The elephant in the room

It's been a tough day. I'm still not at liberty to explain why. Mind you, I don't imagine it would take much of a leap to guess the reasons. Still, I'll leave it there, as an apology for what will probably be a lacklustre post.


More practice today: the Splunk Enterprise Deployment Practical Lab test is this Monday. So there goes my weekend. I'm up to almost 90% of my monthly EC2 usage on the AWS free tier, so I switched to GCP today. I have to say, I like the interface more. It's still early days, obviously, but it's a better experience, so far. For example, they explicitly state that you will not be billed for your free kit; period. It will just stop working at the end of the trial period, presumably, if you haven't made a payment. I like that, as I've had a low level of worry rumbling along this week about waking up to a bill from Amazon. (Although, probably a very small one, in their defence.)

A word of warning if you're thinking about using Keybase's private storage heavily: don't overextend yourself. It's obvious, with hindsight, that performing lots of writes and deletes on a (remote) encrypted filesystem is a bad idea, but it took being in a real mess to open my eyes. Actually, it was my sloppiness that included the path for what would be the synced copy of those files (in my home directory) in the actual copy I was making to Keybase's storage that kicked off the facing mirrors, reflections ad infinitum, hard disk drive thrashing itself to death. Obvious, as I said, but this cautionary tale is the single benefit I can wrestle out of that agonising spell yesterday.

End of Day 27

— jlj #100DaysToOffload

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