What is ScaleIO? It is a storage solution designed for small businesses and enterprises that use standard servers and disk inside of them to provide storage over ethernet. So if you are a Dell shop, you can install a few servers with a bunch of disks, install some software, and have a storage solution with automatic redundancy. ScaleIO needs direct access to the disk, so it runs best on bare metal servers using an OS such as Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Ubuntu. In this guide, we will walk through a quick Redhat installation and optimization. A side note, running it completely in Vmware ESXi is supported, but access to the disk can get difficult, and you cannot VMotion or move the virtual machines anywhere. This is called in the “marketecture “world, hyper-converged. You are running everything off of one common server architecture.

It has been quite an adventure the last couple years, I finally was able to visit the South Pole, both geographic and ceremonial. There are two of them and they actually have poles. Each year the winter staff creates a new marker for the geographic pole, since it moves around 30ft per year.

I have never felt cold like I did there, and it was not a very cold time. Since the summer season is opposite of the U.S., it was -45F with the wind chill. It gets down to -100F during the winter. That makes your lungs hurt and takes some getting used to.

It has been a rush the past couple months planning and preparing! I have been working at McMurdo station in Antartica for a month now as a Senior Network Engineer. This has been on my list of jobs to keep an eye out for, and the opportunity came about. I have to say it has been a great journey so far, dealing with the new environment (I have been in a hot desert the last 9 years, so a cold desert is different!), learning new systems, meeting tons of new people.

I recently have been on a serverless kick. What is that you ask? Well, it means running code in the cloud without managing any server resources or having a server operating system that is always running. Even better, you only pay for resources when your code is executing. Hosting solutions have been around for a long time, but they typically run all the time, and you pay for that (also you might have to manage and update your server). Serverless also means you should break your code into smaller micro-services so it is easier for them to run independently of each other, and you can upgrade one component without affecting the whole.

Meteor 1.5 is out and we can finally do code splitting!  If you are not familiar with code splitting, this allows us to separate our logic in a single page web app (SPA) and only send the client the relevant portions of code. This is useful in a couple immediate ways:

1. You have a giant application that is too large to send at once (any script files over 1MB often take too long and the user experience is terrible)
2. You want to keep some portions of code hidden until the user is authorized to see it

We are going to cover option 2 since that is a use case I just ran into. Sometimes splitting the code up can make the files larger (or the same size) so Meteor has provided a nice tool that helps visual how large the file sizes are once they are bundled. You can read more about that in this great post: Bundle Visualizer. Use the tool before the split, and after the split to make sure it doesn’t effect your code in the wrong way (compare the two).

The current way to connect Meteor into your React App is to use ES6 based components. Meteor has a function called “createContainer” that will send Meteor data into your React component as props instead of “this.data” access. This can make it a bit more complicated if you need to change your subscriptions based on React’s state, but we will talk about the new pattern you will need to use. This is a better pattern long term as you can switch out the top level data injection and re-use all your display logic (say you want to swap out Meteor down the road, or use Redux).

For the past few weeks I have been refactoring a client’s app to move from the React.CreateClass() format to the new and shiny ES6 class based format. We also re-factored Meteor from a mixin to the new createContainer component format. While we are at it, let’s demonstrate the functional based components for a child that only uses props (so not state). Functional components make the code much cleaner as you don’t need constructors for just display logic.

This post will explain how I backup mine and my clients Linux servers to Amazon’s S3 file storage service via bash shell scripts.

It’s cheap, quick, and it takes care of off-site backups. I prefer to use a different provider than my hosting company in case of major system disruption. I hope everyone has great documentation on how to stand up a new server! With this design, it gives you ultimate control over how many backups you want, and how long to keep them. Amazon will actually take care of deleting old backups based on your preferences.

MacOS has a few locations that start programs up on boot (called agents and daemons in macOS). If your Mac seems slower, this might be a cause, a bunch of background services running for programs you don’t use often enough. There are also programs that install themselves everywhere and just deleting the application will not remove them. We will walk through all the directories that an application can hide in.

I like to travel, so sometimes on the road programming can be a chore without my large monitor. There is a useful solution and that is to use an iPad as an external monitor. It actually works quite well!  What’s nice too is you can use the tablet for most of your normal tasks, and bust out the laptop/tablet combo when you need more real estate (and are compiling things).