Philosophy
Philosophy may seem like an out of place thing to find on a technology web site.
It is important to grasp why things are done instead of blindly doing them. Taking a holistic view of the space we occupy is critical when making decisions. Without such grounding, decisions are aimless and tend to be indeterminate.
- In Defense of GeneralismI had an interesting interview a few days back, and was called a generalist in it as if that’s a bad thing. Since I didn’t get a job out of the interview, I may as well get a post. I)What advantages does a generalist give you? The philosophical discussion of the generalist vs the specialist goes back to the Greeks, if not earlier. The concept of the fox versus the hedgehog encompasses this debate. The idea is that a hedgehog knows how to react one way in an adverse situation, and that is curl up into a ball while the… Read more: In Defense of Generalism
- Proxmox VE Storage Integration: A Business CaseIntroduction I have been working with virtualization and container systems over a decade and a half at this point. My first experiences with putting multiple machines on a single host was likely OpenVZ. I have worked with systems such as OpenVZ, Xen, KVM, Docker, VMware ESXi, and their management systems such as vCenter, Proxmox VE, Nutanix Prism, and Xenserver to one level or another. I have also ran storage arrays from Netapp, Pure, EMC, HPE, and IBM and hyper-converged solutions such as Ceph and Nutanix AVS. I have designed and built enterprise storage and virtualization solutions for over a decade… Read more: Proxmox VE Storage Integration: A Business Case
- Type I vs Type II statistical errorsI-IntroductionA flash back to statistical math class may seem really off for a technology blog. In an era when many are trying to integration machine learning into what seems like everything, understanding the practical fundamentals of these errors is critical in knowing when to apply this emerging technology. II-What are Type I and Type II errors?A Type I error is a positive indication when the correct outcome is negative. A Type II error is a negative indication when the correct outcome is positive. III-Why do we care?Why we care is that ultimately computers are used to make decisions based on… Read more: Type I vs Type II statistical errors
- Some Thoughts on BackupsI)Introduction This has been covered a lot of times and a lot of places, but since I had an incident the previous Sunday (as of this writing) where my desktop ate its home partition after a power outage I figured it was a good time to write about backups since they were fresh on my mind. The 3-2-1 rule is simple and fundamental to backups. You have no less than 3 copies of your data, stored in 2 different forms and 1 off site backup. Although there are more standards that can be integrated, this is a good safe start… Read more: Some Thoughts on Backups
- Less is more; Do you really need that feature?I was writing the first of my TrueNAS API Integration posts when I wrote a statement that hit me: “It is critically important that any API keys in files have absolute minimum permissions. You are storing a password to your storage system on a server. I’ll say that I feel like this integration is taken for granted in a lot of systems, even at an enterprise level. An increase in the surface area available is unavoidable when automating. A robust set of user roles as above is a fantastic idea. I personally would strongly advise 600 permissions on the API key file… Read more: Less is more; Do you really need that feature?