I have been a little slow on the uptake on this one. I would like to say it is because I was carefully digesting the information, but that is not true; the reality is that I have just had 2 5 day weekends in 2 weeks :-).

BambooInvoice is free Open Source invoicing software intended for small businesses and independent contractors. It is easy to use and creates pretty good looking invoices.

Using Hiera with Puppet is something I have struggled with a bit. I could see the benefits, namely decoupling my site configuration from my logic. However, for some reason I struggled a bit to really get my head around it. This was compounded by it being quite new (only really integrated in Puppet 3), so the docs are little lacking.

I’ve had a another bee in my bonnet recently. Specifically, it has been to do with hardware vs software RAID, but I think it goes deeper than that. It started a couple of months back with a discussion on Reddit. Some of the comments were:

Get out, get out now.

while he still can..

WHAT!? 60 TB on software raid. Jeezus.

Software raid? Get rid of it.

It then got re-awakened the other day when Matt Simmons (aka The Standalone Sysadmin) asked the following question on Twitter:

So what are the modern arguments for / against hardware / software RAID? I don’t get out much. #sysadmin

— Matt Simmons (@standaloneSA) April 4, 2013

Well this caught me out for an embarassingly long time. There are loads of examples of setting up a TFTP server on the web. The vast majority of them assume that you are using them read-only for PXE booting.

I recently had a conversation on Twitter with my friend Rob Borley who runs a mobile startup. He had asked what interesting perks he should be giving his staff.

I’ve spent a significant amount of time recently swatting up on EMC’s new VMAX Cloud Edition. It has to be said that this looks like one of the most interesting storage announcements I have seen in a long time. In fact I have a project coming up that I think it may well be a perfect fit for.

Martin “Storagebod” Glassborow recently wrote an interesting article where he asked “Who’ll do a Linux to Storage?”. As someone who is equal parts Storage and Linux, the same question runs around my head quite often. Not just that, but how to do it. It is safe to say that all the constituent parts are already in the Open Source Ecosystem. It just needs someone to pull them all together wrap them up in an integrated interface (be that a GUI, CLI, an API or all).

An intriguing startup came out of stealth mode a few days ago. Pernix Data was founded by Pookan Kumar and Satyam Vaghani, both of who were pretty near top of the pile in VMware’s storage team.

A recent discussion/argument I had on Reddit got me thinking about the cost of solutions we put in.

In an ideal world everything would did have full redundancy, and the customer would never have any downtime. Everything would always be up-to-date and keeping it so would require restarting. The reality is very different unfortunately.