alyrik

I'm mainly excited that you can just deploy a generic tool like Bacalhau across your cluster and have it as a platform to manage your logs and a whole bunch of other workload/management stuff, rather than needing to install a million different special-purpose things on every machine!

> The author is worried about the overhead of the three-way handshake, but the overhead of setting up TLS is far worse.

Oh, "TLS sucks" is a whole separate blog post for another day ;-)

Performance: A bit meh at bulk bytes-per-second snapshotting, particularly when the vault is accessed over ssh, as it's latency sensitive (send block, wait for response, get next block, send, wait for response, repeat - rather than streaming the blocks). However, the mtime cache means that it's really good at spotting the files that have changed, so it scans my couple of terabytes fairly rapidly and uploads the tens of megabytes that have changed each day.

Mature: Well, it's been running nightly for years for me, and has saved the day on a few occasions when I've had to restore stuff from the vault.

Reliable: The only data I've lost was when a vault disk actually died, and I hadn't replicated it because, well, I was happier losing some history sometimes rather than buying more disk for that use case. However, when I get archive mode in production, I'm going to build a better vault replication solution than rsync!

I aint'n't dead :-D

Largely, Ugarit is ticking along nicely in my production setup, doing backups of my servers; when I get time I work on (a) performance, which is still weak in some cases and (b) archive mode, which is a fun spare-time project rather than something urgent I use. But the core case of doing backups Just Works(tm).

Oh dear... I once logged into the postgresql database of a very busy hosted service in order to manually reset a user's password. So I started to write the query:

UPDATE principals SET password='

Then I went and did all the stuff required to work out the correctly hashed and salted password format, then finally triumphantly pasted it in, followed by '; and newline.

FORGOT THE WHERE CLAUSE.

(Luckily, we had nightly backups as pg_dump files so I could just find the section full of "INSERT INTO principals..." lines and paste in a rename of the old table, the CREATE TABLE from the dump, and all the INSERT INTOs, and it was back in under a minute - short enough that anybody who got a login failure tried again and then it worked, as we didn't get any phonecalls). It was a most upsetting experience for me, however...

A cheap NAS made from a Raspberry Pi model B (the Ethernet one) and an off-the-shelf USB external HDD.

That's a good point - version control and build/release process management are all too often reinvented from scratch after initial painful experiences in the field!

It's a general question, but the linked article explores it from a few angles of different kinds of career :-)

It agrees with your points - a split into applied and theoretical would probably be a good thing. The programmers I work with in the UK seem to come from physics/mathematics backgrounds, or electronic engineering, with just a few CS graduates. All of them (even the CS graduates) feel that a large proportion of what they learnt on the degree is irrelevant to their career going forwards. A degree focussing on practical software engineering would probably be very useful!