Judah Things

Author: Judah Wright

  • Refurbishing Old Switch

    Authors Note

    This post was abandoned in a pending state for a bit over a year. To be honest, since I was not successful I was a little disheartened from posting it. I changed my mind though, the post is worth publishing anyways, despite the failure. So here it is-

    You might have read in the datacenter diary that a switch was failing, it had a bad fan. Clearly the device had to go, but I had hopes of refurbishing it. If anything, its a test-run of doing more of this.

    Just out of curiosity I popped the lid open. The fans look like pretty standard 40mm fans. I can feel there is a ton of dust and gunk jamming one of the fans, so it’s definitely dead.

    Honestly its a lot smaller than I expected
    Looking at the fans model numbers

    It looks like these are readily available on AliExpress and eBay, so for $12 I grabbed a pair. They ship from mainland China so it took a week or five but it eventually arrived.

    Unfortunately, after powering the device back on there was a snap and a pop and a wisp of blue smoke. No activity on the fans and the console port won’t light up.

    It looks like this device is destined for the dumpster. They cant all be winners.

  • Growing Oysters

    Growing Oysters

    I wanted to try my hand at growing oyster mushrooms. They are tasty and supposedly easy to grow. It cant be that hard, right?

    This blog post isn’t meant to be a comprehensive guide on how to do this, you can find better instructions on YouTube. If we try this again I’ll make a point to take better pictures of the process. If we have more success I’ll be better prepared to share it.

    Here’s what we did. We took two grain bags and inoculated them with a blue-oyster liquid culture. After a few weeks of growth we did a “break and shake”, and let it finish colonizing.
    Next we got some low-nutrient substrate. In our case we used aspen animal bedding. We put the bedding in a bucket and poured boiling water over it to help kill off the bad stuff. After letting it sit we drained the water off.
    The last step was to break up and mix the grain spawn with the wood shavings. We did this in a bucket with half inch holes drilled all over to allow for fruiting. We stuck the bucket on a shelf for a few weeks, then it started pinning!

    We got one good flush off of it. The rest of the pins aborted and dried out. We think that we made a poor choice of substrate, we think it was far too dry for proper growth of the fruiting bodies. When I disposed of the mycelium in the garden, the bedding was rather dense and dry. Anyways, here you can see the one healthy flush compared to some drying-out counterpart pin sets.

    Next time we will try using a different substrate, maybe coco coir to help retain moisture better. We will also try again at a better time of year, when we can let the colonizing buckets sit outside. I am sure that these guys were not too thrilled with fruiting in the dead of winter next to a hot dry fireplace.

    Most importantly we learned that all it takes is 3 short months and about $60 in supplies to save you $8 at the grocery store.

  • Mushroom In December

    Mushroom In December

    It rained for a few days and these appeared apparently out of nowhere. Wild that they can grow so late in the year.

    Also featured, puppy snoots.

  • Yellow Mushroom

    Yellow Mushroom

    While out with my family gathering firewood, I stumbled upon some real nifty mushrooms.

    There must have been a hundred or more all growing out of one dead tree.

  • A Failing Switch

    Datacenter Diary #1

    Im starting off a new category on my blog, “Datacenter Diary.” It basically just chronicles my adventures in the “Server Canyon” (or other) realm.

    In this post I recount dealing with our first major hardware failure. Hardware failure happens all the time, but this was a single-point-of-failure device. Our main backbone switch.

    Network switch with a fan warning
    Fan light lit up but temp seems fine

    I’ll admit I might have been ignoring an ever-louder growing rattle for a few weeks, but when the warning light lit up it was time for action.

    I picked up a new (previously enjoyed and lovingly revitalized) switch from Unix Surplus. I have no special relationship with them, just a happy customer. I ended up with a fancy Dell/Force-10 S60-44T-AC-R. I picked this device because the Server Canyon network sees large bursts of traffic and this device has a pretty large packet buffer. Plus, it has two 10-gigabit ports that I will definitely take advantage of later.

    Force-10 glamor shot

    The first thing to do was copy the config from the old PowerConnect to the new Force10 switch. This turned out to be a little more difficult than expected since they were different product lines, but a switch is a switch and I got it sorted.

    Luckily, nearly every piece of server infrastructure has redundant uplinks. This means that I just needed to trunk the switches and start moving servers over. The management and client networks were only disrupted as long as it took to move the plugs over, but the storage network utilizes redundant links so no real downtime occured.

    Here you can see an in-progress picture of the migration:

    The process ended without much fuss, I only managed to miss tagging one VLAN.

    Next, a post-mortem on the old switch. That is a problem for another blog post though!

  • Tiny Mushroom

    Tiny mushroom.

    Tiny mushroom

  • Peas

    Thats it. Thats the post. Just some pea flowers.

  • Mushroom Picking

    It’s springtime and that means it is time to go pick mushrooms.

    Morels are my personal favorite. They grow anywhere (in North Idaho at least) where a wildfire burned through a forrest the previous year, and typically pop up once it hits 70F outside.
    If you ever wondered why people keep such a close eye on wildfires during fire season, well now you know. Mushrooms are the answer, they will grow there next year.

    Ironically enough, I didn’t get a single picture of a Morel in the wild. I got a few other good pictures to share though. Enjoy!

    Mushroom MUSHROOM
    Cup mushrooms
    Bug on forrest floor
    Mushroom under a tree

    Finally, the haul. Not much, maybe a dozen, but it’s still early in the season.

    Mushroom haul

  • First!

    Well, not really first.

    I am starting over with my blog. I liked where I was going and the direction I had with my old blog, but since it wasn’t maintained it fell into disrepair. The point of the blog was to be a flashy “look I’m smart” for job recruiters, but screw them. I want to blog about things that make me happy darn it! Besides, the framework it was using went proprietary and it was time to move on.
    Despite my efforts to find another suitable blogging platform, even considering building my own, I gave up and decided that WordPress was good enough. After all, I am using it as a blogging platform right?

    Fret not, you can still view the old blog on archive.org in all its monochrome glory.

    So what is new? Well I am hoping to pick things back up with more recent projects and doings. Stay tuned for more 🙂