Blog posts

2025

Jan 9

How to rebuild a ZFS pool
Jan 7

Did Santa bring me extra capacity for my ZFS pool this xmas?! Nope! You just created a stripe instead of a mirror and only noticed a few months in. OOF! Been spending the last 24 hours rebuilding my storage pool.

2024

Nov 16

I’m giving a lot of thought lately to the concept of data at rest: things that are better off at rest (like photo galleries, personal wikis, and such) versus data that should be in flight, like dynamic sites with more complicated requirements that must respond and react to external change. Even my work’s e-commerce website I believe is a candidate for a site that could be at rest, save for the customers’ actual purchase flow, of course.

There’s operational, mental, and labor taxes for systems that are in flight, be they of maintenance, security, or the cycle of updates and subsequent fixes. I’m a big fan of static sites that keep data, services, and functionality at rest, as they remove those burdens and offer durability, stability, and predictability.

I’m exploring alternatives to Bookstack for my personal knowledgebase. Bookstack offers some compelling features and it’s been a reliable tool for the last four years, but it requires active hosting, has to be exposed to and protected from the public internet (so I can access it on the go), and it keeps the data in flight in a DB. Because the data is so valuable to me, I’ve been thinking that this data ought to be at rest, so I’m weighing out and playing with other options.
Nov 16

I’ve been doing some browsing around in the blog-o-sphere and came across some interesting articles on Blogs as Digital Gardens and Now Pages that I found interesting.

I like the idea of making space for rapid, low-stakes publishing of the things I’m currently interested in or am working on. When I get an idea to write about, sometimes I don’t have the time or space to dedicate to writing a polished, fully-articulated blog post.

I got the idea to add mini-posts to my blog and merge them in alongside the regular posts, resulting in one big feed of quick thoughts and fuller posts.
Nov 11

Announcing Bildaro, a self-hosted photo gallery
Oct 11

Lessons my DIY file server taught me about the 'Out-of-the-loop performance problem'
Aug 3

Fix MacOS Finder problems with Samba file shares