OpenZFS, it turns out, can react very poorly to a reshuffling of the disks. In one zpool I had six disks, arranged as 3 mirrored VDEVs, physically arranged in two external enclosures. One of the enclosure has 4 slots, the other 2. Two of the VDEVs were in one enclosure, the third in the second. This isn’t ideal: one enclosure failure will offline the whole zpool. To fix this, I got ahold of another 4 slot enclosure to spread the VDEVs around. That’s when things went a little fucky.
Last night was rounded out nicely by a visit to the Library, which offered a civilised volume, a nice mocktail, and some delicious cheeses. What more could a man ask for? Well, I guess I can think of several things, starting with the winning Lotto numbers, but they’re not on offer. After trundling off to bed at a sensible hour, I’m ready to leap once more into the breach, dear friends.
The day commences with a reading from Machines of Loving Grace and some administrivia, including mentioning the sponsors. Which metl probably should have done yesterday.
After a nice lunch at Husk (dirty fries and a very nice chocolate malt stout, in case you’re wondering), we’re back into it.
After a much-deserved rest, the good folks of the Crüe return for the 11th Kiwicon, styled Kiwicon 2038AD and with a nifty cyberpunk/Blade Runner theme. We have gloomy colour schemes and mirror shades. We’re returning to the Michael Fowler Centre so as to allow a couple of thousand of us to show up and learn more about the terrors of the what happens when thinking rocks go wrong.
Breakfast was, again, a bit of an interesting experience. And by interesting I mean sugar-laden. Everything tastes very sweet to my palette, but I guess this is the norm in the States.
Today’s culture shock was breakfast, which included cinammon sugar donuts, which I do not think of as a traditional breakfast food. It was not as good as the OpenShift breakfast, let me tell you. Also, the pre-keynote DJ was good, I guess, but my ears hurt after the first quarter hour or so.
Today is the OpenShift Commons day - a bunch of information, mostly from CoreOS Brandon Philips and Clayton Coleman “We wanted to bring the smartest Kubernetes developers together.” Said tongue and cheek. “Developers and people who understand how the Internet work are horribly outnumbered. New users are joining the Internet user base faster than developers and ops people to support them. CoreOS is about how we make it as easy as possible to manage that, because we can’t train our way out of that.
I was inspired by attending Angus Lees’ [garage Kubernetes](https://archive.org/details/lca2018-How_to_run_Kubernetes_on_your_spare_hardware_at_home_and_save_the_world talk) at linux.conf.au 2018; not in the direct way of setting up Kube at home (although that’s on my to-do list); rather, to solve what Angus mentioned in passing as the biggest pain point for lab/SOHO environments: storage. Storage is still a SPOF1 for most SOHO-type environments.
There’s a good reason for that: distributed systems are hard. Distributed storage is the hardest part of that problem. But it’s also the most worthwhile problem to solve; if you can have reliable distributed storage, you’ll never wake up to find a note from your 5 year old bemoaning that she can’t watch TV again.
Another fine start to the Alliance Français French Film Festival. Last year I binged on perhaps two dozen movies and, really, it was far too many. This year I’ve paired back a bit, which will no doubt mean I miss some good ones, but equally will mean I’m not too overloaded to even think about them properly.
The only sour note is that, as last year, the change in director in 2017 seems to have largely trashed the children’s film selection. Historically a bit of a highlight, it’s become desperately mediocre.