summoned. Part of this (as the business peeps say) “risk mitigation strategy”, is backups. Its a part of working in technology that I want to give as little attention as possible, so its important its low touch and that its done correctly and is available when I need it. ...
Fabric describes itself as a “library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks”. To get this work done, Fabric uses what are called “fabfiles’, which is just some python stored in a file called fabfile.py. In terms of execution, it works a lot like Rake from the Ruby world. You have a base command, in this case fab and each task is read from the fabfile.py and executed on request. Nothing too earth shattering. ...
Storage clustering systems have been an interest of mine for many years. The idea that you can put a bunch of similarly shaped systems together and make them behave as a unit is fascinating. One could think of systems biological terms; the kernel being analogous to the nucleus in a cell, bringing individual cells together to serve a higher purpose of the organ or nerve ending. I’ve never really needed a high performance cluster, and when I studied the technologies in the area of HPC, I didn’t have data that needed processing. Though I did thirst for storage, and with it and, data redundancy. ...
It struck me the other day, that this is probably as good a year as any to try again at keeping a website online. There have been others before this, but like a moth to the flame, I ended up spending more time hacking on the site than I did writing entries, completely defeating the initial intention. As such, I thought I would give Jekyll a try. Looks simple, well documented, customizable and looks to have a pretty strong community. All good signs. ...
I’ve recently discovered FreeBSD’s new package manager and it looks poised to become the default package manager soon in FreeBSD 10. After watching the video from BSDCAN I realized that there was some pretty serious effort going into the project, but still a bit rough around the edges. Some wiki reading later, I was ready to dive in. More sources of information seem to be springing up about this new package manager, and though it does not solve all of the issues surrounding package management in FreeBSD such as custom options on your ports, it sure is a vast improvement from previous tools that are available for FreeBSD for my use cases. ...