Switching from macOS to FreeBSD.

Since OpenSolaris was axed, we haven't had an option for running a Solaris-based distribution on EC2. Thanks to the hard work of Andrzej Szeszo, commissioned by Nexenta, now we do.

This post details an outage I caused this week by making several poor decisions.

I was asked to share out the pool on the X4500 via NFS and iSCIS. NFS I was familiar with, and have used a fair amount. iSCSI for all its new hotness factor, I've never touched.

I was unsurprised, but pleased, with how trivial it is to set up.

I've been at my current job for three years and change. In many respects, it has been the biggest learning experience of my career (which started in 1999). My previous job had been doing network security for a decently sized university, and the experience almost drove me crazy (go find pictures of my mad scientist hair from that year; you will not question my unstable mental state again, I assure you). When a friend mentioned his employer was hiring, and did I know any system admins looking for work, I said, yeah. Me.

Documenting infrastructure changes over time is useful for spotting trends in your knowledge. It's also helpful when identifying areas that are lacking in investment. Keep track of the major changes to your platform; this table is nice, but you can see there was a large chunk of time I didn't update it.

If security is a never-ending process, operations is systematic refutation of entropy.

I was recently asked to help install and configure a Sun X4500 ("Thumper"). The system has dual Opterons, 16GB RAM, and 48 500GB SATA disks. The largest pool I'd configured before this project was a Sun J4200: 24 disks.