Category Archives: Computing

The admin’s manifesto

I am a network administrator. I work on a team of fewer than a dozen people, only one of whom is a full-time developer (and it’s not me). But I do write code — software that supports the operational needs … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-10-18 by | Tagged ,

Game proficiency and mental health

I have exactly two games installed across all of my computing devices. (Obviously I’m not a gamer and not likely ever to be one.) I’ve been musing on long-term trends in my performance in these two games, and I have … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-10-11 by | Tagged , , ,

Simple database tricks

I’ve been keeping an inventory of my personal library in a database for more than a decade. It was thus easy, when writing the previous post, to find out the exact number of books I had bought from SFBC. I … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-09-28 by | Tagged

Building big NFS servers with FreeBSD/ZFS (2 of 2)

Posted on 2013-09-24 by

At CSAIL, we support two distributed file systems: AFS, which has a sensible security model (if somewhat dated in its implementation), but is slow and limited in storage capacity, and NFS, for people who don’t want security and do need … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, FreeBSD, ZFS | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Building big NFS servers with FreeBSD/ZFS (1 of 2)

Posted on 2013-09-24 by

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the chance to build a number of big file servers for work. Back in January, I wrote a description of the server hardware we used and some of the software configuration that … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, FreeBSD, ZFS | Tagged ,