My things

Based on a LinkedIn post originally published on 28 January 2026 On HG000009, the front-end data store node in my home lab, ZFS serves as the central storage control plane. I use the term control plane deliberately. ZFS is not merely the filesystem placed on top of a disk. It is the layer through which back-end storage resources are aggregated, organised, protected, observed and presented to consumers. The physical and remotely provided storage devices become part of ZFS-managed pools. ZFS then provides the storage from which client-facing services can be created, including: iSCSI targets; SMB shares where appropriate; datasets; volumes; snapshots; and replicated storage states. This design makes storage behaviour explicit. Instead of allowing each application or client to interact directly with individual devices, HG000009 provides a controlled point at which data-integrity, allocation, recovery and presentation decisions are made. What “control plane” means here In large distributed...

Based on a LinkedIn post originally published on 23 January 2026 In the 2000s, while I was living in southern Brazil, an acquaintance contacted me about a technical problem. He was working with Porsche and needed help resolving an issue affecting a Windows NT server. He suggested that helping with the problem could open the door to future professional opportunities. The arrangement sounded reasonable. I agreed to investigate. The technical problem was eventually resolved. The professional lesson lasted much longer. The request The server had lost its reference to one of its internal disks following an incorrect configuration change. From the outside, the situation initially appeared serious. Part of the storage was no longer accessible, and the system’s behaviour created the impression that a significant failure had occurred. After examining the configuration, I determined that the problem was not a mysterious hardware fault. The server had lost the correct relationship with the disk b...

 

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Based on a LinkedIn post originally published on 21 January 2026 The front-end data store node in my home lab, HG000009, runs Linux with a deliberately minimal baseline. This is not simply an implementation detail. The operating system is an explicit part of the architecture. It directly affects performance, reliability, security, observability and the ability to diagnose unexpected behaviour. Infrastructure problems often appear at a higher layer than their real cause. A slow storage service may originate in device latency, but it may also result from memory pressure, CPU contention, scheduling behaviour, network buffering or an interaction between kernel and user-space components. A service timeout may look like an application problem while the actual cause is resource exhaustion elsewhere in the operating system. Treating the OS as an opaque dependency makes these problems much harder to understand. The operating system is part of the system Architecture diagrams often show the oper...

 

  Pure propaganda

Based on a LinkedIn post originally published on 19 January 2026 In November, I participated in an interview process with a well-known global organisation. The first interview went very well. The second went very well too. The third conversation was thoughtful, technically detailed and genuinely engaging. By that stage, the discussions had created the impression that there was meaningful alignment between my experience and the organisation’s needs. Then the process ended abruptly with a simple rejection. There was no explanation. I followed up politely and asked whether the organisation could provide any feedback. The purpose was not to dispute the decision. I wanted to understand how my profile had been assessed and whether there was something I could improve. Those messages received no response. I fully accept that rejection is a valid outcome. Companies must choose between candidates, and interview performance is only one part of a hiring decision. However, after several substantial...

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