Posts on smcleod.net

New Apple Silicon M4 & M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:00:00 +1000

A regression in external display support on Apple Silicon M4/M5 generation chips prevents full HiDPI modes on 4K monitors, limiting users to either blurry non-HiDPI or reduced workspace HiDPI.

The advice I find myself repeating every time someone asks how to get started with Claude Code

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 01:00:00 +1000

I spend a lot of my time helping people who are getting started with Claude Code. These are the key things I find myself repeating.

Patching NVIDIA's driver and vLLM to enable P2P on consumer GPUs

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:59:00 +1000

NVIDIA artificially restricts peer-to-peer (P2P) GPU communication to their enterprise cards. Turns out this is a software limitation, not a hardware one. I patched my drivers to remove it, hacked vLLM to take advantage of it, and got a 15-50% throughput improvement running Qwen 3.5 35b on dual RTX 3090s.

The Role Bridging Problem

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 01:10:00 +1000

An observation on functional correctness without domain quality.

Stop Polluting Context - Let Users Disable Individual MCP Tools

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 01:10:00 +1000

If you’re building MCP servers, you should be adding the ability to disable individual tools.

MCP DevTools

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 01:10:00 +1000

A single, modular MCP server for AI coding agents.

Agentic Coding Adoption Cost Cycle

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 01:10:00 +1000

The two common themes I see with engineers adopting agentic coding tools

Agentic Coding Workflow & Cline Demo

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 01:10:00 +1000

Recording of a demo and Q&A session on my Agentic Coding workflow and Cline use.

Vibe Coding vs Agentic Coding

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 01:10:00 +1000

From Creative Exploration to Production Quality

My Plan, Document, Act, Review flow for Agentic Software Development

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 01:10:00 +1000

An overview of my agentic coding development flow.

LLM Sampling Parameters Guide

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 01:10:00 +1000

A practical guide to LLM sampling parameters for Ollama, llama.cpp, and MLX

Getting Started with Agentic Systems - Developer Learning Paths

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 01:10:00 +1000

A curated learning path for engineers looking to gain practical experience with AI and agentic systems.

The Cost of Agentic Coding

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 01:00:01 +1000

The cost of not leveraging agentic coding is likely far greater than you think.

The Democratisation Paradox: What History Teaches Us About AI

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 01:00:01 +1000

The Democratisation Paradox: What History Teaches Us About AI.

The effects of prompt caching on Agentic coding

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 21:00:01 +1000

What is prompt caching and why is it so important for Agentic coding?

Agentic Coding - Live Demo / Brownbag

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 01:00:01 +1000

Video recording of a brownbag presentation / live demo I ran on Agentic Coding using Cline/Roo Code

Bringing K/V Context Quantisation to Ollama

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 20:00:02 +0000

K/V context cache quantisation has been added to Ollama. This enables significant reductions in VRAM usage, allowing users to realise the potential of expanded context sizes and run larger models at their existing context sizes.

Will AI Take My Job?

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 22:00:02 +0000

It's probably not so much AI itself you have to fear.

Generating Diagrams with with AI / LLMs

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 01:00:10 +0000

Generating diagrams with AI / LLMs

Ingest: Streamlining Content Preparation for LLMs

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 01:00:10 +0000

A CLI tool for parsing directories into LLM-friendly markdown

LLM Parameter Playground

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 01:00:10 +0000

A web app to explore the effects of different inference parameters on LLMs.

Code, Chaos, and Copilots (AI/LLM Talk July 2024)

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 01:00:10 +0000

Integrating AI into Daily Development

Understanding AI/LLM Quantisation Through Interactive Visualisations

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 01:00:10 +0000

AI/LLM Quantisation Visualised

Rating AI Tools

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 01:00:10 +0000

Subjective ratings of the notable AI tools I've tried.

Gollama: Ollama Model Manager

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 01:00:10 +0000

Gollama is a Go-based client for Ollama for managing models.

Confuddlement: Download Confluence Spaces as Markdown, Summarise with Ollama

Thu, 23 May 2024 05:45:10 +0000

Download Confluence Spaces as Markdown, Summarise with Ollama

NVApi - Nvidia GPU Monitoring API

Sat, 18 May 2024 11:30:03 +0000

Nvidia GPU Monitoring API

SuperPrompter - Supercharge your text prompts for AI/LLM image generation

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

SuperPrompter is a Python-based application that utilises the SuperPrompt-v1 model to generate optimised text prompts for AI/LLM image generation (for use with Stable Diffusion etc…) from user prompts.

See Brian Fitzgerald’s Blog for a detailed explanation of the SuperPrompt-v1 model and its capabilities / limitations.

Features

Utilises the SuperPrompt-v1 model for text generation.
A basic (aka ugly) graphical user interface built with tkinter.
Customisable generation parameters (max new tokens, repetition penalty, temperature, top p, top k, seed).
Optional logging of input parameters and generated outputs.
Bundling options to include or exclude pre-downloaded model files.
Unloads the models when the application is idle to free up memory.

Prebuilt Binaries

Check releases page to see if there are any prebuilt binaries available for your platform.

Llamalink - Ollama to LM Studio LLM Model Linker

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a simple command-line tool that allows you to easily link Ollama models to LM Studio's directory structure. It simplifies the process of symlinking Ollama models to LM Studio, making it convenient to use the models in both applications.

Open source, locally hosted AI powered Siri replacement

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 01:00:00 +0000

Using an ESP32 S3 Box 3 with Willow, Home Assistant and Large Language Models (LLMs) create a locally hosted, offline, AI powered Siri / Alexa replacement.

Fun with Makefiles - Dynamic Menu Generation

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This reusable snippet will generate a menu of targets from the Makefile. It will use `fzf` if it is installed, otherwise it will use a numbered menu.

MBA Washing

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

"MBA Washing" refers to the phenomenon where individuals or companies, often with a strong theoretical or academic background but limited recent practical experience, adopt and reinterpret industry-specific terminology and cultural movements.

SDXL LoRA Training

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

A talk I gave to some peers on creating your own SDXL LoRA models from my tinkering around over the last few weeks.

Fixing AMD CPU Scaling on Fedora

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 06:41:37 +0000

Enabling the new AMD P-State Driver on Fedora with Kernel 6.4

Defaulting git clone to shallow (depth=1)

Mon, 29 May 2023 08:53:24 +1000

Before adding this to my shell config, I would manually add –depth=1 to all my git clones.

How likely would you be to block a company from asking you to rate everything they do?

Fri, 26 May 2023 06:41:37 +0000

NPS Surveys are corporate spam

Escaping the Time Trap: Why Estimating Effort, Not Time, Leads to Greater Success

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 06:41:37 +0000

Effort is non-linear and multi-dimensional. Time (with relation to delivery) is linear and one-dimensional

Introduction to AI and Large Language Models (LLMs)

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 01:00:00 +0000

A high level intro to LLMs that I'm writing for a few friends that are new to the concept. It is far from complete, definitely contains some errors and is a work in progress.

Open Budgeting - Subscriptions & Licences

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 12:41:37 +0000

Publicly documenting my subscription and license expenses

Energy, Sustainability and Deployment Frequency

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 12:03:41 +1100

Deployment / Delivery Frequency

I often end up needing to advocate for more frequent delivery/deployments with clients.

There’s the usual benefits commonly discussed such as improved feedback, reduced risk, well understood processes, maintainable dependencies etc… however what’s often missed entirely is how it relates to the health and sustainability of the team.

Zsh Configuration and Plugins - Part Two

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 16:32:43 +1100

My Z-Shell configuration, scripts and hacks

Github Not-So-Reusable Actions

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 15:52:27 +1100

Github Actions Reusable Workflows vs Composite Actions

YAML Anchors and Aliases

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 15:52:27 +1100

Using YAML Anchors and Aliases to make config files more DRY

Zsh Configuration and Plugins - Part One

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 10:32:43 +1100

My Z-Shell configuration, scripts and hacks

Encourage Your Peers To Contribute To Open Source

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Contributing to Open Source is important to the quality and maintainability of the software and engineering communities we rely on every day - so why is it that so many developers/engineers never participate?

Making Work Visible - Avoid DMs

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 07:00:00 +0000

We create more value by having conversations in public instead of behind closed doors.

The Best Of - 2022 Edition

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 19:00:00 +0000

Near the end of each year I note down a summary of the best apps I’ve enjoyed using throughout the year, here’s 2022.

It's 2022 and we're (still) not deploying enough

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 07:00:00 +0000

We’re (still) not deploying enough

It’s 2022 and not deploying frequently enough is still one of the most common causes of software failure.

DALL·E 2 - Selected works

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Over the past month I’ve been playing with OpenAI’s DALL·E 2, below are some of the interesting images I’ve generated.

“DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.”

“A renaissance oil painting of two developers arguing over which javascript framework is the worst”

“A Ralph Steadman painting of 7 cats sitting on a fence, and one raven”

Beginner Harmonica Practice Exercises

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 13:00:00 +0000

Beginner Harmonica Practice Exercises

Way back in around 2008 I wrote up a doc with a list of beginner harp exercises and practice riffs, at the time it was uploaded to a few forums and a shared Google doc - both have since disappeared. To this day I still get regular emails asking for a copy of it so I thought I’d copy it to a post here.

Note: I haven’t updated these since around 2011.

Firefox Addons for 2022

Tue, 17 May 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Firefox Addons - 2022 Edition

My list of must-have Firefox addons - 2022 edition

Updated: 2022-11-07

Privacy and Security

Firstly - you should have Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled.

Don’t Track Me Google
LocalCDN
UTM Tracking Token Stripper
- Note: You can accomplish some of what this does by setting up the removeparam uBlock origin rules I’ve listed below.
Multi-Account Containers
- Useful for setting sites such as Amazon, eBay, Twitter, LinkedIn, Banking etc… each to always open in their own isolated container.
The official addon for whatever Password Manager you use.
Firefox Translations

uBlock Origin

Probably the single most important addon.

Goodbye Evernote, Hello Bear

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 19:00:00 +0000

Until recently I used Evernote for my notes, web clippings and document drafts, I was a subscriber going on 14 years and had over 3000 notes.

However in recent years Evernote has gone downhill to the point it could be considered hostile to it’s users.

The native macOS app was replaced with an Electron Javascript webframe and like almost all Electron apps I’ve tried it was plagued by poor performance, memory leaks and aggressive idle CPU utilisation and above all else it now lacks the low latency feeling the native application had.

Rancilio Silvia Upgrade

Sun, 11 Jul 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Weekend upgrades to my Ranchilio Silvia v4 espresso machine.

Added a digital PID kit for improved temperature control
Replaced the boiler element
Thermal insulation
Basic “smart” power control with Siri integration
Upgrade the standard Ranchilio basket to a VST 18g Ridged

Rebuild Photos

Note the damage to the boiler elements terminals, this was shorting and causing the houses RCD to trip

Wiring the PID controller

Replacing the boiler thermostat with one connected to the PID controller

DevOps Team Charter

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 14:00:00 +0000

A template team charter for software and platform engineering teams.

Research¹ shows there is great value in people embracing a shared vision and ideas that are bigger than themselves.

When it comes to a team charter, it’s important to remember that it’s not a static document. It’s a living document that should be updated as the team evolves and grows.

Keep in mind that

One size doesn’t fit all.
Consider your (teams) mission, cultural background and values.
While not exhaustive - this is on the longer side, you may wish to distill as is practical, but I implore you not to only pick the easier items - that’s missing the point.
These can give you talking points when performing postmortems, retros and during times of conflict.

Ferrari F12 Berlinetta

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Last weekend I had a chance encounter with a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta and the owner kindly let me jump in and take a few photos.

Specs

6.3L v12
544 KW (740 Horsepower)
690 Nm at 6000RPM
1525 kg
0-100 in 3.1s
0-200 in 8.5s
Maximum speed: ‘over 340 km/h’
Was ‘The fastest road car Ferrari ever built’

Photos

The Best Of - 2020 Edition

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Near the end of every year I note down a summary of the best apps, hardware & podcasts I’ve enjoyed throughout the year (and often for some time before).

This post has been superseded. You can find the latest version of this post here.

Software and Services

Software - Mobile

Browser Addons

Hardware

Podcasts

YouTube Channels

The Absolute Worst Software I’ve Experienced

💩 Microsoft Office365 💩
💩 Microsoft Teams 💩
💩 Atlassian Jira 💩
💩 Atlassian Bamboo 💩
💩 Atlassian Confluence 💩
💩 McAffee Endpoint Security 💩
💩 Facebook 💩

Rest in Peace Jimothy

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 15:20:00 +0000

You magnificent girl, you brought me 14 years of love and happiness

Photos

Camels Dressed As Unicorns

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 08:10:00 +0000

Stop trying to hire with titles like ‘DevOps Engineer’ or ‘Cloud Engineer’

“DevOps is … not a job title”

“It’s more of a cultural practice, like innovation, and it makes just as little sense hiring “innovation engineers” and expecting your organisation to be innovative, without also creating the culture to foster innovation.” (Joel Shea when responding to this posted on LinkedIn)

In most cases it’s clear the organisation doesn’t truly know what they want or need and likely don’t understand the nuances of the aspects of engineering.

Looking For New Opportunities

Tue, 06 Aug 2019 10:30:00 +0000

As stated in my announcement post - after 7~ years, I resigned from Infoxchange several months ago.

I planned on taking a holiday, relaxing, decompressing, dipping my toes in some off-the-shelf tech I haven’t spent a lot of time with and performing some personal growth through reading a number of books that have been sitting on my ’to read’ shelf.

This is exactly what I’ve done.

I’m now open to new opportunities

I’d rather find a workplace that I can add great value too and be happy to work with than rush into a new role quickly, obviously if something great turns up right away - I’ll pursue it.

Leaving Infoxchange

Sat, 29 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000

After 7~ years, I have resigned from Infoxchange.

In 2012 I was hired to work with Infoxchange to “shake things up” (in the Systems Operations team) and stabilise the hosting environment.

As Team Lead of Systems Operations I was tasked with melding the team and then for us to work to provide a stable, robust, modern and scalable platform for Infoxchange developed application hosting and product delivery and in a short time, with a small budget - we did just that.

Goodbye XenSever - Hello XCP-ng

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 13:00:00 +0000

In 2018 I set out to replace our XenSever 7.2 based virtualisation after Citrix essentially screwed over free / open source users.

This project was to directly replace XenServer 7.2 with something supported and manageable for our traditional virtualisation needs.

High Level Selection Considerations

I evaluated a number of options, with the primary candidates below.

Key criteria (at a high level) I was evaluating:

Ease of moving from our existing XenServer 7.2 based hypervisor clusters.
Security (architecture, hardening, monitoring, logging).
Cost (both licensing if any and self-support / management costs).
VM Performance (Storage IOPs and throughput, Network latency and throughput, Processing latency, steal from over-provisioned workloads).
Management UI/UX and performance (for BAU activities).
Management / Cluster SPOFs, fail-over and redundancy.
Installation and upgrade process.
Update and security patching frequency.
Networking design and complexity.
Community (size, engagement, acceptance of suggestions / MRs).
Reliable live VM migrations.
Ease of management for a small team (Part of a low TCO).
Risk of vendor and technology lock-in.
Risk of survival (will it still be well maintained over the next 1-3 years).
Stability and reliability above practically all else.

XenServer 7.6 (w/ Paid License)

For

Potentially priority support from Citrix for issues.
Easy upgrade from 7.2.
Fresh installs and upgrades are simple, painless and easy to pxeboot, licensing can be a pain after install however.

Against

Slow moving development.
Incredibly expensive, it would cost us something like $140,800 AUD per year (shelf price) for our 32 hosts (each with 2 sockets).
Features heavily restricted by licensing model.
Mostly older-fashioned enterprise users.
No web management interface (although you can use Xen Orchestra from the folks behind XCP-ng).
Diminishing community since XenServer licensing changes in 7.3.
Poor storage performance compared to KVM based solutions.
Many outdated packages, while kind of based on CentOS 7, there are a great deal of packages from older releases or completely custom rebuilt.
Uses old technologies like EXT3 and doesn’t support SSD/Flash TRIM/DISCARD functions.
SELinux not enforcing or supported.
OpenvSwitch still uses a lot of Dom0 CPU (same as XenServer).
Dom0 often ends up limiting VM storage operations (tapdisk maxing out Dom0 CPU).
Applying updates can be painful or at least slow, requiring binary ISO files to be downloaded from Citrix.
Uses Jira for bug tracking (I just can’t stand the thing, it’s painfully laggy, give my GitLab or Github over it any day).

XCP-ng

XCP-ng is a relatively recent fork from XenServer after it was open sourced, tracking upstream but clearly prioritising modernisation and community.

New Zealand Otago Trip in a 2019 Mustang GT

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In late November of 2018 I was lucky enough to get my hands on the upcoming 2019 Sport spec Mustang GT v8 to be its first driver.

I’m not usually an American Muscle enthusiast, but the new 2019 GT really is quite different from its slightly older counterparts, with a new specially developed 10 speed gearbox (yes, 10 gears - because more is better right?), tuned up suspension and so seemed like it would make for a pretty fun trip.

Run youtube-dl (or similar) in the background

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 08:52:00 +0000

I wanted an alias or function to use youtube-dl in the background. Looking around the web lots of people seemed to want this and most of them were banging their heads against a wall due to:

A) bash quoting
B) backgrounding dying when their terminal closed
C) passing the argument (url in my case) to the function

Here’s a simple function I whipped up that seems to ‘just works’™:

function yt
{
  nohup youtube-dl "$1" --no-progress 2>&1 > youtube-dl-"$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)".log &
}

And if you don’t want logs, simply send the output to /dev/null:

Disabling scroll-wheel zoom in Firefox

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 10:57:14 +0000

This feature annoys me endlessly, I end up zoomed in and out of websites all over the internet. … But the fix is easy and there’s no addons required.

Navigate to about:config (in Firefox’s URL bar)
Change the value of the following two properties to 0:

mousewheel.with_control.action
mousewheel.with_meta.action

If you use Firefox sync and want these settings to sync between your machines, also add the following properties:

Create two new properties both of type boolean and set them to true:

Highlands Festival of Speed 2018

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend I headed to New Zealand and marshalled at the Highlands Festival of Speed.

The Highlands Festival of Speed is a weekend packed with some of the best modern classic racing you will see in New Zealand. Featuring the Pre 65 Racing, Mainland Muscle, Formula Libre, South Island Porsche, OSCA, Highlands Modern Classics/Nostalgic Classics and the Highlands Sprint Series. This is a weekend of true blue Kiwi racing starring some of New Zealand’s most well known racing legends.

Flash Storage and SSD Failure Rate Update (March 2018)

Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It was almost 3 years ago that my open source storage project went into production. In that time it’s been running 24/7 serving as highly available solid state storage for hundreds of VMs and several virtualisation clusters across our two main sites.

I’m happy to report that the clusters have been operating very successfully since their conception.

Since moving away from proprietary ‘black box’ vendor SANs, we haven’t had a single SAN issue, storage outage.

Theory of constraints

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link”

Any improvement made anywhere besides the bottleneck is an illusion.
Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless because it will always remain starved waiting for work from the bottleneck.
Any improvement made before the bottleneck merely results in more ‘work’ piling up at the bottleneck.

Identify the system’s constraint(s) (that which prevents the organisation from obtaining more of the goal in a unit of time)
Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint(s) (how to get the most out of the constraint)
Subordinate everything else to the above decision (align the whole system or organization to support the decision made above)
Elevate the system’s constraint(s) (make other major changes needed to increase the constraint’s capacity)
Warning! If in the previous steps a constraint has been broken, go back to step 1, but do not allow inertia to cause a system’s constraint.

References

Top album picks for 2017

Thu, 28 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Here are my top album pics for 2017 (in no particular order)

Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list, it’s just the top albums that really stood out to me and in all fairness, I’ve thought of several others since so there may be a follow up post (or two).

Father John Misty - Pure Comedy

As a bonus, a short film was released with the album:

From Wikipedia:

HP 4951C Protocol Analyser

Wed, 27 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

My good friend Joel Shea received a most unlikely gift this Christmas - A vintage HP 4951 Protocol Analyser.

According to the HP Computer Museum:

Original Price: $3595 The 4951B was replaced by the 4951C and 4952A in 1986. Both new models handled Async, BSC, SDLC, HDLC, X.25 and SNA protocols. The 4951C also handled DDCMP, while the 4952A did not. The 4952A handled X.21 while the 4951C did not. Both new analysers used a floppy dive (618 KB) for removable media.

Talk - Clustered, Distributed File and Volume Storage with GlusterFS

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Using GlusterFS to provide volume storage to Kubernetes as a replacement for our existing file and static content hosting.

This talk was given at Infracoders on Tuesday 14th November 2017.

NOTE: Below link to slides currently broken - will fix soon! (03/08/2019)

Click below to view slides (PDF version):

Direct download link

Applying syntax in Sublime based on the first file line

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In vim, you can add a comment at the top of files to set the syntax, e.g.:

# vim: syntax=ruby

In SublimeText there are many ways to detect syntax, one interesting approach I’ve recently found useful is to match on the top line in the file. For example, with Puppet there is a file called Puppetfile, it has no extension but it’s really Ruby syntax, so it’s useful to add linting incase you miss something simple like a , and break deployments.

Broadcom, Or How I Learned To Start Worrying And Drop The Packet

Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week we started the process to upgrade one of our hypervisor compute clusters when we encountered a rather painful bug with HP’s Broadcom NIC chipsets.

We were part way through a routine rolling pool upgrade of our hypervisor (XenServer) cluster when we observed unexpected and intermittent loss of connectivity between several VMs, then entire XenServer hosts.

The problems appeared to impact hosts that hadn’t yet upgraded to XenServer 7.2. We now attribute this to a symptom of extreme packet loss between the hosts in the pool and thanks to buggy firmware from Broadcom and HP.

GlusterFS

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We’re in the process of shifting from using our custom ‘glue’ for orchestrating Docker deployments to Kubernetes, When we first deployed Docker to replace LXC and our legacy Puppet-heavy application configuration and deployment systems there really wasn’t any existing tool to manage this, thus we rolled our own, mainly a few Ruby scripts combined with a Puppet / Hiera / Mcollective driven workflow.

The main objective is to replace our legacy NFS file servers used to host uploads / attachments and static files for our web applications, while NFS(v4) performance is adequate, it is a clear single point of failure and of course, there are the age old stale mount problems should network interruptions occur.

Return Of The RSS

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Of all the tools for reading news and subscribing to software releases, I still find RSS the most useful.

I use Feedly to manage my rss subscriptions and keep all my devices in sync, but instead of using the Feedly’s own client, I use an app called Reeder as the client / reader itself.

Link: My Feedly RSS Feed

Feedly

RSS feed subscription management

Features:

Keyword alerts.
Browser plugins to subscribe to (current) url.
Notation and highlighting support (a bit like Evernote).
Search and filtering across large numbers of feeds / content.
IFTTT, Zapier, Buffer and Hootsuite integration.
Built in save / share functionality (that I only use when I’m on the website).
Backup feeds to Dropbox.
Very fast, regardless of the fact that I’m in Australia - which often impacts the performance of apps / sites that tend to be hosted on AWS in the US as the latency is so high.
Article de-duplication is currently being developed I believe, so I’m looking forward to that!
Easy manual import, export and backup (no vendor lock-in is important to me).
Public sharing of your Feedly feeds (we’re getting very meta here!).

Reeder

A (really) beautiful and fast iOS / macOS client

MH-Z19 CO2 sensor reader, logger and visualiser

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 16:37:38 +1100

MH-Z19 CO2 sensor reader, logger and visualiser

Reads data from UART(serial)-connected MH-Z19 (or MH-Z14) sensor using python 3.
If you dare to install nodejs you can visualise the logged data (using html and plotly.js library).

Repository: sammcj/CO2-Logger

Usage

Note this post is from 2016, in 2021 I replaced my custom Co2 loggers with an Aranet4. While very expensive, is and excellent off-the-shelf solution, with many features.

Connection

Sensor can be queried using 3.3v UART at 9600 bps. Sensor main feed voltage is 5v.

Castle Hill Winter Trip 2016 Photos

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Castle Hill Winter Trip 2016 [Photos]

The State of Android in 2016 & The OnePlus 3 Phone

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to try Android for a couple of weeks, I like staying on top of technology, gadgets and making sure I never become a blind ‘zealot’ for any platform or brand.

The OnePlus 3

I did a lot of research and decided to try the “Oneplus 3” as it was good bang-for-buck, ran the latest software had plenty of grunt with the latest 8 core, high clock speed Qualcomm processor coupled with 6GB of DDR4 - the specs really are very impressive, especially for a $400USD phone.

Update Delayed Serial STONITH Design

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

note: This is a follow up post from 2015-07-21-rcd-stonith

A Linux Cluster Base STONITH provider for use with modern Pacemaker clusters

This has since been accepted and merged into Fedora’s code base and as such will make it’s way to RHEL.

Source Code: Github
Diptrace CAD Design: Github
I have open sourced the CAD circuit design and made this available within this repo under CAD Design and Schematics
Related RedHat Bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1240868

`v1` vs `v2/v3` versions of the `rcd_serial` STONITH system

The v2/v3 cables include the following improvements:

Monitoring SystemD Units With Nagios

Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Ever forgotten to add a critical service to monitoring?

Want to know if a service or process fails without explicitly monitoring every service on a host?

…Then why not use SystemD’s existing knowledge of all the enabled services? Thanks to ‘Kbyte’ who made a simple Nagios plugin to do just this!

Requirements

Python3 (For RHEL/CentOS 7 yum install python34)
python-nagiosplugin My pre-built RPMs or pip3 install nagiosplugin
PyNagSystemD

Online Conversion from SQL_ASCII to UTF8 in PostgreSQL

Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Scripts and source available here: sql_ascii_to_utf8

The Goal

To be able to take a Postgres Database which is in SQL_ASCII encoding, and import it into a UTF8 encoded database.

Requirements:

Python3 (For RHEL/CentOS 7 yum install python34)
python-nagiosplugin My pre-built RPMs or pip3 install nagiosplugin
PyNagSystemD

The Problem

PostreSQL will generate errors like this if it encounters any non-UTF8 byte-sequences during a database restore:

# pg_dump -Fc test_badchar | pg_restore -d test_badchar_utf8
pg_restore: [archiver (db)] Error while PROCESSING TOC:
pg_restore: [archiver (db)] Error from TOC entry 2839; 0 26852 TABLE DATA table101 postgres
pg_restore: [archiver (db)] COPY failed for table "table101": ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x91
CONTEXT:  COPY table101, line 1
WARNING: errors ignored on restore: 1

And the corresponding data will be omitted from the database (in this case, the whole table, even the rows which did not have a problem):

Speeding Up rsync

Tue, 03 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The most common way to use rsync is probably as such:

rsync -avr user@<source>:<source_dir> <dest_dir>

Resulting in 30-35MB/s depending on file sizes

This can be improved by using a more efficient, less secure encryption algorithm, disabling compression and telling the SSH client to disable some unneeded features that slow things down.

With the settings below I have achieved 100MB/s (at work between VMs) and over 300MB/s at home between SSD drives.

Benchmarking IO with FIO

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick tldr there are many other situations and options you could consider

FIO man page
IOP/s = Input or Output operations per second
Throughput = How many MB/s can you read/write continuously

Variables worth tuning based on your situation

--iodepth

The iodepth is very dependant on your hardware.

Rotational drives without much cache and high latency (i.e. desktop SATA drives) will not benefit from a large iodepth, Values between 16 to 64 could be sensible.

Mirroring a Gitlab project to Github

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s pretend you have a project on Gitlab called ask-izzy and you want to mirror it up to Gitlab which is located at https://github.com/ask-izzy/ask-izzy

Assuming you’re running Gitlab as the default user of git and that your repositories are stored in /mnt/repositories you can following something similar to the following instructions:

Grant write access to Github

Get your Gitlab install’s pubkey from the git user

cat /home/git/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

On Github add this pubkey as deploy key on the repo, make sure you tick the option to allow write access.

AskIzzy

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today we launched a mobile website for homeless people

… and it was launched by one of Australia’s many recent Prime Ministers

Today alone we served up over 87,000 requests

As many of you know, I work with Infoxchange as the operations lead.

When I first heard the idea of a website or app for people that have found or are worried about finding themselves homeless in Australia I really didn’t think it made sense - until I saw the stats showing how many homeless people in Australia have regular access to a smart phone and data either via a cellular provider or free WiFi.

Fix XenServer SR with corrupt or invalid metadata

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

If a disk / VDI is orphaned or only partially deleted you’ll notice that under the SR it’s not assigned to any VM.

This can cause issues that look like metadata corruption resulting in the inability to migrate VMs or edit storage.

For example:

[root@xenserver-host ~]# xe vdi-destroy uuid=6c2cd848-ac0e-441c-9cd6-9865fca7fe8b
Error code: SR_BACKEND_FAILURE_181
Error parameters: , Error in Metadata volume operation for SR. [opterr=VDI delete operation failed for parameters:
  /dev/VG_XenStorage-3ae1df17-06ee-7202-eb92-72c266134e16/MGT, 6c2cd848-ac0e-441c-9cd6-9865fca7fe8b.
  Error: Failed to write file with params [3, 0, 512, 512]. Error: 5],

Removing stale VDIs

To fix this, you need to remove those VDIs from the SR after first deleting the logical volume:

iSCSI SCSI-ID / Serial Persistence

Mon, 14 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

“Having a SCSI ID is a f*cking idiotic thing to do.”

- Linus Torvalds

…and after the amount of time I’ve wasted getting XenServer to play nicely with LIO iSCSI failover I tend to agree.

The Problem

One oddity of Xen / XenServer’s storage subsystem is that it identifies iSCSI storage repositories via a calculated SCSI ID rather than the iSCSI Serial - which would be the sane thing to do.

How to cluster and failover (almost) anything - An intro to Pacemaker and Corosync

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Slides

Failover Demo

SAN Intro

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Replacing Junos Pulse with OpenConnect

Tue, 22 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In an attempt to avoid using the Juniper Pulse (Now Pulse Secure) VPN client we tried OpenConnect but found that DNS did not work correctly when connected to the VPN. This bug has now been resolved recently but has not made it’s way into a new build, in fact there have been no releases for 6 months.

Luckily the OpenConnect was not too difficult to build from source.

Build OpenConnect on OSX

Remove old openconnect and install deps

brew remove openconnect
brew install libxml2 lzlib openssl libtool libevent

Build openconnect

wget git.infradead.org/users/dwmw2/openconnect.git/snapshot/0f1ec30d17aa674142552e275bf3fac30d891b39.tar.gz
tar zxvf 0f1ec30d17aa674142552e275bf3fac30d891b39.tar.gz
cd openconnect-0f1ec30

LIBTOOLIZE=glibtoolize ./autogen.sh
PATH=/usr/local/opt/gettext/bin:$PATH
./configure
make
make install

To connect

sudo openconnect --juniper -u myusername www.myserver.com

If you’re comfortable with allowing admin users to run openconnect without entering a sudo password, add the following using sudo visudo:

SSD Storage - Two Months In Production

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last two months I’ve been running selected IO intensive servers off the the SSD storage cluster, these hosts include (among others) our:

Primary Puppetmaster
Gitlab server
Redmine app and database servers
Nagios servers
Several Docker database host servers

Reliability

We haven’t had any software or hardware failures since commissioning the storage units.

During this time we have had 3 disk failures on our HP StoreVirtual SANs that have required us to call the supporting vendor and replace failed disks.

OS X Software Update Channels For Betas

Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Set update channel to receive developer beta update

sudo softwareupdate --set-catalog https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.11seed-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

Set update channel to receive public beta update

sudo softwareupdate --set-catalog https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.11beta-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

List available updates

sudo softwareupdate --list

Set update channel to receive default, stable updates

sudo softwareupdate --clear-catalog

Show current settings

defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist

Write setting manually

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.11beta-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

iSCSI Benchmarking

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The following are benchmarks from our testings of our iSCSI SSD storage.

67,300 read IOP/s on a VM on iSCSI

(Disk -> LVM -> MDADM -> DRBD -> iSCSI target -> Network -> XenServer iSCSI Client -> VM)
Per VM and scales to 1,000,000 IOP/s total

root@dev-samm:/mnt/pmt1 128 # fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=128 --size=2G --readwrite=read
test: (g=0): rw=read, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=128
2.0.8
Starting 1 process
bs: 1 (f=1): [R] [55.6% done] [262.1M/0K /s] [67.3K/0  iops] [eta 00m:04s]

38,500 random 4k write IOP/s on a VM on iSCSI

(Disk -> LVM -> MDADM -> DRBD -> iSCSI target -> Network -> XenServer iSCSI Client -> VM)
Per VM and scales to 700,000 IOP/s total

root@dev-samm:/mnt/pmt1 # fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=128 --size=2G --readwrite=randwrite
test: (g=0): rw=randwrite, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=128
2.0.8
Starting 1 process
bs: 1 (f=1): [w] [26.3% done] [0K/150.2M /s] [0 /38.5K iops] [eta 00m:14s]

Raw device latency on storage units

Intel DC3600 1.2T PCIe NVMe

root@s1-san6:/proc  # ioping /dev/nvme0n1p1
4.0 KiB from /dev/nvme0n1p1 (device 1.1 TiB): request=1 time=104 us
4.0 KiB from /dev/nvme0n1p1 (device 1.1 TiB): request=2 time=83 us
4.0 KiB from /dev/nvme0n1p1 (device 1.1 TiB): request=3 time=51 us
4.0 KiB from /dev/nvme0n1p1 (device 1.1 TiB): request=4 time=71 us

SanDisk SDSSDXPS960G SATA

root@pm-san5:/proc  # ioping /dev/sdc
4.0 KiB from /dev/sdc (device 894.3 GiB): request=1 time=4.2 ms
4.0 KiB from /dev/sdc (device 894.3 GiB): request=2 time=4.1 ms
4.0 KiB from /dev/sdc (device 894.3 GiB): request=3 time=4.1 ms
4.0 KiB from /dev/sdc (device 894.3 GiB): request=4 time=4.1 ms

Micron_M600_MTFDDAK1T0MBF SATA

root@pm-san5:/proc  # ioping /dev/sdf
4.0 KiB from /dev/sdf (device 953.9 GiB): request=1 time=157 us
4.0 KiB from /dev/sdf (device 953.9 GiB): request=2 time=190 us
4.0 KiB from /dev/sdf (device 953.9 GiB): request=3 time=65 us
4.0 KiB from /dev/sdf (device 953.9 GiB): request=4 time=181 us
```shell
## Latency on the a VM

- (Disk -> LVM -> MDADM -> DRBD -> iSCSI target -> Network -> XenServer iSCSI Client -> VM)

```shell
root@dev-samm:/mnt 127 # ioping pmt1/
4096 bytes from pmt1/ (ext4 /dev/xvdb1): request=1 time=0.6 ms
4096 bytes from pmt1/ (ext4 /dev/xvdb1): request=2 time=0.7 ms
4096 bytes from pmt1/ (ext4 /dev/xvdb1): request=3 time=0.7 ms

--- pmt1/ (ext4 /dev/xvdb1) ioping statistics ---
3 requests completed in 2159.1 ms, 1508 iops, 5.9 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.6/0.7/0.7/0.1 ms
root@dev-samm:/mnt  # ioping pmt2/
4096 bytes from pmt2/ (ext4 /dev/xvdc1): request=1 time=0.6 ms
4096 bytes from pmt2/ (ext4 /dev/xvdc1): request=2 time=0.8 ms

--- pmt2/ (ext4 /dev/xvdc1) ioping statistics ---
2 requests completed in 1658.4 ms, 1470 iops, 5.7 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.6/0.7/0.8/0.1 ms
root@dev-samm:/mnt  # ioping pmt3/
4096 bytes from pmt3/ (ext4 /dev/xvde1): request=1 time=0.6 ms
4096 bytes from pmt3/ (ext4 /dev/xvde1): request=2 time=0.9 ms
4096 bytes from pmt3/ (ext4 /dev/xvde1): request=3 time=0.9 ms

Delayed Serial STONITH

Tue, 21 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A modified version of John Sutton’s rcd_serial cable coupled with our Supermicro reset switch hijacker:

This works with the rcd_serial fence agent plugin.

Reasons rcd_serial makes for a very good STONITH mechanism:

It has no dependency on power state.
It has no dependency on network state.
It has no dependency on node operational state.
It has no dependency on external hardware.
It costs less that $5 + time to build.
It is incredibly simple and reliable.

Essentially the most common STONITH agent type in use is probably those that control UPS / PDUs, while this sounds like a good idea in theory there are a number of issues with relying on a UPS / PDU:

Video - Cluster Failover Performance Demo

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

CentOS 7 and HA

Tue, 07 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

First some background…

One of the many lessons I’ve learnt from my Linux HA / Storage clustering project is that the Debian HA ecosystem is essentially broken, We reached the point where packages were too old, too buggy or in Debian 8’s case - outright missing.

In the past I was very disappointed with RHEL/CentOS 5 / 6 and (until now) have been quite satisfied with Debian as a stable server distribution with historicity more modern packages and kernels.

SSD Storage Cluster - Update and Diagram

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Due to several recent events beyond my control I’m a bit behind on the project - hence the lack of updates which I apologise for.

The goods news is that I’m back working to finish off the clusters and I’m happy to report that all is going to plan.

Here is the final digram of the two-node cluster design:

Plain text version available here

This was generated from the LCMC tool (beware - it’s java!).

Video - Storage Cluster Failover Demo

Thu, 14 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A brief demonstration of the failover and recovery process on the storage clusters I’ve been building.

Talk - High Performance Software Defined Storage

Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

A high level talk from Infracoders Melbourne on 12/04/2015.

There’s also a low quality recording available here:

Building a high performance SSD SAN - Part 1

Continuous integration for the Linux Kernel - Built within Docker

Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Linux Kernel CI for Debian

Github: sammcj/kernel-ci

Those of us using technologies such as Docker and BTRFS or simply trying to gain a performance edge on the competition have a lot to gain from the features and performance of recent Kernel updates (especially from 3.18 onwards).

‘Enterprise’ Linux distributions such as RHEL & variants are concerningly out of date when comes to the Kernel. Many people seem to have forgotten what Linux is… Linux IS the Kernel.

Xen Orchestra Docker Image

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Docker config to setup XO which is a web interface to visualize and administrate your XenServer (or XAPI enabled) hosts

Github: sammcj/docker-xen-orchestra

Running the app

Updates are pushed to the Docker Hub’s automated build service:

https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/sammcj/docker-xen-orchestra

From Docker Hub

docker pull sammcj/docker-xen-orchestra
docker run -d -p 8000:80 sammcj/docker-xen-orchestra

Building

git clone https://github.com/sammcj/docker-xen-orchestra.git
cd docker-xen-orchestra
# Edit whatever config you want to change
docker build -t xen-orchestra .

See https://xen-orchestra.com for information on Xen Orchestra

Delete Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OSX

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by http://zitseng.com/archives/7489

Source (Github)

WARNINGS

Do not run unless you understand what this is doing
The CA system is broken by design - This is not a fix for that
This is merely a band-aid for those interested or concerned about these root CAs

Usage

chmod +x delete_gov_roots.sh
./delete_gov_roots.sh

You’ll be prompted for your password as root access is required to delete system-wide root certs.

Building a high performance SSD SAN - Part 1

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Over the coming month I will be architecting, building and testing a modular, high performance SSD-only storage solution.

I’ll be documenting my progress / findings along the way and open sourcing all the information as a public guide.

With recent price drops and durability improvements in solid state storage now is better time than any to ditch those old magnets.

Modular server manufacturers such as SuperMicro have spent large on R&D thanks to the ever growing requirements from cloud vendors that utilise their hardware.

Direct-Attach SSD Storage - Performance & Comparisons

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Further to my earlier post on XenServer storage performance with regards to directly attaching storage from the host, I have been analysing the performance of various SSD storage options.

I have attached a HP DS2220sb storage blade to an existing server blade and compared performance with 4 and 6 SSD RAID-10 to our existing iSCSI SANs.

While the P420i RAID controller in the DS2220sb is clearly saturated and unable to provide throughput much over 1,100MB/s - the IOP/s available to PostgreSQL are still a very considerably performance improvement over our P4530 SAN - in fact, 6 SSD’s result in a 39.9x performance increase!

Search - A Journey of Delivery on a Budget

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

“Search - A Journey of Delivery on a Budget”

Presented a Melbourne Search - July 2014 - “Search - A Journey of Delivery on a Budget” (Click for slides)

Talk - 24 Months

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The way we work at Infoxchange has changed greatly.

A retrospective journey into transforming Infoxchange’s technology and culture over the past 24 months - presented a Melbourne DevOps - December 2014

The Best Of - 2014 Edition

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of every year I note down a summary of the best applications, hardware & websites I’ve enjoyed & depended on throughout the year (and often for some time before).

This post has long since been superseded. You can find the latest version of this post here.

Software / General Use

Fastmail - https://www.fastmail.com
Evernote - https://evernote.com
Reeder - http://reederapp.com
Keynote - https://www.apple.com/au/mac/keynote
Lastpass - https://lastpass.com
Plex - https://plex.tv
Calibre - http://calibre-ebook.com

Software / Geek Use

Sublime Text - http://www.sublimetext.com/3
Homebrew - http://brew.sh
DropSync - http://mudflatsoftware.com
Beets - http://beets.radbox.org
Textual - http://www.codeux.com/textual
XLD - http://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html
Code Academy - http://www.codecademy.com
Exercism.io - http://exercism.io
Sickbeard + Headphones + Couchpotato + Sabnzbd - http://www.totalhtpc.com/ultimate-usenet-guide.html

Software / Mobile

Tweetbot - http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot
Pushover - http://pushover.net
Lastpass - https://lastpass.com
Keynote - https://www.apple.com/au/ios/keynote
Reeder - http://reederapp.com/ios
Evernote- https://evernote.com
Plex - https://plex.tv
Backblaze - https://www.backblaze.com
WTF Podcast - http://www.wtfpod.com/app
MiniHack - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/minihack-for-hacker-news/id631108846?mt=8
Uber - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/uber/id368677368?mt=8
Goodreads - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/goodreads-book-recommendations/id355833469?mt=8
Notify4M - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/notify4m/id499161979?mt=8
Bandcamp - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/bandcamp/id706408639?mt=8
Hype Machine - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/hype-machine/id414315986?mt=8
Nuzzel (Only got onto this today) - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/nuzzel-news-from-your-friends/id692285770?mt=8
Alien Blue - http://www.reddit.com/r/alienblue

Software / SysAdmin or DevOps Specific

Gitlab - http://gitlab.org
Gitlab-CI - https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci
Dash - http://kapeli.com/dash
PostgreSQL (Makes my list every year & just keeps getting better) - http://www.postgresql.org
PGBadger - http://dalibo.github.io/pgbadger
Docker - https://www.docker.com
Consul - https://consul.io
Puppet (I couldn’t do my job as well without it) - http://puppetlabs.com
iTerm - http://iterm2.com
Nginx - http://nginx.org
Htop - http://hisham.hm/htop
Bonnie++ - http://linux.die.net/man/8/bonnie++
Openfire - https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire
Hiera-Eyaml - https://github.com/TomPoulton/hiera-eyaml
Rubinius - http://rubini.us
Puma - http://puma.io
XenServer - http://xenserver.org
ElasticSearch - www.elasticsearch.org
Logstash - http://logstash.net
FPM - https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
PFsense - https://www.pfsense.org
Debian Jessie (Not quite released but the next great version of the best linux Distro IMO) - https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie
Check_MK Multisite - https://mathias-kettner.de/checkmk_multisite.html
PWSafe - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/pwsafe-password-safe-compatible/id520993579?mt=12
Supervisord - http://supervisord.org

Websites

Last.fm - http://www.last.fm/user/sammcj2000
Feedly - https://feedly.com
HackerNews - https://news.ycombinator.com/news
Lucidchart - http://lucidchart.com/
MondoTunes (Might be a little biased here!) - http://mondotunes.org

Hardware

Das Ultimate 4- http://www.daskeyboard.com
Logitech Performance MX - http://www.logitech.com/en-au/product/performance-mouse-mx
15’’ Macbook Pro Retina - http://www.apple.com/au/macbook-pro
iPhone 6+ (because its bigger than bigger, or something) - https://www.apple.com/iphone-6
CuBox - http://www.solid-run.com/product/cubox-i4pro
Parani SD1000 Bluetooth Serial Adapter - http://www.senaindustrial.com/products/industrial_bluetooth/sd1000.php
SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB SSD - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171999

Other / Non-tech

All Day Socks - http://alldaysocks.com
Sennheiser Amperior On-Ear Headphones - http://www.head-fi.org/products/sennheiser-amperior-on-ear-headphones
O2 + ODAC - http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo
Benchmark DAC1 HDR - http://benchmarkmedia.com/products/benchmark-dac1-hdr-digital-to-analog-converter
Bellroy Wallets - http://bellroy.com
Ink Shoes - http://www.inkshoes.it
Kindle Paperwhite - http://www.amazon.com.au/gp/feature.html?docId=3077740006
Nerf Jolt - http://nerf.wikia.com/wiki/Jolt_EX-1

Books

The Phoenix Project (Reread this year for the 3rd time) - http://itrevolution.com/books/phoenix-project-DevOps-book
Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman! - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5544.Surely_You_re_Joking_Mr_Feynman_
The Dark Tower Series - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43615.The_Gunslinger
Snow Crash - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830.Snow_Crash

XenServer, SSDs & VM Storage Performance

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

At Infoxchange we use XenServer as our Virtualisation of choice. There are many reasons for this including:

Open Source.
Offers greater performance than VMware.
Affordability (it’s free unless you purchase support).
Proven backend Xen is very reliable.
Reliable cross-host migrations of VMs.
The XenCentre client, (although having to run in a Windows VM) is quick and simple to use.
Upgrades and patches have proven to be more reliable than VMware.
OpenStack while interesting, is not yet reliable or streamlined enough for our small team of 4 to implement and manage.
XenServer Storage & Filesystems

Unfortunately the downside to XenServer is that it’s underlying OS is quite old. The latest version (6.5) about to be released is still based on Centos 5 and still lacks any form of EXT4 and BTRFS support, direct disk access is not available… without some tweaking and has no real support for TRIM unless you have direct disk access and are happy with EXT3.

BMW E36 328i Manual Conversion Programming

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Reprogram BMW after doing Automatic to Manual Conversion

Based on my E36 328is experience, written in 2010.

Assumptions

This guide assumes the following:

You have programmed a BMW ECU/DME before using DIS or similar.
You are taking all the necessary safety precautions. (Fully charged battery etc…)
You have DIS working (We used EasyDIS 1.0, Base 44)
You have Ediabas (INPA, NCS Expert, IFH Serve) installed and working.
You’re able to read between the lines of our crappy document, some steps may differ slightly and our wording may be somewhat imprecise.

Data Gathering

Make notes of the following: