Full horizon

Well, my next exam is booked: Splunk Enterprise Certified Architect, in a week's time. Closed book, as per usual, but this one is longer than earlier ones: 90 minutes. The blueprint is pretty intimidating, frankly; especially when you consider that the practical lab test I just finished purposely doesn't include search head clustering.

I need to brush up on so much stuff this week, but the bogeyman in front of me today is search head captain elections; specifically, what happens when one of two sites falls over, taking the current captain with it, and the remaining site has an even number of search heads. I remember the instructor said it's actually best to have a third (logical) site in this scenario with an additional search head, to break the inevitable deadlock in the new election.

But I don't understand why the deadlock occurs in the first place. It just stuck in my head because the instructor said there's a myth circulating that you can only have an odd number of search heads in a SHC; not true, but you do have to be careful. More work to be done.


Then it'll be on to writing more Terraform code for our lab environment. Who said furlough was bench time? As long as it's primarily about my learning, there's no shortage of things to be done.

I need to start planning some exercise in my routine, though. I'm convinced that's why I'm sleeping so poorly. I could put my head on my desk right now and be asleep in five minutes. This is partly because the house is so quiet. Today is my daughter's first full day at nursery. I can't remember the last time I was surrounded by so much silence that I wouldn't break for fear of waking a child.

End of Day 35

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I'm writing this as part of the 100 Days To Offload project; join us at: https://100daystooffload.com/