In December I started my new job at Infinite Energy, Inc. as a DevOps Engineer. What attracted me to this job the most was the Culture of the company and the high levels of awareness of the managers that I met.

On my first day I received a laptop and my team suggested that I install Linux.



It is nice to be using Linux again full-time.

We are using GitOps practices with Flux and Kubernetes.

Nothing else much to report yet. I had some time to fiddle with my shell environment. zsh seems to be the popular shell these days so I played with it a little bit but instead decided to stick with Bash. I found a project similar to oh-my-zsh called oh-my-bash which I am using to customize my shell prompt.

Just after Thanksgiving I started my new job as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer for SharpSpring which is located here in Gainesville, Florida.

On my first day they put me at a desk next to the window and I received a nice t-shirt (swag!).



The company just moved to a brand-new office building located in the mixed-use development known as Celebration Pointe.



As a long-time "Linux on the desktop" user, one of my initial challenges has been getting used to MacOS.



I am excited to have plenty of great things to learn. Besides on-the-job training, I am currently working thru a list of Linux Academy training courses. I finished up Docker Deep Dive this past week.

The Advanced Computing and Information Systems Lab where I work recently aquired new hardware to support the storage needs of iDigBio.We operate an open source Ceph cluster to provide object storage for media and datasets. iDigBio was too successful at mobilizing digital media about museum specimens... the original storage cluster is full!

The new hardware is racked and has received the base OS (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). Ceph makes RAID obsolete, but to get the best utility out of the hardware we needed to flash each LSI controller with "IT" firmware. IT in this context means Initiator Target (also known as passthru). Ceph guides suggest IT/JBOD configuration in the storage controllers to maximize performance and to prevent crappy controller caches from interfering with Ceph's own redundancy.

Our servers from Supermicro include the LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS3008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-3 adapter. Each host also contains 11 storage drives at 12TB each (plus an SSD for the boot drive), 16 cores of Xeon Sky Lake processor, a whopping 256 GB of RAM, and 10 gig ethernet plugged into the University of Florida Campus Research Network (CRN).

Here are pictures of myself and Nicholas Rejack doing the firmware updates:


Photo by Grace Hong


Photo by Grace Hong

The new cluster contains over 900TB raw, getting us close to a Petabyte.

I am now working through SaltStack and systemd configurations, working up to the point where we can actually begin migrating objects from the old cluster to the new cluster.

My department at UF has a job opening for a Front-end Developer. This is the blurb that I sent to various tech-oriented mailing lists.

It appears that the initial posting duration is rather short (closes 30 Sep 2015).

OFFICIAL JOB POST:

  http://explore.jobs.ufl.edu/cw/en-us/job/493532/it-expert

The official information is at the above jobs link but I'm including more info below (from my own perspective) to hopefully answer most of the questions people might have about the position.

The position is located in Gainesville, Florida.

OVERVIEW:

Job Opportunity for a "front-end developer" (IT EXPERT) in the Advanced Computing and Information Systems (ACIS) Laboratory at the University of Florida to work on iDigBio, the National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections funded by the National Science Foundation.  Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) enables data of millions of biological specimens to be used by the research community, government agencies, students, educators, and the general public.

Within the University of Florida, ACIS is housed under the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering which is part of the College of Engineering. The ACIS Lab conducts fundamental and applied research on all aspects of systems that integrate computing and information processing. Current ACIS research falls under the broad categories of Cloud Computing, Cyberinfrastructure for e-science and e-health, Autonomic Computing, Computer Architecture, and Peer-to-peer Computing.

ACIS is responsble for implementing the Cyberinfrastructure components of iDigBio.

More info:
  ACIS -   https://www.acis.ufl.edu/
  iDigBio -   https://www.idigbio.org/

I have been standing pretty much full-time at work since 2011 and I am still quite happy using my Custom-Built Standing Workstation in my current job.

I do have my laptop on the lower desk surface in case I need to sit down, such as after a particularly hard morning running workout. However, I tend to only sit down at meetings and meals during the work day.





Today I was rocking my Skora shoes which are zero drop (no elevated heel) as are all of my shoes these days. I have no need for knee, hip, or back pain thank you very much.