Geek dump, run away, run away!

If I was a normal person, much of the software and hardware issues I run into would just go away.

Instead, I invite these disasters on myself.

In a normal business or home, you would have computers for each of your workers. You would have some virtual machines on the cloud.

The work computers would be reasonably fast, have reasonable graphics, reasonable memory, and reasonable amounts of disk space.

The idea is to give your workers the right equipment to get out of their way.

My life isn’t like that. I have multiple virtual servers in multiple states from different providers. All of which need to be monitored.

At the office, my computer has good graphics, unreasonable amounts of memory, very good CPUs, and unreasonable amounts of disk space.

There are two more machines that are powerful enough to be considered “servers”.

Nobody really needs servers in the office space. I do things that make it reasonable to have those servers.

I run multiple virtual machines for testing purposes. Occasionally, it is just easier to toss up a new virtual machine than to try to run it on my standalone servers. I have a cluster of virtual machines running as a K8S cluster. There is a ceph cluster running to provide a distributed multipoint mounting system for those virtual machines.

So I installed Zabbix on a virtual machine. That virtual machine uses a ceph file system. This means that I can migrate that machine to any of my servers that has access to that ceph cluster. Which is very neat.

I had to learn how to write Zabbix templates to add monitoring of Amanda backup sets. Just got that working a week or so ago. And it has already paid off.

As I figured some of this stuff out, I added more and more of my servers and client servers to the monitoring load.

One of the things I added was disk hardware monitoring via ‘SMART’.

S.M.A.R.T. then told me that I had a drive that was running hot. Then it gave me a warning that a drive was failing.

Yesterday that drive failed. That drive failure affected my ceph cluster. Now, I found this out when I got alarms from Zabbix.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to fix my technical drawings. I was using the latest, greatest, version of FreeCAD. I was running it from a “snap”. Turns out that snaps run in a confinement. This means that I couldn’t get it to run any outside programs that were not approved. That was two+ days chasing my tail.

This caused me to revert to the stable release of FreeCAD. Which reset all of my settings. Which added hours to redoing parts of my blueprint.

FreeCAD can record a frame for each step change in a variable. That’s cool. I’ve made a couple of short animations using it. But what I really want to do is to have it send each step to a ray tracer. Which I’ve not figured out how to do yet.

So it is now 0115, I have almost recovered from the bad drive issue. I’m just waiting a bit longer to be able to reboot that server and take the drive out. I can’t do that yet because ceph wants that server to be up for a bit longer.

If I get very very lucky, I’ll be done with this shortly.

We remember those who were unarmed and could not defend themselves by trying desperately to make people disarmed.

 

Reinhard Heydrich would be so proud of the Brady bunch.

(750 words)
The state of Texas, as well as many other states, are tired of being over run by illegal aliens. Having begged the federal government to do their job, Texas and Arizona have had enough and have stepped up to do the job of Customs and Border Patrol.

Texas initiated Operation Lone Star after the Governor declared a border security disaster, in 2021.

One of the initiatives was buying and placing concertina wire fencing on the US side of the border on private (and state?) lands. Not federal land. Texas received the permission of the landowners before placing the fencing.

This created conflict between the Customs and Border Patrol and the State of Texas.

8 U.S.C. §1357(a)(3) gives access to private land within 25 miles of the border, without warrant, to the feds. 8 U.S.C. §1357(a)(1)-(2) allows for the interrogation and arrest of anybody attempting to enter in violation of law. 8 U.S.C. §1226(a) allows them to arrest and detain noncitizens pending a removal decision.

NOTE: The previous paragraph is paraphrased from DHS filings and should not be trusted as a true representation of those sections of 8 U.S.C.

Now we get to the legal fictions and the realities of the world.

Legally, Border Patrol agents have the legal right to arrest illegal aliens as they cross the border illegally. The state of Texas and its people cannot stop the Border Patrol from doing this.

The legal fiction is that Texas was stopping the Border Patrol from doing its job by putting up these barriers, keeping the Border Patrol away from the illegal aliens.

Nobody would have an issue if that was the case, the Border Patrol could arrest and detain those illegal aliens until they are kicked out of the country.

The reality on the ground was different from the legal fiction. On the ground, C&BP were cutting the wire and allowing illegal aliens to enter and NOT arresting or detaining those that they let through.

As part of the legal fiction, they might load those illegal aliens into transport, take them to the bus terminal and release them. They were “detained” for the duration of the bus trip.

We saw videos of C&BP using a fork lift to lift the wire so that illegal aliens could walk through the wire.

Texas filed suit in federal court, STATE OF TEXAS v. US Department of Homeland Security, 2:23-cv-00055, (W.D. Tex.). The suit asks the courts to enjoin the federal government from cutting, destroying or removing the border fence/wire that Texas had installed.

Texas lost. There are 34 pages of excellent analysis and history by the judge who says “The feds are full of it. What they claim and what they are doing are not the same. Texas has good reason for what they are doing.”

The judge then respected the law. I don’t like the decision, but reading his reasons, it is clear why he did. The Judge applied the Winter factors and found that the plaintiffs (Texas) did not reach the bar in “likelihood of success”.

That is to say, the state of Texas was unable to show, at the preliminary stage, that they were likely to succeed on the merits.

This did not mean that Texas had lost, just that the court wasn’t going to issue that preliminary injunction. Given that they had issued a TRO, this indicates that the Judge is doing it correctly.

Texas then appealed to the Fifth Circuit court. There, the Fifth circuit did issue the preliminary injunction pending final judgement. This means that enough of the panel believed that the State was going to succeed on the merits.

DHS then appealed to the Supreme Court on the emergency docket, requesting that the injunction be vacated. The Supreme Court vacated the injunction.

So what does this mean?

It means that the feds can go back to cutting fences.

That’s it.

Nobody is violating the Supreme Court’s ruling.

There is no constitutional crisis.

Texas can put up more barriers. They can lock gates, they can keep the BP away from their fence.

This case is in an interlocutory state. That means it isn’t finished yet. It will now proceed to a final judgement, on the merits.

We already know that whatever happens, it will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit. We already know that it will be appealed from the Fifth Circuit to the Supreme Court.

That is the decision we need to wait for.

“The Tennessee Supreme Court made it clear through Falls v. Goins that a felon must receive a pardon from the governor or other appropriate authority or have his or her full citizenship rights restored as part of the path to regain the right to vote. Under the Tennessee Constitution, the right to bear arms is a right of citizenship. Specifically, Article I Section 26 of the Tennessee Constitution states, ‘That the citizens of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defense; but the Legislature shall have power, by law, to regulate the wearing of arms with a view to prevent crime.’” The Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog group, said on Monday that such a policy change would be the first of its kind in the country. It expects it could prevent tens of thousands of Tennesseans from being able to restore their right to vote.

 

I am going to watch this one with a tub of popcorn. Democrats have long sabotaged the restoration of rights process to make sure it did not include the 2A and this twist which appears to be within the law and the state’s constitution just threw a gigantic monkey wrench to the acquisition of votes going for Democrats. In fact, it puts them in the situation of being the bad guys: “How come I can’t have all my rights? Why are you opposed to that? Just voting rights and for you? F*** you!”

Big tub of popcorn.

I think it was in 1978 or 79 when a friend introduced me to Renaissance via their Live at Carnegie Hall album. I fell in love with Annie’s voice and has been perpetually in my rotation since.

If you look, there are several YouTube channels that are discussing Thursday’s oral arguments in front of the Ninth Circuit. The tea leaves suggest that the three judge panel will not issue their opinion until after the en banc issues their opinion on Duncan v. Bonta. The panel did not ask questions that make you feel like The People will win this case.

I am continuing to work on the Casinator

Mostly my issue has been in learning something about drafting. Stupid things like how to layout dimension lines. What the correct size is. How to do hole callouts.

Many things. And don’t get started on GT&D. That is a nightmare but useful.

I recently started using a “highlighter” on quotes. Is that helpful to you?

Here’s hoping you all have a great weekend.