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Month: August 2019

Network Attached Storage

Published on August 16, 2019

Death and taxes

It’s said that the only two certain things in life are death and taxes. If the panama papers taught us anything, it’s that taxes aren’t actually a certainty for everyone. That leaves death. Recently my beloved 3TB external hard-drive had an appointment with the grim reaper.

S-ATA / USB interface for the external drive.

Resurrection?

I have at least passing familiarity with certain recovery tools, such as testdisk but alas, it was to no avail. The partition table was destroyed and I couldn’t rebuild it, change it, reformat the drive, or anything. Resurrection is likely still possible, but beyond my current abilities. Fortunately I had recent backups of most of my stuff, so I lost very little of any appreciable value.

The deceased drive in question

The march of progress

I could succumb to grief over my dearly departed drive, but I chose to find a suitable replacement. I decided upon procuring a NAS. This would allow me to access my stuff from multiple devices, without being directly connected to the device via cable. It also allows for some interesting projects down the road. A sort of small scale homelab kind of thing. Having some familiarity with the QNAP brand, I stuck to what I know and bought myself some 4TB Ironwolf drives and set them up in a RAID-5 configuration, so that if a drive fails, it can be replaced and will rebuild itself relatively painlessly. I’m aware this is no substitute for a proper backup however.

Excerpt from the QNAP dashboard

New blog / site

Published on August 16, 2019

“Ah shit, here we go again”.
We’re well into 2019 and I have been saying to myself for years that it’s time I made something out of my website, and then I proceed to get bogged down in the technical stuff, the design and I rarely even get to the point where I start thinking about what content to put on the site.

Having it all backwards.
A thought occurs.. I have obviously been starting on precisely the wrong end of the process. The technology should enable the code. The code should facilitate the design, and what’s good design is predicated upon the content.

Changing focus.
So clearly the content must be front and center. I chose wordpress because of it’s ease of use and customizability. This enables me to get started with the content right away, and I can change the site to suit the content as it’s added.

Long-term viability.
So here’s hoping I can post some interesting content, and actually keep this thing alive long-term. For that reason I’ve decided the content I post here shouldn’t be limited to a narrow subject, because I’m someone who is interested in a wide range of subjects, which means I often prefer delving into a new topic before I’ve had the chance to fully explore the last one. That’s why I’ll choose to post about stuff I find interesting, whatever it may be. Here’s hoping whoever else may read this finds at least some of it interesting too.