Summary: I built a ZFS NAS using a pair of mirrored 1TB drives to comprise the root pool. Unfortunately, it turns out you really don't want to combine a large amount of NFS-served data with your root pool unless you have a separate ZFS Intent Log (ZIL), due to the NFS COMMIT performance bottleneck. Note that you can't add a separate ZIL to a root pool either. Hence, I needed to separate my data from my root pool.

I wasn't planning to buy a new camera any time soon. And then suddenly, I was looking at reviews and catalogues and product specs. Funny how that happens.

Overall, very little. I've had this phone for about six months now and I love it. Tablet? Nah, don't really need one. Either I'm mobile, in which case this is enough, or I'm able to sit down at a proper computer with a keyboard and a large screen.

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Coincidental to John Vincent's SysAdvent entry, Always Be Hacking, I just completed my first Sinatra web app. It wasn't a big app (36 lines, plus a tiny bit of HTML), nor a particularly important or impressive one (it searches a file for matching strings). But it turned out to be a useful exercise.

1. It's the wrong system.
2. It's the wrong data centre.
3. The guy fixing it is almost done...nearly there...just edit this file...hey, who shut the system down?!
4. It's a network issue.
5. It's an application issue.
6. It's a configuration issue.
7. It's a memory leak, so it will solve your problem...temporarily.
8. It's an issue at your end, not the server's.
9. "It's not a fucking PC, Derek!"
10. It's not a hardware problem. It's a psychiatric one.
11. You're an idiot.
12. You're not wishing hard enough. Do you want Tinkerbell to die?
13. You've used up all your magic beans.
14. We're going to not do it and say we did. Same result.
15. You're an idiot.

It was supposed to be a surprise outing for myself and my eldest Junior Research Assistant and, to be fair, I didn't click even when we drove on to the local industrial estate at Treforest. In fact, it was only as we rounded the corner to the anonymous blue warehouse and I spotted the letters "BBC" on a warning sign that I realised this must be the location of those studios ... which must mean we were going to see something from ... that show ... which was really kind of ... oh wow. OH WOW! Somewhere back in 1975, a small boy watching Tom Baker would probably have felt the psychic echo of my sudden excitement thirty-six years in the future.