This See the Sausage Being Made post goes to Patronizers in January and becomes public in February. Not a Patronizer? You could be! $12 a year gets you my latest updates, occasional free tidbits, and the completely pointless MWL Footnote Fortune File, freshly updated for the new edition of Networking for System Administrators.
I have one “job.” Yes, I write books. I get paid for that. But the thing I get a “paycheck” for is writing one blog post a month, at the beginning of the month. For Patronizers.
Here we are at January 28, and I am just getting to writing that blog post.
Absolutely zero excuses, only a procedural failure.
I like to write the blog post when something happens. What happened in the last six weeks?
Nothing.
Well, there’s The Longest Dark, the orcish solstice holiday. I took time off for that. Come January, I started to get to work and realized that my test lab was, at best, suboptimal. Many of the topics I write about can be tested and deployed on virtual machines, but I like to do filesystem books on real hardware or at least real disks. I have a host for that–it’s old, but who cares? Disks are disks, and this thing has eight SATA drives and a couple SATADOMs for the OS. Eight drives lets me test most common ZFS configurations. The host is large and noisy, but I have a basement and it has a BMC so I can kick it as needed. Creating a hard drive failure means two flights of stairs and opening a case, but I can live with that.
Mind you, I had stolen some of the hard drives for other purposes. More drives were needed. I descended into the Parts Closet. Well, I call it the Parts Closet. Other people call it a trash heap, or perhaps a Do-It-Yourself Toxic Gas Cloud Kit, Add Your Own Fire. Old computers, old printers, all precariously balanced. Laptops preinstalled with Windows XP with wobbly lids, cat5 wire crimping kits, pristine Unicomp Model M keyboards with button mice, Keyboardio Model 100s with Dvorak keycaps, a wall of small storage boxes with labels like SOEKRIS and PCCARD and SCSI TERMINATORS. The POWER OVER ETHERNET box sits right next to ETHERNET OVER POWER, which I do recommend as a convenient trick if the electrical system in your home doesn’t date from 1949 and wasn’t engineered by a PTSD-stricken pipefitter with delusions of grounding. (Fortunately cable TV is historical, so I can run Ethernet over the old coax someone paid big money to install.) Once I started digging for hard drives and discovered several expensive 250GB IDE disks, the necessity of a purge overcame my unwillingness to perform said purge.
Finding the cable crimpers reminded me that I needed to check some of the long-haul cabling in the house. The cable tester showed that I shouldn’t ask questions I don’t want answered.
Now let’s detour into backups.
I have a iX Systems miniXL running FreeNAS for local backups, and rely on Dropbox and Tarsnap for external backups. All the backups get tested monthly, mainly because I routinely screw up and must recover from backup. The miniXL also serves as my MP3 storage, because cleaning out the parts closet demands a soundtrack.
Naturally, I’m halfway through the ghastly purge when the music dies.
The miniXL’s boot SATADOM was no longer a boot device in the BIOS.
Fine. I’ve never worked with SATADOM hardware before, but how bad could it be? I ordered an inexpensive replacement.
The Supermicro power cable didn’t fit. Apparently that’s a well-known example of vendor lock-in, so I ordered a more expensive guaranteed compatible Supermicro SATADOM that was not at all compatible and immediately went back to the dealer. Fortunately, some ex-iX folks mentioned that the miniXL had space for an SSD. I had found a couple SSDs in the Parts Closet.
But then I realized that the miniXL has eight removable hard drive bays, is much quieter than my test system, and would easily fit under my standing desk (pic). Causing a hard drive failure with this host doesn’t require going to the basement and opening a case.
The critical service, music, is now being shared from my Mac desktop.
Backups? I have external USB cases for local hosts to back up to. I used the FreeNAS box because it was there. The miniXL is now running raw FreeBSD 15 and bhyve.
I now have a less unsuitable test environment and the toxic waste accident has been relocated from my home to the recycling center. Well, technically, I’ve converted one large toxic waste accident into two smaller accidents and added one of those accidents to a full scale disaster, but I’m not responsible for that disaster so I’m going to be a good citizen and ignore it.
In other news: last month I said I had completed fulfillment of the new Networking for System Administrators by packing and shipping a few hundred books. Uh… not so much. Yes, I finished packing the books. The US Postal Service hauled them off my porch. All good?
No.
More than one backer contacted me to say that their books were weirdly delayed. The USPS hauled my overseas books from Detroit to the big processing center Chicago, where most of them sat for a month. A handful ricocheted between Chicago and NYC for weeks. Several folks told me that this is unacceptable. I agree. I have no leverage nor any ability to fix this, however. My country is increasingly hostile to small business. I’m pretty sure that if I used USPS’ expensive two-day shipping, they would arrive speedily. I could use UPS or Fedex, except they’re expensive and might charge $50 to collect $3 in VAT depending on criteria so complicated as to be effectively unpredictable.
There’s also been other surprises. US Export Compliance returned one package because they require a full recipient name. A recipient like “A D Smith” is not acceptable; the shipping label must spell out Anonymous Doof. I’d expect the destination address to establish an internal protocol for demultiplexing initials, but apparently my government needs to know exactly who backs me. This has never been a problem before, but fine, rules change and there’s probably an announcement somewhere.
All I can think of to do is: warnings on my crowdfunding campaigns. Lots of warnings.
Much like I do when I warn you Patronizers that backing me is a terrible deal. January had no progress, but many tiny fixes. Yes, yes, that’s its own kind of progress but it doesn’t get words on the page. I do appreciate y’all. Thank you.