• Sat, Dec 10, 2016

    Recovering my better half’s system drive. Her OWC 480GB SSD was allowed to reach 100% capacity (only 1.5GB remain)… And all hell broke loose. It’s barely readable (takes 10 minutes just to mount on my laptop), and I can’t even delete anything (any attempt to modify the filesystem just returns an invalid argument).

    I’m currently rsync-ing all the things to a network volume, and will attempt to deal with this after the data is safe.

    That machine was long overdue for a refresh anyway.

    Lessons *:

    • When setting up an SSD, make sure to enable TRIM. Windows | macOS (≥10.10.4).
      • OWC seems to discourage the use of TRIM, citing “garbage collection”. I believe those are different things, but more research is needed.
    • Leave unpartitioned space on the SSD. The accepted guideline seems to be ≈10% of total capacity

    * Disclaimer: I take no responsibility whatsoever for any effects, including but not limited to loss of data, caused directly or indirectly by this blog post.

  • Thu, Dec 8, 2016

    Today I was testing how a SaaS that we use for search handles failover. I clobbered our DNS to make our app use their secondary endpoint. The module in our app handled this very well, and switched over seamlessly.

    But then a thoughts crossed my mind: did this affect the Ops folks on the other end? Did someone see a blip on the charts, and ask the person next to them:

    hey dude, are you seeing weird traffic on node B13? dafuq is that?…

    Or… was it simply missed? unnoticed, lost in the shuffle - because let’s face it: ain’t nobody got time for this.

    I guess the former would be nice, because that would mean those packets of mine were just a little more special than the rest of the internet noise.

    Yet I do hope for the latter…

    Because Karma.

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