Let's say that you have a bunch of servers that you admin en masse using Ansible. You have all of them listed and organized in your /etc/ansible/hosts file. Let's say that each server is running a system service (like my Systembot) running under systemd in --user mode. (Yes, I'm going to use my exocortex-halo/ repository for this, because I just worked out a good way to keep everything up to date and want to share the technique for everyone new to Ansible. Pay it forward, you know?) You want to use Ansible to update your copy of Systembot …
Last weekend I was running short of stuff to hack around on and lamented this fact on the Fediverse. I was summarily challenged to find a way to archive posts to the Fediverse in an open, easy to understand data format that was easy to index, and did not use any third party services (like IFTTT or Zapier). I thought about it a bit and came up with a reasonably simple solution that uses three Huginn agents to collect, process, and write out posts as individual JSON documents to the same box I run that part of my exocortex on …
EDIT - 20201206 @ 2216 UTC-7 - Added how to remove a hard drive and replace it with a bigger one to upgrade.
EDIT - 20200311 @ 1859 UTC-7 - Added how to replace a dead hard drive in a btrfs pool.
EDIT - 20191104 @ 2057 UTC-7 - Figured out how long it takes to scrub 40TB of disk space. Also did a couple of experiments with rebalancing btrfs and monitored how long it took.
A couple of weeks ago while working on Leandra I started feeling more and more dissatisfied with how I had her storage array set up. I had a bunch of 4TB hard drives …
A common task that people using Huginn set up as their "Hello, world!" project is getting the daily weather report because it's practical, easy, and fairly well documented. However, the existing example is somewhat obsolete because it references the Weather Underground API that no longer exists, having been sunset at the end of 2018. Recently, the Weather Underground code in the Huginn Weather Agent was taken out because it's no longer usable. But, other options exist. The US National Weather Service has a free to use API that we can use with Huginn with a little extra work. Here's what …
I spend a lot of time digging around in other people's data. If I'm not hunting for anything in particular then it's a bit of a crapshoot, to be honest, if only because you never know what you're in for. You can pretty much take it to the bank that if you didn't assemble it yourself, you can't count on it being complete, well formed, or anything approximating the output of a human being (it usually came out of a database, but I think you see what I'm getting at). Sometimes, if I'm really lucky I'll just get hold of …
For a couple of years now, I've had my eye on the community of people who've had RFID or NFC chips implanted somewhere in their bodies, usually in the back of the hand. If you've ever used a badge to unlock a door at work or tapped your phone on a point-of-sale terminal to buy something, you've used one of these two technologies in your everyday life to do something useful. What I've wanted to do for a while was use an implanted chip as a second authentication factor to my servers for better security. As for why I couldn't …
It should come as little surprise to anyone out there that I have a bit of a problem with hoarding data. Books, music, and of course files of all kinds that I download and read or use in a project for something. Legal briefs, research papers (arXiv is the bane of my existence), stuff people ask me to review, the odd Humble Bundle... So much so that a scant few years ago I rebuilt Leandra to better handle the volume of data in my library. However, it's taken me this long to both figure out and get around to making …
A couple of weeks back, I found myself in a discussion with a couple of friends about searching on the Internet and how easy it is to get caught up in a filter bubble and not realize it. To put not too fine a point on it, because the big search engines (Google, Bing, and so forth) profile users individually and tailor search results to analyses of their search histories (and other personal data they have access to), it's very easy to forget that there are other things out there that you don't know about for the simple reason that …
If you've been following the development activity of Systembot, the bot I wrote to monitor my machines (physical as well as virtual) you've probably noticed that I changed a number of things around pretty suddenly. This is because the version of Systembot in question had some pretty incorrect assumptions about how things should work. For starters, I thought I was being clever when I wrote the temperature monitoring code when I decided to use what the drivers thought were high or critical values for sending "something is wrong" alerts. No math (aside from a Centigrade-to-Fahrenheit conversion), just a couple of …