Author Archives: tserong

Scope Creep

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On December 22, I decided to brew an oatmeal stout (5kg Gladfield ale malt, 250g dark chocolate malt, 250g light chocolate malt, 250g dark crystal malt, 500g rolled oats, 150g rice hulls to stop the mash sticking, 25g Pride of Ringwood hops, Safale US-05 yeast). This all takes a good few hours to do the mash and the boil and everything, so while that was underway I thought it’d be a good opportunity to remove a crappy old cupboard from the laundry, so I could put our nice Miele upright freezer in there, where it’d be closer to the kitchen (the freezer is presently in a room at the other end of the house).

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I Have No Idea How To Debug This

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On my desktop system, I’m running XFCE on openSUSE Tumbleweed. When I leave my desk, I hit the “lock screen” button, the screen goes black, and the monitors go into standby. So far so good. When I come back and mash the keyboard, everything lights up again, the screens go white, and it says:

blank: Shows nothing but a black screen
Name: tserong@HOSTNAME
Password:
Enter password to unlock; select icon to lock

So I type my password, hit ENTER, and I’m back in action. So far so good again. Except… Several times recently, when I’ve come back and mashed the keyboard, the white overlay is gone. I can see all my open windows, my mail client, web browser, terminals, everything, but the screen is still locked. If I type my password and hit ENTER, it unlocks and I can interact again, but this is where it gets really weird. All the windows have moved down a bit on the screen. For example, a terminal that was previously neatly positioned towards the bottom of the screen is now partially off the screen. So “something” crashed – whatever overlay the lock thingy put there is gone? And somehow this affected the position of all my application windows? What in the name of all that is good and holy is going on here?

Update 2020-12-21: I’ve opened boo#1180241 to track this.

Network Maintenance

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To my intense amazement, it seems that NBN Co have finally done sufficient capacity expansion on our local fixed wireless tower to actually resolve the evening congestion issues we’ve been having for the past couple of years. Where previously we’d been getting 22-23Mbps during the day and more like 2-3Mbps (or worse) during the evenings, we’re now back to 22-23Mbps all the time, and the status lights on the NTD remain a pleasing green, rather than alternating between green and amber. This is how things were way back at the start, six years ago.

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Herringback

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It occurs to me that I never wrote up the end result of the support ticket I opened with iiNet after discovering significant evening packet loss on our fixed wireless NBN connection in August 2017.

The whole saga took about a month. I was asked to run a battery of tests (ping, traceroute, file download and speedtest, from a laptop plugged directly into the NTD) three times a day for three days, then send all the results in so that a fault could be lodged. I did this, but somehow there was a delay in the results being communicated, so that by the time someone actually looked at them, they were considered stale, and I had to run the whole set of tests all over again. It’s a good thing I work from home, because otherwise there’s no way it would be possible to spend half an hour three times a day running tests like this. Having finally demonstrated significant evening slowdowns, a fault was lodged, and eventually NBN Co admitted that there was congestion in the evenings.

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Distributed Storage is Easier Now: Usability from Ceph Luminous to Nautilus

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On January 21, 2019 I presented Distributed Storage is Easier Now: Usability from Ceph Luminous to Nautilus at the linux.conf.au 2019 Systems Administration Miniconf. Thanks to the incredible Next Day Video crew, the video was online the next day, and you can watch it here:

If you’d rather read than watch, the meat of the talk follows, but before we get to that I have two important announcements:

  1. Cephalocon 2019 is coming up on May 19-20, in Barcelona, Spain. The CFP is open until Friday February 1, so time is rapidly running out for submissions. Get onto it.
  2. If you’re able to make it to FOSDEM on February 2-3, there’s a whole Software Defined Storage Developer Room thing going on, with loads of excellent content including What’s new in Ceph Nautilus – project status update and preview of the coming release and Managing and Monitoring Ceph with the Ceph Manager Dashboard, which will cover rather more than I was able to here.

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Hackweek0x10: Fun in the Sun

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We recently had a 5.94KW solar PV system installed – twenty-two 270W panels (14 on the northish side of the house, 8 on the eastish side), with an ABB PVI-6000TL-OUTD inverter. Naturally I want to be able to monitor the system, but this model inverter doesn’t have an inbuilt web server (which, given the state of IoT devices, I’m actually kind of happy about); rather, it has an RS-485 serial interface. ABB sell addon data logger cards for several hundred dollars, but Rick from Affordable Solar Tasmania mentioned he had another client who was doing monitoring with a little Linux box and an RS-485 to USB adapter. As I had a Raspberry Pi 3 handy, I decided to do the same.

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On Equal Rights

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This is probably old news now, but I only saw it this morning, so here we go:

In case that embedded tweet doesn’t show up properly, that’s an editorial in the NT News which says:

Voting papers have started to drop through Territory mailboxes for the marriage equality postal vote and I wanted to share with you a list of why I’ll be voting yes.

1. I’m not an arsehole.

This resulted in predictable comments along the lines of “oh, so if I don’t share your views, I’m an arsehole?”

I suppose it’s unlikely that anyone who actually needs to read and understand what I’m about to say will do so, but just in case, I’ll lay this out as simply as I can:

  • A personal belief that marriage is a thing that can only happen between a man and a woman does not make you an arsehole (it might make you on the wrong side of history, or a lot of other things, but it does not necessarily make you an arsehole).
  • Voting “no” to marriage equality is what makes you an arsehole.

The survey says “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?” What this actually means is, “Should same-sex couples have the same rights under law as everyone else?”

If you believe everyone should have the same rights under law, you need to vote yes regardless of what you, personally, believe the word “marriage” actually means – this is to make sure things like “next of kin” work the way the people involved in a relationship want them to.

If you believe that there are minorities that should not have the same rights under law as everyone else, then I’m sorry, but you’re an arsehole.

(Personally I think the Marriage Act should be ditched entirely in favour of a Civil Unions Act – that way the word “marriage” could go back to simply meaning whatever it means to the individuals being married, and to their god(s) if they have any – but this should in no way detract from the above. Also, this vote shouldn’t have happened in the first place; our elected representatives should have done their bloody jobs and fixed the legislation already.)