In my last post, I wrote about why I was getting back into fish keeping and entering aquascaping. The decision was made, now time for the action. How does one acquire an aquarium in the middle of a pandemic? Normally, I'd visit a few local fish stores (LFS) and find one that had a nice tank/stand/filter combo. During the pandemic that was, a little hard, to say the least. First, I didn't know of many local LFS. I recently moved from SF to Orinda, and this whole landscape was new to me. Second, this wasn't going to be an average, kid's-on-the-bookshelf tank or a basement-room-tank. It was going to reside in my living room. If not a focal piece, a definite point of attention. So I had to find something that looked good, was available during a pandemic, and would somehow arrive without requiring a crew of people.

I'm no longer 13, and aesthetics mean as much to me know as function did back then. To be fair, most of the aquarium stands out there are cheap (bad MDF or not even waterpoof) and don't look great. I didn't want that in my living room. The good looking stands are...well, good fucking luck finding them in stock. As is well documented, anything good pet-related in the pandemic is massively backordered or out of stock.

I found a decent Marineland 75 gallon setup at a LFS, but it only had the cornerflow setup (good for marine, bad for tropical) as well as the old stand. I did manage to find the 75 gallon Marineland high def ensemble kit at a local store (Concord Petsmart). I have a vehicle large enough to fit it (Allroad -- wagons rule), but it can't fit the stand, too. And even then how am I going to get it in there by myself? Staff won't help me carry it in there and hang on to the stand while I make a 45 minute round trip. Should I bring a friend to get it? With COVID19 and a 2 month old newborn? Yeah no probably not a great idea.

I did find a very nice all-in-one setup from Current USA called the Serene aquarium. In short, it's a great offering. Right off the bat, I'll admit that it's not cheap. But that doesn't mean it's a ripoff bad deal. You get a 65 gallon starfire rimless tank (blue/clear glass -- not green and no black corner braces), tested canister and heater circuit, RGB LED background lights, speakers with soothing tracks, a nice but not overpowering LED light, and a fantastic hardwood stand. Oh and freight shipping with everything assembled to your doorstep. TAKE MY MONEY! I know a lot of hobbyists will hate the price tag, but honestly, it's not a bad deal and Current has a hit on their hands. I have finite free time and I prefer to spend it with my family rather than getting everything right the first time. I could spend endless hours dicking with everything to make it just right and drilling shit in all the wrong places....or I could just pay a few hundred dollars for labor and have someone else do it. The fun part of fishkeeping is the fish -- not setting up your damn filter loop. Also, did I mention the doorstep shipping? Well, they're only obligated to bring it to your driveway curbside, but a decent tip helps them bring it down a steep driveway and look what shows up on my doorstep.

There are a few unboxing videos on the net about taking delivery of this setup, so I'll skip that. I'll just say that it's pretty easy to open up with a simple screwdriver. Steph and I were able to get the stand inside pretty easily. It's not light, but it's not bulky nor overly weighty. I got the stand into place and leveled out. I then went out and gave the tank a lift to judge the weight. No fucking way. At this point, I did some quick math on what a 65 gallon 11mm starfire aquarium would weigh -- over 200 lbs. A friend and I could possibly get it in, but man I'm too old for that shit. I punched up Lugg on my phone, and they got it in place an hour later for $40. Seriously some of the best money I spent. The tank was set down perfectly on its self-leveling mat with nary a half mm out of plumb.

In the next post, I'll write up my first foray into aquascaping and a few tips on getting started with this new field.

Like the title says, I got back into aquariums and fish keeping recently. One could say it started with our recent move to Orinda. Going from roughly 950 square feet in our San Francisco condo to almost 3000 sq ft in our new home had a large say in the matter. Our living room had an odd corner that we were not quite sure what to do with. The space laid largely bare for months as we thought about several options.

I reflected back on my youth and my fish/amphibian/reptile-keeping hobby and remembered how much joy it brought. I really was into those critters. I could just zone out (sans medication) and watch fish for hours. I could watch turtles pop around and slowly watch newts change into true amphibians. I remembered how much it relaxed me and what a stress reliever they were. Seems like a great idea during a stay-at-home, always with your family 24x7 pandemic!

Don't get me wrong, it aint all roses. I still freak out when a fish swims a little sideways and instantly dread, "Does it have swim bladder problem? Could it be fungal? Oh crap is it bacterial?" And that's just the first 30 seconds. These critters are my babies. And in this latest round, I've amped up my game. I've added live plants and shrimp. First things first, back to the start.

In case you have been living in a hole or hate animals, you probably know that everything pet related is massively sold out or in short supply during COVID19. People need companionship, and if we can't fill that with a human being, we'll fill it with a dog/cat/bird/snake/turtle/guineapig/fish/snail/etc. I dove into research on trying to find something that would work for the the space and fill my needs. One of the biggest things was how much things have changed since I was 15 years old. Virtually no one sells undergravel filters any more. Hang-on-back (HOB) filters are almost looked down upon and canister filters are almost the bare minimum. Technology and productivity advances have jumped ahead so much. The gear you get now is incredibly better than what we had back in the 80's. And cheaper! Massively cheaper! Sure, you can still nerd out on Euro gear or go super paying-for-the-badge-ADA stuff, but your run-of-the-mill stuff from Petco/Petsmart is really good and very well priced.

I'll follow up with another post about my setup and all that, but I wanted to write this: fish keeping is better than ever and you should look into joining the hobby. You'll be better off. I know that I am.

Basically avoid them at all cost. They're buggy, and Samsung doesn't publicly post their SSD firmware on their website. You need to go through OEM vendors to get it. Anyone who deals with OEM's knows what a PITA it is to get things from them when it involves another company.

Buying drives from CDW or Amazon on your own? Might as well be anal rape in Samsung's book. You're not getting any support nor any updates so that 5 year warranty can get bent.

Stick with their "Pro" consumer SSD's or better yet, buy Intel or Micron. Both Intel and Micron have good firmware support with publicly posted software packages.

That said, hit me up if you just happen to have the latest 883 DCT firmware. I really need it.

If you're running Red Hat Ceph, make sure you're on the latest 3.2 or 3.3 Otherwise, you're in for a world of hurt. The first 3.1 "fully supported" release had too many bugs. Be sure to match up your alloc_size to match your stripe chunks, otherwise you'll be burning extra space depending on file size.

The increased write performance is nice, but there were too many initial gotchas in their first attempts.

They're still tweaking various things as the support cases roll in. In just the latest release they changed the Bluestore block allocator from random to sequential. These are not minor changes...

Oh and if you thought about converting OSD's from Filestore to Bluestore, don't. It will take too long. Just build a new cluster and recopy the data from an application level. Rebuilding with the backfill method is pretty much garbage slow. Our moderately sized cluster would take a year and a half to rebuild as Bluestore with the sanctioned Red Hat Ceph methods.

Totally unsolicited, but I thought that I'd write up a good blurb about this Bluetooth receiver/transmitter that I found on eBay. eBay doesn't really offer product reviews, so I guess this is my version of the Amazon product review.

We have a great TV that can send out audio over Bluetooth, but only to a single device at a time. I've found this shortcoming in many Android TV's, but maybe it's a protocol thing? Not sure, I dunno. I like to listen with my Sony LDAC Bluetooth headphones, but things go bad when the wife wants to join the party. So what's our best choice?

Well, I grabbed this BT audio receiver and hooked it up to a pair of Sennheiser 165 RF headphones. TV -> Bluetooth receiver -> Sennheiser unit via stereo miniplug. We actually went through a few of these things before we found one that had good audio quality, paired reliably, and could run well off of AC power instead of just batteries (or perpetually charging batteries).

tldr; buy the Homespot Bluetooth 4.2 Apt-X audio receiver if you need a good BT receiver. It's better than all the other crap out there. It took 2 weeks to arrive from Hong Kong, but it was very much worth it. 6 months without any issues.

A while back, I tasked one of my team members to update the NTP servers used in one of our datacenters. We were using standard pool NTP services and decided to move away from them for various reasons. We found that stable time was more important than accurate time, and the pools definitely didn't add stability. NTP uses UDP by default, and we wanted to turn off/ACL-off UDP in certain networks. So we grabbed a few CDMA-based time servers off of Ebay, fronted them with our typical Juniper SRX firewalls, and set up clients to use the SRX's as time sources.

After setting up a few devices, this employee suggested, "Hey why don't we set this up on a loopback and anycast it?" I thought about it for a second, something else came up, we moved on, and the suggestion was forgotten (by both of us). We had not finished moving everything from flat, layer 2 networks to a true Clos L3LS setup, so the timing wasn't just right. After finishing the L3LS migration, I looked at this again......and we're very happy with the results.