Hi, I'm Brett

Marketing guru by day, FOSS dev by night.

Category: Uncategorized

  • Tuning a Ceph cluster for high-throughput workloads

    A default Ceph install gets you a working cluster, not a fast one. This is the full tuning playbook I use in production: kernel network parameters, TCP stack hardening, CPU governor and idle state management, and route initialization. The kind of changes that make a measurable difference under real workloads. Why defaults fall short Out…

  • Automating the Edge: The Part Nobody Sees

    If you read the last post, you saw the fun parts. OpenResty routing requests.Redis acting as a control plane.Traffic getting pushed closer to the edge so it actually feels fast. That’s the part people like to talk about. This is the part that makes it work. The problem you only notice at 2am At some…

  • Lua, Redis, and the Art of Never Reloading Nginx

    If you’ve been following along, you’ll know I’ve been on a bit of a journey with CDN infrastructure. From Building a Better CDN to speeding things up to playing with gRPC. This time around, the whole thing got torn down and rebuilt from scratch. The goal: a reverse proxy where I never have to touch…

  • Adding Docker Applications to Swizzin Installs

    So, after the recent r/seedboxes Guides Post, there was some interest in knowing how to integrate something dockerized into the Swizzin panel. First we’re going to start at the highest level, installing Docker. Then we’ll move over to creating a compose, creating a systemd for the compose, how to put it behind nginx, and finally…

  • Should I Defrag XFS?

    XFS is a high performance filesystem, meant for high amounts of IO and will take a beating with varying sized files, and has the ability to scale quite easily. While XFS provides many benefits to IO by allowing striped allocation, etc. etc. it can become fragmented. Which is liklely why you’re here. The highest risk…

  • The Power of the Python Virtual Environment

    People often come to me asking “how do I add x” to my system… or say “it’s missing dependency x…” but in reality, the user has actually failed to look at the venv module to help with their day to day operations. Virtual environments are a way for Python programs to be run in a…

  • Some Linux Systems Administration Wisdom

    The Bourne Again SHell, or BASH for short, is a powerful language that can be used for low-level linux system administration operations. While modern systems engineers have a strong liking to more robust solutions like Redhat’s Ansible, for consumer facing projects I find that readability is key. Now, sure ansible is readable, but it’s unapproachable.…