about

I bought some used hard drives, from a vendor that was new to me. I was careful with burn-in and testing, as they were being shipped and deployed remotely. I checked for defects and verified capacity. Testing quickly was important, so I could return something that wasn’t working, and get a replacement.

about

This continues the billion file file systems blog posts (tag); the first post has an introduction and a Table of Contents.

Previously, we looked at populating file systems.

The file systems / drive images are a bit unwieldy and tricky to copy and move around efficiently. If we archive and compress them, they’ll be much smaller and easier to move around.

This is a long post; sorry not sorry.

about

Making file systems with a billion files is interesting for feeling out scaling issues.

The Intro post for file systems with a billion files, with a table of contents. This is yet another way to make file systems with a billion files.

While working on the upcoming archiving and compression post, with various obstacles, yet another method for making those file systems came to mind: running multiple multitouch methods in parallel. Spoilers: It’s the fastest method for making file systems with a billion files that I’ve run.

why?

I was restoring an entire computer, and restoring from my network share on a NAS wouldn’t work: it would quietly hang, a day in. Copying the backups to an external drive and restoring from that worked.

This is the simpler migration. I’m planning to post the opposite direction separately.

this is part 2 – part 1 has an intro and links to the others

I forget where I picked up “forest” as “many files or hardlinks, largely identical”. I hope it’s more useful than confusing. Anyway. Let’s make a thousand thousand thousand files!

what

This is a story about benchmarking and optimization.

Lars Wirzenius blogged about making a file system with a billion empty files. Working on that scale can make ordinarily quick things very slow – like taking minutes to list folder contents, or delete files. Initially, I was curious about how well general-purpose compression like gzip would fare with the edge case of gigabytes of zeroes, and then I fell down a rabbit hole. I found a couple of major speedups, tried a couple of other formats, and tried some other methods for making so many files.

why

I want to keep an eye on domains and their expiration dates without signaling that, avoiding middlemen who would like a signal of interest, to front run the purchase, and auction it off.

This is, to me, surprisingly hard to do.

what

Trying to pair an Apple Watch to a phone, an update was required; upon requesting it, the Apple Watch (through the iPhone) would cancel, reporting:

Unable to check for update, not connected to the Internet

I’ve long braindumped notes into a specific app, which has issues with, say, command line details and links; smart quotes can lead to really unpleasant surprises and breakage, for example. I’ve been spreading notes across other apps and locations, and it’s tripping me up when I reach for notes.

So, I might post some of my notes to my blog. They might be helpful to other people. Just having them tagged here might make them easier for me to find.

(to do: switch themes to one that displays tags)

about

In the movie “Glass Onion”, there’s a recurring background chime: every hour, a resounding “dong!” with some chimes. Turning this into a ringtone sounded like fun.

what

Here’s the playable mp3 (I didn’t make the mp3, see below for the source):

And here’s the m4r version, usable as a ringtone on iPhones. It’s an aac / mp4 (audio-only) file.