Everybody uses it, and specially during the pandemic, so I contribute. Only 2% of visitors do.
The small one (6 drives) fits perfectly in one ATX Bay, however, the SAS SSD are too height to fit.
I fit 1 SATA3 SSD 1TB and 4 SATA3 HDD 2TB.
The other one, the 3 Bay 5.25″ SAS/SATA enclosure for 12 drives did not fit in the Corsair Obsidian Series 750D case, and I had to install it outside. Doing a DIY, as I explain in my book about assembling, fixing and upgrading your own PCs and laptops.
However the 12 Gbps SAS SSD were returning Checksum errors in ZFS when I did copy information or I ran scrub. I’m afraid the enclosure can only provide 6 Gbps at max, or a poor connection. Cables or expanders use to be the reason. I ordered new cables to make a direct connection to the HBA Controller without the enclosure to validate my theory and the drives stopped showing errors.
There is something good in all bad: I have been able to document and explain how to troubleshoot, actual errors in ZFS, in my book and talk about the problems with the cables, and the advantages of using a SAS controller even if you use SATA drives.
There is an offer with Microsoft Pass which is that we can use Disney+ for free during 30 days.
Don’t forget to balance how much of your contribution goes to every player.
Unfortunately by default most of the money goes to O’Reilly and Humble Tip and few to the Charity cause. You can change that from the web when going to to the payment.
This article talks about how at Riot Games they use Slack. Slack is really a powerful tool, and also makes the communication more human in companies with their approach and the funny icons and /giphy. I’m very serious when it comes to work but I recognize the friendly, warm, human and lovely touch these kind of animated icons bring to the conversations.
Remember that life of the SSD is different from spinning drives. I recommend to keep your backups on external spinning drives disconnected most of the time.
Operating at Scale – An Inside Look at Facebook’s Production Engineering Team
I’ve been working on testing performance of more configurations on Azure and GCP.
I’m also looking forward to test the AMD Ryzen™ 7 3700X, AM4, Zen 2, 8 Core, 16 Thread, 3.6GHz, 4.4GHz Turbo that is arriving to me this week.
I closed the ticket #21 (Thank Jian!) so ensuring CTOP.py is compatible with Python 3.5 versions.
Feature requests and bugs are listed using gitlab: https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/ctop/-/issues
I updated it the Nov-01, as I normally do, bringing more content.
I’ve been paid the royalties for he past two months and I reinvested everything (and more from my pocket) in Hardware for working with ZFS.
I was offered by an editorial in The States to publish Python Combat Guide and other of my books worldwide. I was thinking it for a while. It was very good money, translation to multiple languages and platforms and marketing and a lot of promotion, but I would had loss the rights and the Freedom I have now, like the possibility to offer discount coupons to who I want and to update the contents often. So to celebrate my decision for you, readers of the blog, during September, I provide a discounted price of $5 USD for the fist 100 sales instead of the $25 USD suggested price. Use the following link:
https://leanpub.com/pythoncombatguide/c/blog-carles-nov2020
As part of my effort to contributing with nice Open Source products to the Community I have made some investments to keep contributing to:
I’m writing a new book about managing ZFS for Small Business too, so I show how to operate on this hardware, good points and downsides.
I’m assembling a new Pc with ZFS plenty of Disk Storage within a mix of:
I’m a big fan of Intel, but this time I have chosen AMD. Concretely a AMD Ryzen 7 3700X AM4 8 Core / 16 Threads, 3.6 GHz to 4.4 GHz with Turbo. The reason I chose this CPU is because it only uses 65W but still has 8 Cores / 16 Threads.
Also I want to see the performance of this AMD Ryzen with CMIPS and another important reason is that AMD motherboards support PCI 4.0. I have bought a NVMe SSD Samsung 980 PRO PCI 4.0 (x4) able to read at 6,400 MB/s. I will use this AMD box for running VMs as well. Basically Virtual Box and Docker.
I’ve been surprised that for 169.99 GBP I can have a very good Asus Motherboard with a 2.5 Gb Ethernet: ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING, AMD B550, AM4, DDR4, PCIe 4.0, SATA3, Dual M.2, CrossFire, 2.5GbE, USB 3.2 Gen2 A+C, ATX.
In order to have an Asus motherboard with a 2.5 Gb Ethernet for Intel I had to jump to a 254 GBP motherboard and Intel is still PCI 3.0. Actually there are PCI 10Gb NICs at 80 GBP so at some point I’ll upgrade my home network from Gigabit to 10 Gb. That will come slowly, but if the new equipment I assemble has 2.5 Gb when I upgrade the main switches to 10 Gb, at least I’ll be able to communicate at 2.5 Gb without ant additional change.
Also memory at 3200, speed that the AMD motherboard can provide, is more than affordable.
This new server will have 64 GB of RAM (Corsair DDR4 Vengeance PC4-25600 (3200)), as I plan to run VMs and use Volumes mounted via iSCSI and locally as block devices to improve my Software. I’ve bought a new UPS to keep it running in case power goes down. That’s something that doesn’t happen often in my city in Ireland, honestly, but I never forget that this happens in Barcelona two or three times per year, and that a high tension spike can burn your motherboard, drives, or electronics like the TV or the fridge. I’ve bought as well a new KVM Switch, a HDMI 4K and USB too one, so I don’t have to have so many keyboards. My logitech M720 allowed me to use it with 3 computers, but still I want something more operational. The KVM I bought allow me to switch with a button or within a hotkey in the keyboard.
I bought a new Icy box fox handling 6 2.5 drives in just one bay of the tower, and a 850 Watt Corsair PSU that will be able to power the many drives I want at the same time.
I started two new books:
Those can be purchased while I’m still working on them and get the updates that I’ll be publishing and keeping a communication with me about doubts or improvements.
I saw some Halloween offers and I purchased Software licenses for Software I use.
Backup Guard is one of the products I registered:
I contribute a lot to Open Source, and many years ago before Open Source existed I was creating Freeware Software. But I think that good commercial Software deserves to be supported. Like everything in life, if they are doing a good work that is useful to me, why not giving them support?. It is also a way to make sure they will continue producing amazing Software. And in the other hand, myself, I create Software. Some times commercial Software, and I like to be paid, so I apply the same principle.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54482245
Long time ago I created some ZFS tools that I want to share soon as Open Source.
I equipped myself with the proper Hardware to test on SAS and SATA:
Finally I will have my empty USB keys located and protected. ;)
Remember to be always nice to robots. :)
If you’re surprised by the number of cores reported by the Amazon instance m5d.24xlarge, and even more for the baremetal c5n.metal, you’re guessing well that this comes from having Servers with 4 CPUs for Compute Optimized series.
| CMIPS Score | Execution time (seconds) | Type of instance | Total cores | CPU model seen by Linux |
| 58536 | 34.16 | Amazon AWS m5d.24xlarge | 96 | 4 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8175M CPU @ 2.50GHz |
| 54169 | 36.92 | Amazon AWS c5n.metal | 72 | 4 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8124M CPU @ 3.00GHz |
| 26329 | 75.96 | Baremetal | 48 | 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz |
| 21732 | 92.02 | Baremetal | 40 | 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v3 @ 2.30GHz |
| 9810 | 203.87 | Desktop computer | 12 | Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7800X CPU @ 3.50 GHz |
https://linuxacademy.com/cp/library/catalog/view/DevOpsCourses
I’m finishing the 24 hours long Implementing a Full CI/CD Pipeline:
https://linuxacademy.com/cp/modules/view/id/218
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Casa Monitor</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<FRAMESET cols="50%,50%">
<FRAMESET rows="50%,*">
<FRAME src="http://players-all-games/">
<FRAME src="http://monthly-graphs/">
</FRAMESET>
<FRAMESET rows="50%,*">
<FRAME src="http://grafana/databases/">
<FRAME src="http://kibana/clusters/">
</FRAMESET>
</FRAMESET>
</HTML>If you don’t have the space or the resources for more monitors you can use the ingenious.
I have a cheap HDMI switch that allows me to do PinP (Picture in Picture) with one main source on the monitor, and two using a fraction of their original space. It may allow you to see variants in graphics.
And in you have only a single monitor, you can use a chrome extension that rotates tabs, which is also very useful.
Be careful if you use the reload features with software like Jira or Confluence. If they are slow normally, imagine if you mess it by reloading every 30 seconds… I discourage you to use auto refresh on these kind of Softwares.
 | This past week I have connected the XBOX One X Controller to the Windows laptop for the first time. Normally I use the Pc only for strategy games, but I wanted to play other games like Lost Planet 3, or Fall Guys in a console mode way. I figured that would be very easy and it was. You turn on the controller, press the connect button like you did to pair with the console, and in Windows indicate pair to a Xbox One controller. That’s it. |
I named this as the first incident where a provider told that the reason of a fiber failure was a squirrel chewing the cable.
I popularized this with my friends in Systems Administration and SRE and when they suffer a Squirrel Attack incident, they forward it to me, for great joy.
I’m used to construction or gas, water, electricity, highways repair operations on the cities accidentally cutting fiber cables, thunders or truck accidents on the highway breaking the floor and cutting tubes and issues like that. I’ve been seeing that for around 25 years.
So the first time I saw a provider referring to a squirrel cutting the cables it was pretty hilarious. :)
In my funny mental picture: I could visually imagine a cable thrown in the middle of the forest, over trees, and a squirrel chewing it as it tastes like peanuts. :) or a shark cutting a Google’s or Facebook’s intercontinental cable thrown without any protection. ;)
The sense of humor and the good vibes, are two of the most important things in life.
I tried to continue following it since I left Sanmina. ZFS is really an amazing Software and it’s lead by an amazing Community of super cool Engineers and companies. I would like to continue contributing ASAP.
I bought some new hard drives in order to work a bit on this. You don’t need to have dedicated hardware if you want to test features. You can run in a VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation.
None is perfect. I see flaws in all of them and bad architecture practices*, however from all I learn interesting things.
*I guess that’s why I wrote my own book :)
You know, I study every day. At least 30 minutes, after work. As part of my healthy routines.
But I also study and learn during the work, as we have time available for this.
I’m very fortunate that Blizzard gives me time every day to study. That’s amazing. They also send us to events paying the ticket, travel, hotel, expenses… now with covid-19 we only go to virtual events, but the company still pay for this and give free days. Is a very nice company.
I use a lot Linux Academy too:
I continue having purchases of my book, and I’m very happy about that. I’m working on improving it and providing more contents and samples going from the scratch, with step by step code samples. From spaghetti code reading CSV files, to OOP with Full Coverage.
I’m really grateful to this beautiful country, Ireland.
Having an Irish degree is something that brings me an special illusion.
It allows to pass a fixed width and height for the terminal render. That’s very useful when you run CTOP in a Docker non interactive session, or from a Cron, with the –iterations=1 so the output can be captured programmatically.
https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/teach-unit-testing/-/tree/master/lesson0
I also added some contents to lesson 1, where we refactor pure spaghetti code with no error control, to something more elaborated with unit testing and full code coverage. Still procedural, but I will jump to next class in two weeks, where we will move to OOP and Dependency Injection.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/07/atlassian-tells-employees-they-can-work-from-home-indefinitely.html
This new scenario challenges the old companies and is driving to some internal tensions in the companies that resist to allow employees to freely Remote Work.
I’ve been working in adding new information and I released a new update this week, the version 0.77. Talking about mutable and immutable objects when passing to a function, and references.
It is exactly this model:
I start this section to mention things that are worth.
https://slack.engineering/a-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-day-at-slack-dfe05b485f82
2. I read this interesting article about Netflix and Hexagonal Architecture:
https://netflixtechblog.com/ready-for-changes-with-hexagonal-architecture-b315ec967749
3. This new from Amazon is interesting for everybody in the sector:
4. I updated CTOP.py to v.0.7.6 adding some command line switches to:
5. I’ve been asked by an editorial to print my books in paper, for all the world. I’m thinking about it.
6. I’ve been asked to talk in a DevOps event.
7. I’ve created a new section in the blog, for adding the score of the videogames I played.
After some work reviewing it and ensuring it has the expected quality, I finally published my book Python Combat Guide.
Is an atypical creation. Is more a Master Class to my best friend, it could be a SDM, TL leading a small Software Development department, a Coder or a Scientist wanting to join IT as programmer and to learn a lot of stuff very quickly, than rather a formal Python Book for learning. Absolutely is not for beginners.
If you want to buy it, to explore the TOC, extended description…
One, you can already see. I added a new section to the CSS @media, so now screens bigger than 1,800 px in width, will use that width for rendering the page. The original WordPress theme at 960x was too small for our current screens. I will add a new CSS @media for 4K screens promptly.
Other is about the organization of the content. I want to separate a bit the contents, now articles are sequential and is difficult to discover nice contents if they have 2 or more articles more recent, so I will group articles by content and provide a small index on the top page. Also I will provide more areas for Operations, SRE, where it will be easy to locate code, scripts, tricks… things that are useful to our day to day. I also want to make visible the articles about living in different cities, for IT Engineers, with useful tricks and tips. And keep the more complex and more interesting Engineering matters in the main page.
With more delay I wanted, I bought a SSL certificate, configured Apache, and after few changes to the blog has been set. One very annoying is that WordPress linked the images statically pointing to http://blog.carlesmateo.com so I changed the latest article’s images to point to relative path so they will work nice with http or https.
My reflection is that everything negative can have its positive output. With this coronavirus thing, I decided to focus into improving things. And so I’m doing. :)