Month: Mar 2020

Cloud vs. on-premises is about shaping risk

TL;DR: moving to the public cloud consolidates many small risks into few large ones. A recent GCP cloud outage (https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/20004) highlights an issue with running more and more parts of the internet on the same infrastructure: as more computing resources consolidate in large cloud providers' data centres, the risk of a significant, global outage of … Continue reading Cloud vs. on-premises is about shaping risk →

Force-enabling Firefox’ reader view

TL;DR: Prepend "about:reader?url=" to any website URL to force reader view in Firefox I'm in love with Firefox' reader view. It not only removes ads, nag-screens, subscription prompts and other clutter from articles but it's typographical choices often are better than the (well-intended) choices of the author. I also value the consistent look and feel … Continue reading Force-enabling Firefox’ reader view →

First write operation to large ext4 file system is slow

I'm running a large (>20TB) ext4 file system and noticed that the first substantial write operation after mounting is very slow and involves plenty of drive activity. The reason seems to be some memory structure initialisation as described here: https://linux-ext4.vger.kernel.narkive.com/SUFNE520/ext4-slow-performance-on-first-write-after-mount The workaround is thankfully as simple as running this command in a script after mounting … Continue reading First write operation to large ext4 file system is slow →