On starting a new job recently (well, last year when I started this entry), I have been reminded yet again just how long it takes an Operations person (Sysadmin, SRE, whatever you want to call us this year; I'm going to use 'Ops' for this post) up to speed, compared to a developer.
Since /random/bread we have moved cities, and I'm continuing to make bread. It's been fine, but a week or so ago I did it on autopilot and put 1.25 cups of water in again.
Or, how I lost my mind
System Administration, or more accurately the Operations side of IT, is at its heart a technically complex job. However, there are some soft skills that are important. Note that I'm using 'soft' in a non-derogatory sense. The raw technical aspects are 'hard' in that they have well-defined edges, and typically very clear right and wrong answers. The 'soft' aspects tend to be fuzzier, with softer edges and more nuance. One of these soft skills is Situational Awareness.
For a holiday project I'm enhancing Cookiemaster to be able to force cookies for your choice of domains to be Session (transient, go away when you close the browser) rather than persistent. In doing so, I found it wasn't parsing the date in 'Expires' correctly, and in discovering why, I found the horror that is the Date format as specified in the RFC.
AWS Elastic File System (EFS) is an NFS compatible network-accessible shared storage system. It allows you to outsource the problem of HA network storage, which is highly attractive in some circumstances. But, there are some sharp edges, which we discovered at work.
I recently read this excellent article https://www.producttalk.org/2018/02/co-creating/ which, amongst other things, talks about avoiding a commitment and confirmation bias. It's well worth a read, quite by itself.
Or: a little clue as to how the sausage is made.
I inherited an LTO-4 SCSI-attached tape drive recently (yes, old-school, I know, it's mostly just for fun), and have been fiddling with it to do some tape-based offsite backups (to complement my other offsite backups). In doing so, I learned a bunch of things about the SCSI protocol (including its many many tendrils and offshoots), and about handy tools for interacting with SCSI devices. Some of these things may be useful to others, so I'm putting them here. Enjoy!
I had reason to re-build a custom grafana Debian package a few weeks back. It was a little bit tricky to figure out the right steps, and I wasn't able to find this process documented anywhere else, so here it is (for my future benefit as much as anyone else's). This is brief, and is intended to be an outline/guide only. Your mileage may vary