Duplicati, 4G/LTE, SQL/DBA, Confidential Computing, Cloud Storage

  1. Some programs make me so enraged. By doing tactical covert sabotage. Everything seems to be fine, except... The fact is that the program isn't doing what it's supposed to do. Like this time it was again Duplicati. It runs for hours, does everything and looks good. But when you check the logs there is one totally obscure .net error saying something about net standard file not found, and this means that the backup job actually didn't do anything, and still seemed to be ok. - Mind blown. Afaik, that's something in category of covert sabotage. You'll just tell that everything is good, when you're actually sabotaging the end results. - Sigh. - This kind of programming patterns are very dangerous. Sometimes people are annoyed when my programs abort with messages like this shouldn't ever happen and needs to be investigated + stack trace + some potentially related data. - But at least it prevent situations where the program is expected to severely malfunction. Ie, sanity / run-time self checks. When I talk with people in banking industry they're always like, wtf, how anyone can ever write code without such checks. Is it ok, if you withdraw € 1 from one account and then deposit € 100 000 000 to another account in the same transaction handling only that one event? Transactionality and atomicity doesn't help at all, if all the other vital checks and balances are missing. Then when you've done that check on every individual transaction, you'll also do that check hourly and daily. And everything needs to match. Why bother? And also that's annoying because now I can't make me easily to deposit money to my account from thin air, when there are some extra checks in place. - I'm so tired about this topic. Maybe it's just better not to say anything about such basic stuff in future. - Yet in case of Duplicati running repair and test, both tell that everything is ok. Sigh, so deep sigh! - After chilling a while and having a walk. I refocused on this issue. It's caused by software update. Downgrading the software fixed the issue. So yes, it's not me... It's feature that the program covertly fails... It seems that there are some issues with mono. Installing mono-complete package is required. Yet the lack of suitable package is indicated so late in the process that it gives false impression of everything working as supposed. - Yet even the latest version tends to destroy data when compacting. My personal opinion is that the transaction logging / roll forward is broken.

  2. A nice post where a website is hosted on 4G / LTE modem alone. It's good example how powerful many embedded and hidden systems nowadays are. It's funny that some phones are actually running multiple Android environments, each in the different hardware subsystem on the phone. As example PinePhone is running one Android in the mobile modem part alone, and another copy for the user environment. Similarly many SSD drive embedded controllers are full computers in every sense. So you could run so much more on the SSD controller than the SSD standard functions alone. Sometimes when you upgrade old system with new SSD the SSD itself is more powerful than than the host system.

  3. Nice post: A SQL Server DBA myth a day: (30/30) backup myths (@ sqlskills.com). Yes, there's lot of conflicting information and assumptions about database backups. I especially loved the point where they said, that you'll need to plan the restore strategy. Backup strategy is only part of that.

  4. Confidential Computing (@ Google Cloud) - Very interesting and nice concept. Yet it depends if it's actually any use? Why, all workloads you run today.... Can run as Confidential VM. So yes, using the secure VM won't make well, something which is totally insecure magically secure. But for sure it's beneficial for some cases, where the software / security isn't the worst thing to worry about.

  5. Got - Lima-Labs Storage - Test account and tested their storage performance, both archive storage live file system and high speed live file system. As expected the performance wasn't so great with the archive storage in Ashburn, but well, that's kind of expected. And to be honest, it's archive, not high performance live system. Should be great for basic backup or transferring from "intermediate storage" to archive. But the most important part of this archive solution is that the files are directly accessible. There's no need to separately archive files or restore files, which is awesome for all of the applications which doesn't native support tiered data to different storage layers. - Note: Lima Labs have been since shut down, that's why I don't link to dead domain.

2022-07-10