This was an old forgotten grave. Ghost hunters come closer and everyone felt very sad and angry presence.
Intrigued, they came closer, and everyone seen in light of full moon a very scary epitaph on the tombstone, covered with old cracks:
"He deployed to Production at Friday 13"
it
This morning, I took my wife to the hospital for routine blood tests that had been scheduled for some time. Everything was going smoothly: check-in, number, waiting room. Suddenly, everything came to a halt and shut down. I was connected to the hospital’s public Wi-Fi and noticed that my connection also went down.
Having managed a couple of similar facilities, I immediately understood what had happened. I saw the staff panicking and calling the technicians, but they quickly reorganized within 10 minutes. They managed to process everyone who already had a number and then proceeded with the others in the order of their arrival. Despite the ten-minute delay (even though people started complaining right away), they were extremely efficient.
I later confirmed that the entire booking, check-in, and queue system is “in the cloud.” The hospital experienced a connectivity interruption, and all related services stopped. The staff no longer had access to anything, so a technician sent the lists to a manager via another channel, and everything resumed manually.
For years, I’ve insisted that certain things MUST be local. The healthcare facilities I manage have all the necessary systems for the operation of the facility internally, including patient records. External services like websites, emails, etc., are secondary.
Everything essential must always be accessible locally and, in special cases, it should be possible to physically access the servers and connect directly to them, bypassing any network/switch failures.
There has been only one interruption in the past, due to human error. Today, we have redundant servers (not HA on virtualizers, but two machines running the same software with replicated databases - on separate power lines) so such an issue shouldn’t happen anymore.
Not everything can be anticipated, but history is a great teacher. The Internet connection will eventually be interrupted :-)
When it comes to the health and survival of people, there are no compromises.
#IT #Internet #Networking #Outage #Health #HA #Cloud #CloudComputing #OwnYourData
Edited 1y ago
The slides, the video, and the text behind my presentation at EuroBSDCon 2024 - 'Why and how we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs.'
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/10/03/i-solve-problems-eurobsdcon/
#ITNotes #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #RunBSD #IT #SysAdmin #EuroBSDCon #EBC24 #EuroBSDCon24 #EuroBSDCon2024 #NoteHUB
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——
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#productivity #product #push #ascii #it #asciiart #friday #dontpush #dev #reallife #hotfix #git #codejokes #nerdjoke
Edited 213d ago
Average YouTuber: "My mobile carrier is terrible today; I'm only getting 200 Mbps! How am I supposed to survive?"
Me: "Hey, I get 20 Mbps on my phone's hotspot! I can work just fine!"
"New servers are less energy-intensive." Really? 🤔
This is said so often that it could almost be taken as an absolute truth.
By extension, it is often said that each new generation of hardware consumes less energy than the previous one.
Manufacturers communicate pretty often about this, including HPE (1), Nvidia (2), etc..
A 🧵
Edited 180d ago
Time for my (or rather our) #introduction we are Peritia, a #queer #DID system,
Current Occupation: Sysadmin
So expect some #IT related things.
We joined Mastodon to validate the existence of our own instance.
Cause: Decentralization good. Corporate data hoarding bad.
#dmsopen, especially if youre queer #furry like linux, or have cute pet pics.
Will Follow back.
Just to manifest this finds some cool people and keep away idiots:
#Nonbinary #TransRights #NoAI
Edited 134d ago
Edited 17d ago
I write technical articles on my blog.
AIs show up in large numbers to read them, crawl them, learn from them.
Time passes. I publish a new post.
And right on schedule, someone comments:
"This was clearly written by an AI".
Which is fascinating, really.
I write.
Machines read.
I keep writing.
Then humans accuse me of being the machine.
At this point I am not sure if the problem is that AI sounds too human,
or that humans have forgotten what a human who actually studies sounds like.
Either way, I will keep writing.
Worst case scenario, the AIs will enjoy it.
Best case scenario, one day a human will too.
Through no intelligence of my own, and mostly by the luck of the birth year, my #IT #computing career timing seemed to have been near-perfect: I entered IT in the early 1980s (when financial drivers and technological forcers propelled the field to the forefront of 20th Century innovation), and the wall clock shall force me to exit my beloved field in the early 2030s (after economic trends and AI-guided MBAs have ruined it).
It is (soon-to-be “was”) a good run.
Edited 100d ago
Here is the CPU usage graph for the last 24 hours of the FediMeteo VM. A full 24 hours, during which a huge number of people are connecting, helped by the traction gained from being among the top stories on Hacker News and Lobsters, as well as the many shares across the Fediverse.
RAM usage? Active, around 450 MB. Then there is cache, ARC, and so on. But in practice, zero swap in use after days of uptime.
39 jails running, 39 snac instances, nginx serving the homepage, and HAProxy. HAProxy caching enabled. ZFS snapshots every 15 minutes, backups via zfs send and receive every hour. The same hourly schedule applies to the recalculation of cities, countries, and followers for the homepage.
All of this on a 4 euro per month FreeBSD VM.
If anyone has doubts about the quality and efficiency of FreeBSD, this is the data to show.
So, another day, another leak of 70000 people's government IDs, from Discord this time.
It seems to me that websites shouldn't be *allowed* to collect personal information unless it is absolutely necessary (an address so that they can delver a package). But we instead seem to be moving in the opposite direction with Governments around the world demanding that various websites collect ID for age verification. This is bad.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/discord-says-hackers-stole-government-ids-of-70000-users/
#lispyGopherClimate
https://communitymedia.video/w/1iDniLCpYPSPjxFww6TzJ9
#climateCrisis #haiku by @kentpitman
Thinking about scarcity.
Interesting #IT notes from @AmenZwa recently
@jackdaniel 's #McCLIM #commonLisp multi-input ! (And moving towards #WECL for a few weeks)
https://functional.cafe/@jackdaniel/115334363009353916
- My #NicCLIM #gamedev and Dungeon Crawler Carl #bookReview (AMA in #lambdaMOO #live)
https://screwlisp.small-web.org/lispgames/nicclim-alpha-part-iii-map-edit-macros
I'm sure there was another topic. I think now just ping me in the hour before the show if you would like to be a guest
Edited 96d ago
The Virtue of Finished Things
An email asking if my software was abandoned made me realize how the ideal of completeness has disappeared from our lives. In an era of mandatory updates and disposable goods, I reflect on the value of boring software - the kind that is finished, reliable, and simply does its job.
https://my-notes.dragas.net/2026/01/06/the-virtue-of-finished-things/
#MyNotes #World #Reflections #IT #Life #Blogging
An email asking if my software was abandoned made me realize how the ideal of completeness has disappeared from our lives. In an era of mandatory updates and disposable goods, I reflect on the value of boring software - the kind that is finished, reliable, and simply does its job.
https://my-notes.dragas.net/2026/01/06/the-virtue-of-finished-things/
#MyNotes #World #Reflections #IT #Life #Blogging
Edited 5d ago
A few days ago, a client’s data center "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.
I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.
The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.
To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.
The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.
That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.
The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.
The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.
Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.
Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.
Marky Mark still hasn't updated the old Threads.net domain in the #Fediverse to the new Threads.com
Guess his superintelligence wasn't up to the challenge 🤖
On a side note: If #Meta wants a product to be "cool", @zuck should not wear it! 😎
❌ #Demeta now: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeMeta
#threads #ai #facebook #it #humor #mastodon #markzuckerberg #profile #joke #threadsnet #threadscom #tech #socialmedia #domain #online #internet #it #update #funny #superintelligence #zuck #artificialintelligence #ki
