Category: Ha

The Problem Just over 2 years ago my Dell T320 server had a motherboard failure [1]. I recently bought another T320 that had been gutted (no drives, PSUs, or RAM)[...]

Marco wrote a blog post opposing hyperscale systems which included “We want to use an hyperscaler cloud because our developers do not want to operate a scalable and redundant database[...]

I previously wrote about the issue of swap potentially breaking SSD [1]. My conclusion was that swap wouldn’t be a problem as no normally operating systems that I run had[...]

Hard Drive Brands When people ask for advice about what storage to use they often get answers like “use brand X, it works well for me and brand Y had[...]

The Hetzner server that hosts my blog among other things has 2*256G SSDs for the root filesystem. The smartctl and smartd programs report both SSDs as in FAILING_NOW state for[...]

For my ETBE-Mon [1] monitoring system I recently added a monitor for the Linux load average. The Unix load average isn’t a very good metric for monitoring system load, but[...]

Since forking the Mon project to etbemon [1] I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the monitor scripts. Actually monitoring something is usually quite easy, deciding what to[...]

I was recently asked to get data from a computer that controlled security cameras after a crime had been committed. Due to the potential issues I refused to collect the[...]

I’ve recently had some discussions about backups with people who aren’t computer experts, so I decided to blog about this for the benefit of everyone. Note that this post will[...]