April 20, 2016

It’s like 802.1p for your innards.

By Daniel

So I have titles again now, I ran through my countdown (or countup, I suppose) of ten days. No nicotine and I’m over that mental hurdle now of ten days. Truth be told, everything after that jittery first day was easy. I threw away all my remaining gear over the weekend. At this point I’m ready to enter that “I used to” phase of my life and be more selective, if only a little, about what’s coming into my body.

The hard drive saga appears to be laid to rest. The final topology is 4x5TB drives in a RAID 10, with the 128GB SSD still to be swapped out for a larger model. Those replace 2x3TB in a RAID 1 and 2x1TB in a RAID 0. So my usable space has doubled, but it’s all resilient storage. I took one of the 3TB drives and put it in one of the enclosures that the 5TB drives came in, and connected it to the PC over USB 3.0. With write caching enabled, it’s fast enough to be the data store for Steam, even NBA 2K16 didn’t see a change in load times and it’s probably the biggest game I have in terms of shit to load. I took the 1TB drives and fed them to the PowerEdge server, to bring me up to 8x1TB drives which I’m reconfiguring to an 8-drive RAID 10. That leaves one 3TB drive that I’m unsure what to do with. All my Steam and Origin games fit fine on one 3TB drive. And these drives have a 94% failure rate? Nothing important’s going on it, anyway. I’ll think it over.

We also bought a Keurig and a water filter/dispenser deal over the weekend. I didn’t grasp how much I disliked our tap water until we got the filter. The water is incredibly hard, what with it being the desert, and there’s a ton of sediment. We bought the filter thinking that if it didn’t do anything we’re only out 30 bucks. It’s exceeded expectations.

This all goes to a larger quality-of-life improvement that’s going on. I’m not doing the 25-cent ramen any more, I’m making and bringing lunch instead, fresh sandwiches and fruits and vegetables. The Keurig means I can bring coffee on the train, which is exactly what I’m doing now. So better food, better water, no nicotine. It feels like a natural evolution in my life. Money is a “can’t take it with you” sort of thing, and I have some immediate health concerns that should be greatly helped by making these changes.

For example, since cutting out the nicotine the one thing I noticed is that I’ve been hungrier than I’ve been in years, maybe since I was a teen. Whether that’s because the nicotine was suppressing my appetite or lowering my metabolism, or both, I don’t know. But it wasn’t doing enough to stop me from gaining weight (go figure, you have to attempt some semblance of work), so to hell with it. But I’ve had a lot of GI issues recently. I became lactose intolerant, and I was diagnosed with IBS which is a hell of a thing, as I’ve touched on before. If I simplify some of the equation on what’s going into me, it’s only going to help. I think it’s going to do a lot. It’s small sample sizes at play, but I’ve only needed to take an anti-spasmodic once in the last ten days, where prior to that it was every other day or so.

Nutanix is coming along nicely, it’s been the carrot on the stick for quite a while for quite a few people, so it’s on us to get it to a usable state quickly. Today being Wednesday we may actually get to make some uninterrupted progress. Yesterday was three-fourths meetings. Today is zero meetings. I have high hopes.

What I tend to have to do on days like this where my boss is out of town, and I have all day with nothing scheduled, to keep myself from goofing off, I’ve got a Chrome extension that will block sites that I specify. While I have total control over whether or not that runs, it’s sufficient because more often than not, checking /r/sysadmin is almost muscle memory.

Wednesdays are for action.