A Ceph war story
It all started with the big bang! We nearly lost 33 of 36 disks on a Proxmox / Ceph Cluster; this is the story of how we recovered them.
Is Your Linux Version Hiding Interrupt CPU Usage from You?
TL;DR: Some Linux distros and even different kernel versions within a distro have disabled IRQ time accounting. In such case, your monitoring tools will report zero time spent in hardware interrupt handlers (shown as %hi, %irq, hiq, etc). It’s easy to check how your kernel is behaving by looking at /proc/stat and you…
My EC2 Wishlist
While I've made engineers inside Amazon aware of all of these at various times, I think it's time to post my wishlist here — both so that a wider audience inside Amazon can hear more about these, and so that the FreeBSD community (especially the people who are financially supporting my work ) can see what I'm aiming…
The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator
Yes, hiding HTTP-referers on your outgoing links are still a thing. Even though standards evolved, they rely on your user having a current browser, which is really something outside of your control. Even then, many larger websites have technologies in place to mask the http-referer on outgoing links. This is to avoid…
Abusing AWS Lambda to make an Aussie search engine
UPDATE 2025-05-19 Somewhat un-suprisingly AWS has closed the loophole that I was exploiting for this https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/#30._AWS_Lambda and as such compiling data into your lambda …
Cgit, Nginx and Gitolite: A Personal Git Server
Hi'ya I'm Bryan, and this is my collection of projects, ideas, thoughts, feelings, opinions, ramblings, concepts, concerns, notions, conclusions, blurbs, and schemes, to name a few.
I wish systemd logged information about the source of “transactions”
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Setting up a Raspberry Pi with 2 Network Interfaces as a simple router
I needed a very basic 'Internet sharing' router setup with one of my Raspberry Pis, and I thought I'd document the setup process here in case I need to do it again. I should note that for more complex use cases, or where you really need to worry about security and performance, you should use something like OpenWRT…
The utilization of 44/8: the reason I mapped IPv4 and IPv6
In the early days, when the Internet was just beginning, back in 1981, radio amateurs were allocated, by what is now known as IANA , an IPv4 block for usage and experimentation by all members of this hobby, internationally. This block was 44.0.0.0/8, which is a huge amount of address space by today’s standards, but…
Building Container Images with Nix
Dockerfiles are de facto standard for creating container images. In this article I highlight some issues with this approach and I propose building container images with Nix.
AWS doesn’t know who I am
AWS needs an identity that uniquely represents its users, not fractured across corporate identity providers.
Heroku-style deployments with Docker and Git tags
In this post I want to explain a new deployment method I came up with while working on drwn.io. I wanted it to meet a few requirements: Simple Based on git tags Zero-downtime Easy rollbacks Creating …
Peeking through logs
I was reading an interesting and educational blog post , about the writer's home infrastructure status. I was curious about it, because it mentioned syslog-ng, a project I used to be heavily involved with, and a project that's still dear to my heart, even though I'm neither involved, nor am I using it any longer. It…
How not to migrate an email domain
I did the thing! I moved IntroCave.com over to IntroMaker.com. It's still a bit of a work in progress ( some thoughts here ), but I decided to break this out as a separate post.
Creating my awesome Windows 10 dev setup
Blake Mealey's digital garden.
Build an SMS Forwarder with Raspberry Pi Zero W and Waveshare SIM7000E Hat
In this guide, I will explain how to receive SMS messages and forward them to your Telegram account using Raspberry PI Zero W and Wireshare GSM hat. Python will be used to read SMS messages and forward them to Telegram Bot API. Messages will be listened to by Gammu SMS service and it will trigger the Python script…
How to port your OS to EC2 (2018)
You're going to want to make some changes to what goes into that disk image later, but for now just build a disk image.
Do not do in code what can be done in infrastructure (2017)
Or subtitle: Maybe distributed programming is no longer a programming problem? (For the obvious impaired: This is meant to be more thought provoking than an actual truth) Over the last decade we ha…
Graviton2 and Graviton3
What do modern cloud workloads look like? And what does that have to do with new chip designs? I found these gems in Peter DeSantis's ReInve...
You Don't Need to Rebuild Your Development Docker Image on Every Code Change
You can mount code from your development machine into a container and save yourself tedious waiting times during development.
Moderation in Infrastructure
Infrastructure companies need a distinct approach to moderation that focuses on neutrality and due process.