Computing

My Dell R620 server has an iDRAC 7 card in it. Since the server is very loud compared to my other computers (laptops and a custom build micro tower), it’s nice to be able to control it from across the house. It’s not exactly in the most accessible place in my office and I hate crawling around to hit a power button. Due to the noise and power consumption, I tend to switch the system off (shutdown -p now) when I’m done with it and it’s very nice to have a system that you can just ssh into and run /admin1-> racadm serveraction powerup to start it up.

Another interesting problem cropped up in my quest to install BSD. The presence of a RAID adapter in my server that presents the disks as a virtual disk. Based on some research, it seems that ZFS doesn’t do well unless the adapter can use Initiator Target (IT) mode which presents each disk individually to the operating system. Since ZFS seems to be the way to go for a modern FreeBSD installation, I would like to use it.

I received my used eero and switch to set up a network connection for my to-be BSD server. Adding the eero to my existing network was easy. It did require a reset of the new-to-me eero and then an update of the entire network to the latest software version which took a few minutes. After that, I shutdown the Raspberry Pi I had setup the other day and put the eero in its place.

As part of the project to install BSD on a server, I’ve been using the iDRAC 7 command line in my Dell 620 server to manage it via the Raspberry Pi I set up to the other day as plugging in a monitor and keyboard is not that convenient. However, since I hadn’t touched it in a very long time, the SSL certificate for the iDRAC had expired. /admin1-> racadm sslcertview -t 1 -A 01 US Texas Round Rock Dell Inc.

An article about the boring reliability of BSD in The Register has me intrigued. I don’t have experience working with BSD but I like the concept of an operating system that limits the drama. A quiet backwater where things actually work sounds great. This is not a knock on Linux. Linux is popular for good reason and there are flavors of Linux that appeal to the “move slowly and don’t break things” philosophy in BSD with other distros aiming towards the bleeding edge.

I love this AI rant from Ludicity. It’s over the top, but captures the essence of the nonsense that surrounds AI at present. I’m not going to piledrive anyone, but it does seem that the case for AI has been overstated as the technology currently stands. ChatGPT is a very impressive chatbot. If you need a very impressive chatbot, then it’s just the ticket. It will impact certain use cases in business dramatically (e.

I read a few days ago that Bram Moolenaar has passed away. I didn’t know him but I use his work almost everyday. Bram was the main author of vim which is an excellent and flexible text editor. A truly great piece of software. It is also remarkable that vim is charityware to raise money to help children in Uganda. He was very dedicated to this cause and made a big difference in peoples lives beyond software.

We all know that AWS is expensive. But it used to be that it was by far the best hyperscaler and had the appeal of being novel. AWS profits reflected that. Now that it’s been around a while, the bloom has come off the rose. There are now solid competitors (especially Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) and enterprises are starting to move their infrastructure back to their own data centers.

This article about The Home Computer Generation struck a chord with me. I think there are a lot of us Gen Xers who fell in love with computing due to our early exposure to primitive home computers. I fondly remember the Atari 800. We had some games and a simple word processor (and a weird dot matrix printer that was super slow and noisy) but my favorite thing was Atari Basic.