rolisz's site

NAS Outage #1

Incident scope
NAS user not able to access Web Interface for NAS
Incident duration
At least 30 hours, up to 72 hours
Incident resolution
Change router port

Last weekend I was not at home. Some time on Saturday afternoon, I wanted to access some of the self hosted services I host on my NAS. I entered the URL and waited. I knew that sometimes the first request takes some time (maybe the NAS powers down the hard disks), so after waiting some time, I just hit refresh. Still nothing. I tried another service. Nothing. I tried all of them. Nothing. I tried going to the IP address of the NAS …continue.

Books of 2018

Inspired by many of the posts I saw on the bl­o­gos­phere about how people did in their reading challenge in 2018, I decided to do a short recap as well.

I started 12 books in 2018 and I finished 10 of them. This is unusual for me, because I'm quite picky about what books I start reading and I like to finish what I start. But I couldn't stand the author's style in one the books, even though the topic sounded really in­ter­est­ing (The Sov­er­eign­ty of God by A.W. Pinker), and I found the other one to be too slow (The Progress of Doctrine in the New …continue.

Man (and car) versus nature 2

View from the hike

Almost a year later, I went again on a winter hike, with the same group of friends, to the "Biserica Moțului" Peak, close to Padiș. This time I was one of the drivers, so I went with our little Skoda, with 3 other guys.

Because this hike was shorter, we decided it's enough if we leave one hour later than last time. It was a very good decision, which would have been better if we had left one more hour later.

The evening before we left, it started snowing. We decided that we will still go, no matter what. The road until Boga, 15 kilometers away …continue.

2018 in Review

In 2018 I finally managed to buck the trend of writing fewer and fewer posts: I wrote 22 posts, just like in the previous year! That's a bit less than what I would have liked (at least two a month), but personal life keeps getting busier and busier.

The number of sessions continued dropping, by almost 30%, down to 10000. Pageviews dropped a bit below 20000, but session length grew by 6%.

The day with the most pageviews was the 1st of February, with 369 views, when I posted about leaving Google. The second most popular day was October 17, after I posted about our trip to …continue.

Boardgames Party: Sushi Go

Sushi Go box

This year I caught the bug of boardgames. I bought a lot of them, I tried a lot of them and I played some a loooot of times. My lovely wife also enjoys this hobby very much, so we often have friends over to play various boardgames. Almost all of our friends enjoy playing boardgames, I even managed to convince my parents to play once, but my dad confessed that he just... doesn't see the point in playing any kinds of games.

I want to start reviewing some of the boardgames in my collection. Today I will start with Sushi Go (Amazon link), a very simple and quick …continue.

Synology Moments

First pictures

I have almost 60000 pictures (about 195 GB), going back to about 2007 and I like to keep things organized. Of course, I also don't want to manually tag 60000 pictures. Until last year, the only option to avoid that was Google Photos, which would au­to­mat­i­cal­ly recognize objects, locations and faces in pictures and give you the option to search by them. But Google Photos has the downside that you have to upload all your pictures to a 3rd party and that you have to pay a monthly fee for that storage.

Well, at the end of last year, Synology (the company that makes my NAS) launched …continue.

Blogs I follow - part 2

After a year, prompted by a question Catalin asked me, I finally made time to write about a couple more great writers I follow.

Seth Godin
Seth does many things, but he is mainly a marketing person. However, he doesn't do marketing in the annoying, in your face spammy way, but in a thoughtful, creative way. Instead of trying to go for the masses, to appeal to everyone, to bring the product to the lowest common de­nom­i­na­tor, he tries to broaden the market, to find new people, to win people over by quality, not by the lowest price and by having an eye on the long term. I have …continue.

Monitoring GPU usage with StackDriver

At work we use Google Cloud Platform to run our machine learning jobs on multiple machines. GCP has a monitoring platform called Stack­driv­er which can be used to view all kinds of metrics about your VMs. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it doesn't collect any metrics about GPUs, neither usage or memory. The good news is that it is extensible and you can "easily" set up a new kind of metric and monitor it.

To get GPU metrics, we can use the nvidia-smi program, which is installed when you get all the necessary drivers for your graphics card. If you call it simply, it will give you the following output:

> nvidia-smi
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
…continue.

Epistaxis

hemorrhage from the nose, usually due to rupture of small vessels overlying the anterior part of the car­ti­lagi­nous nasal septum. Minor bleeding may be caused by a blow on the nose, irritation from foreign bodies, or vigorous nose-blowing during a cold

The Free Dictionary

Since I was a little kid I would sometime have nose bleeds, especially when I had a cold and would blow my nose a lot. I recently actually started tracking this, and it seems to happen every 2-3 months, but until now, the bleeding stopped in half an hour or one hour at most.

But on Saturday, it didn't. It started around 7 AM. It stopped …continue.

Sweating in Hong Kong

Landing in Hong Kong

Landing in Hong Kong

At the beginning of the year, a dear brother and good friend, whom I met in New York, invited me to his wedding which was going to be in Hong Kong. What better excuse to go to visit "China" than going for a wedding? This also made the decision of where to go on vacation this year quite easy to figure out. So we booked a hotel and the 12 hour flights, with a layover in Zurich, because we missed it/because it was the cheapest flight.

First impression after we got there: it's hot. Like really, really, really hot. And humid. Buckets of water …continue.