invertedohm

Kernel 4.18 is _ancient_, weird to test on that. Also I wonder if the whole performance increase can't just be achieved by lowering the readahead size a bit. I see in their notes they have a decent SSD but set the blockdev readahead to 64. Depending on your workload it's much more performant to lower that to 16. As mentioned in TFA, fast storage is the most important factor here, and in my experience combining that with a smaller readahead pretty much fixes any read amplification issues you get with the larger readahead.

I get the feeing you're looking at this through the specific lens of a programmer. Terraform isn't made for programmers - you'll miss all the flexibility a real language gives you. It's made for ops people who deal with wrangling a whole bunch of different types of systems with different API's and languages and just need some way to standardize the management of disparate systems, whatever counts as "infrastructure".

The state file thing gets a relatively large part of the hate but it's that and the limitations of the DSL that make the DAG possible and useful. Pulumi and all the other wrappers don't solve this, though they can plausibly solve the "closer to programming" problem and I'm sure that has a valid audience.

I guess what I'm saying is, I think it'll stick around and we will in fact settle on it for a large part of operational work. I'll add that I also think k8s should die a quiet death and _that_ will be seen in retrospect as a necessary step to something better.

Personally I just push to an offsite restic backup on a cheap Hetzner storage box. It's not super fast and only hosted in EU AFAICT but it fits the bill for being cheap and reliable enough. It's just there for me to retrieve sentimental-value things like photos in the off chance all my other backup methods have failed.

Initial setup is a bit weird with their SSH key setup IIRC but manageable.

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

As others have noted, PowerToys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerToys) has a long history. I have some fond memories of the TweakUI utility by Raymond Chen as it made the OS much more usable.

Oh yeah it's definitely a weird Translate bug.

"Krigsskipet gjør en unnamanøver" translates to "The war ship is doing nightmare". "først en unnamanøver" to "first a young man", "unnamanøver i siste liten" is "last minute kidnap".

Translate seems very confused by that word.

The original is "Krigsskipet gjør først en unnamanøver i siste liten". Now, I don't speak Norwegian but I'm guessing the word "unnamanøver" is pretty versatile considering the translations you get when making minor changes.

  Krigsskipet = war ship (german-ish)
  gjør = verb to do
  først = first
  unnamanøver = evasive action
  (in other context apparently "nightmare" or "kidney robbery"?)
  i siste liten = at the last minute

Workload is mostly writing incoming metrics from many dynamic instances (AWS). In 2015 Influx was at pre-1.0 and definitely had a tendency to "fall apart" under stress - for one, there were no memory limitations implemented, so an accidental large query would eat up all your memory and kill the database. To be fair, no one recommended putting it in production at that point. It's just that I needed something to run a Graphite-like metrics platform at scale and it had to be future-proof. Bit of a gamble but it turned out well! :)

While it's a relatively young product, I've been running InfluxDB at scale for over a year in production and it's been a joy to use. Hundreds of hosts reporting stats every 10 seconds and the query language is straightforward and powerful once you grok the data structures a bit. It fits the bill, I think.

I'd like to second this, while also noting that a side-effect of this noodling-with-languages is that my fully English OS and browser is getting a page with some content (full paragraphs!) in Dutch, while other content is in English. On the same page. An interesting bug, but not one that inspires confidence.

Kind of amazing that the state of the art in this area hasn't changed in nearly 10 years. The marketing angle is funny as well - everything has to be a cloud now. I think I used to call what we built at Optiver a "private cloud" but "Metal Cloud" is nicely buzzwordy as well.

PS - Hi Marty, unknown nick here but I'm sure you can figure out who I am. :D

You don't hear the former at all; but you hear the latter as "plus plus," don't you?

I really do not. A short silence, both of them. I suppose it depends on how you normally code. I have never had a need for speaking out code and am not well versed in it.

The "it works after traceroute" line was the moment I was sure it was ARP caching. Then I was just wondering if it had anything to do with AWS specifically, which could have pointed towards a serious VPC bug. That doesn't seem to be the case though. You're not weird. Just burnt by real experience.

Nice write-up. Too bad I'm not in SF. :P

Ants. This is a drone in the insect hierarchical sense. It implies independent behaviour of duties and expendability, mostly.

No matter how incredible the software is, I don't see a solution for the core problem that they will need to solve: battery vs weight. It's revealing that there are no prototypes shown at all.

Very curious what their weight goal is and how they plan to deal with physics.

In the video, Adam glances at the guy behind him in line as he says "checking my statement for sketchy charges". Dude looks a lot like weev. Not sure if it's the guy himself, but that has to be intentional.

This is what I believe will be a (perhaps minor) roadblock towards adoption of these devices. It's relatively cheap compared to what's on the market now and appears very high quality. The problem is that flying machines are not well suited to a sudden loss of control, with their best option being crashing straight down.

As an intermediate pilot myself, I'd be scared to fly anywhere near the style that the promo videos do - over open water, one mistake means your drone is taking a dive. More experienced flyers are used to the fact that flying machines crash and parts need replacing on a fairly regular basis no matter how carefully you fly. That's going to be a harder sell to people buying a complete package expecting awesome output like the promo videos.

Sometimes a propellor detaches mid-flight, or the battery unplugs due to some crazy vibration. Of course, it shouldn't happen in a good design, but users are careless and it only needs to happen once to cause a good crash.

Indeed, cssh is great for getting a quick visual on a few servers, but you're pretty much limited to what will fit on your screen. Ansible really shines when you scale it up a bit further, and it grows well, allowing you to add bits and pieces as needed.

The hosts/inventory in ansible as a source of truth for your infrastructure is also a nice feature. You could use a selection from your ansible inventory to open a cssh with 'top' running on all your webservers, for example.

Exactly. The simplest explanation in my mind is that it's a white balance issue. Most photos are taken in some form of daylight, which is generally in the orange range without a pure white on a "correct" exposure. On average, photos will be taken in warmer (orange) rather than colder (blue) tones.

It would probably even work on a bunch of photos taken of a white wall in some natural light, if you averaged them out. More of an orange hue than pure white, certainly.

This is simply a side-effect of how DNS updates. The data is propagating right now, as the root nameservers for the .biz tld are already returning the Microsoft DNS servers as the correct response. The TTL for the root appears to be a day, so you should see this everywhere in 14 hours from this post.

Source: 'whois' and 'dig +trace'

Leaving aside the obviously deficient sysadmin work here: the timeline of the story doesn't add up. I can only hope this explanation is not accurate.

You find notes in your AWS control panel saying you should contact some Hotmail address. OK. So the first thing you do is reach out to that address and take the time to communicate intricate extortion details? Only after that you think maybe it's a good idea to start changing passwords, and right then the other party takes action and deletes all the things?

If that's what actually happened then I'm afraid something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.