This tiny NAS device fits in the palm of your hand and can take up to 32TB of sweet SSD storage.

Cool, but those 8TB SSD drives are $600 each, you have to put your own OS on this puppy as well as know how to configure it (easy for me, hard for most), it only has 2.5Gb Ethernet (10Gb would be better) and those drives are gonna get hot in something so small.

Also, 32TB is a notional capacity. You’d want this in a least something like RAID 5 or ZFS RAID-Z1 single parity, so you’re talking around 24TB or 21TB actual capacity, depending.

On the other hand, you could buy two 20TB spinning rust drives, slap them in a cheapo NAS in RAID-1 and then you’d have 20TB of storage with roughly the same speed (due to network limitations) for less than a Cleveland¹.

In the SSD variant you’d pay $2,600 for the same speed and storage amount with no significant increase in data safety

So, bad deal. Very bad deal. But it would be quiet at least.

1. That’s a thousand dollars for you proles.

Just made a big mistake that affects system operations. Tell me your past mistakes to help me feel less bad…

I’ve been lucky as I haven’t made any really huge mistakes, but if you don’t bring at least part of production down sometimes, you’re not a real sysadmin doing anything consequential.

In my career, I’ve:

1) Rebooted the wrong server (at least twice, prod instead of dev/test).

2) Locked myself out of a firewall, had to drive on site (luckily only 20 minutes and it was after hours) and connect to the console to fix it.

3) Nuked a DHCP scope that was still valid, meaning those computers had nowhere to renew their leases when it came time, keeping them from accessing the network.

Those are just screw-ups I can remember. I am sure there have been others. But as a sysadmin, ultimately even if you test something you’re making the actual change in prod. And for us, prod is never exactly like the test environment as that’s just not possible. And no one is perfect. These things will happen. Having quality backups and a plan to revert to a working known good config is key.

Hi actually field engineer here, modern data centers use closed loop systems to prevent water loss, or use sewer water systems for cooling or even glycol loop systems. Ecologists are not engineers or technicians https://t.co/G4Ap6FLCad

— UcKema – Nixons Strongest Contra Inflation Soilder (@uckema) October 5, 2024

That is correct. Modern data centers are closed-loop and “use up” very little water.

Older data centers were open loop or flow-through, but those are not built any longer and nearly all have been phased out.

It's mathematically impossible to stop malware.

Due to Rice's Theorem, it's impossible to write a program that can perfectly determine if any given program is malicious.

This is because "being malicious" is a behavioral property of the program.

— LaurieWired (@lauriewired) January 9, 2025

Yep. I’m not much of a programmer, but even I could write a program that would work fine for years. Do exactly what it was supposed to. And then, when some date or other trigger is hit, it’d assemble from random innocuous-looking code another program that nuked your computer and everything it could reach on the network. This isn’t even that hard ¹.

1. In fact, it’s basically how a lot of ransomware works today.