Return to Lockdown

What a week. Full of crazy, and none of it HAM related.

A week of pushing business cases to spend money on things that might save our world in specific but likely circumstances. Fun times.

At home, I've invested heavily in hard disks. I own a lot of them. I need a lot less of them.

I have a large media collection, and they've been running on shelves of enterprise grade disks in arrays. Good performance, good reliability. Bad power bills. Simply because every time the arrays are read.. which is almost always, up to 25 disks are spinning at once. In a chassis that probably consume 100w without the disks spinning up. 

I had 2 shelves running - a 25x2.5" shelf and a 12x3.5" shelf. Last night, both were turned off, and a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) enclosure with 3x8TB disks fired up. It's taken days to relocate my media across to those disks, but it finally completed and I dropped the shelves last night. And the Powerpal meter showed an immediate drop of 600watts.  I'd been working on a calculation of around 250w,  which over a year was costing around $500 a year to run. Obviously a lot higher. Which is fine, the return on investment is now under a year - and I have an additional disk coming. 

My power bills have been challenging, so I'm hoping this should help reign them back in. 

A lot of mopping up to do this weekend; those disks were all on NFS shares mounted across multiple servers with many things pointing at them. The path structure needed to be different on account of no longer using arrays of disks, so all of the databases that talk to them all need to update. Slow, time consuming, and as it appears, not without drama. 

I funded these new disks by selling some stuff. Hopefully I can sell a little more gear to help pay these new big disks. There's one in transit, and it'd be ideal to get one more. 

I did finally achieve a few other objectives during the week; the tiger oscar sitting inside our front door has had plastic storage box lids for covers on his tank for a year and a half. Largely on account of the fact I've always been too scared to put glass up there. He likes to bang them and he's a big fish, so breakage was a concern. I had some 8mm clear acrylic panels made. Quite heavy, but are starting to bow slightly. Good luck breaking those though. 

Preparing for the winter weather to set in, I ordered a few bottles of Nitro fuel so I have stock on hand for those rare nice days where I can get the car out for a spin. My usual supplier in Geelong rang after I ordered some and told me that they couldn't ship it. Unusual given they'd done that very thing a week before. Alas, I found somewhere else who was happy to use road transport to ship it to me.. from Queensland. Now I have 3L in reserve. Should be enough. A lot of drama for stuff that's less than $20 a litre.  

Lockdown is already off to a frustrating start. I suspected well in advance of it that it was coming on account of hearing from someone who'd been at the local hospital when a case presented. Friday is usually challenging as I juggle my son at home whilst working. Having his sister home as well doubles the trouble; they seem to enjoy aggravating each other at the cost of my sanity. When the XYL returned home that then brought the QRM up to S9 to the point of giving up on the day. On the upside, my sons kinder programme is still operational, so he will be back there and I'll get a few hours peace. 

Professionally I'm looking at getting my first CyberSec certification. It's been a couple of years since I did my postgrad on the subject, so it's a bit of a refresher and trying to keep the subject at the forefront as it factors heavily into what I do and how I do it. I don't care too much for study I must admit but I've been applying a fair amount of pressure for change so it's appropriate that I practice what I preach.