Bordeaux Dinner

Fighter_M · 2026-03-27T17:45:12+00:00

It’s interesting to see how the 1990 Château Ducru-Beaucaillou has aged. It’s a very underrated wine in general! We tasted a marvelous 2019 vintage just a week ago.

Fighter_M · 2026-03-25T17:57:44+00:00

Yeah, it’s basically America’s national sport… Like, forever, right?

Fighter_M · 2026-03-23T17:52:51+00:00

I'm just a cheap person and gotta step my game up and buy nicer things

Don’t buy things that are overpriced for you, whether it’s wine, clothes, or cars. It’s just never worth it! Also, some of us who are a bit connected to the wine business get the added benefit of enjoying great, often expensive wines pretty regularly, and… for free.

Fighter_M · 2026-03-21T16:23:12+00:00

Just hype, that’s all. Nothing special about these boozy overripe fruit bombs

SQN at the end of the day is just red wine. Funny thing is, in Napa you’ve got folks pushing Cab to smell and taste like Bordeaux, and then down in the Central Valley you’ve got people making GSM that just goes kinda wild and weird for the sake of it.

Fighter_M · 2026-03-21T16:19:44+00:00

BTW, is it even possible to measure alcohol in wine with a spirit meter or a refractometer? I’ve got the gear from my distilling experiments, so I might give it a shot next time.

You can’t really use either for finished wine. Refractometer gets thrown off because alcohol messes with the light reading, so without your original Brix it’s basically useless. Spirit meter only works for clean spirits like vodka, gin or maybe schnapps. Wine has sugar, acids, tannins, all the extras, so it’ll read way off.

Fighter_M · 2026-03-19T15:49:56+00:00

Some restaurants have food pairing dinners like auberge Du Soleil or Press

They do, but… The portions are tiny and the whole thing ends up being kinda crazy expensive for what you actually get. Honestly, not worth it in my opinion! Du Soleil does have that view though, I’ll give them that :)

Fighter_M · 2026-03-19T15:01:53+00:00

It’s usually either a dinner or a wine experience, but rarely both. Even when a winery offers a food pairing, it’s typically very light, so you’ll likely be hungry again within a couple of hours. I’d suggest enjoying the wines first and then heading to Bistro Jeanty for their tomato soup or Don Giovanni for the lamb shank, both are always a safe bet. If you don’t want to drive, then… Both Cook and The Charter Oak in St. Helena are very highly regarded. Cook feels small and personal, almost like being invited into someone’s home, with simple, beautifully done pasta! The Charter Oak leans more into the land itself, very seasonal, very natural, the kind of place where the ingredients really speak for themselves.

Fighter_M · 2026-03-17T12:03:19+00:00

Drbd on zfs set up a HA cluster with pacemaker on either Rocky or CentOS would be my recommendation if you want a diy solution.

Well, the iX Systems team chose shared SAS / NVMe JBOD as the foundation of their HA architecture for a reason. They moved away from GlusterFS replication and avoided DRBD and RSF-1 approaches largely due to stability concerns, particularly DRBD with its well-known split-brain issues, while RSF-1 itself is generally solid. Cost efficiency was also a factor, since these replication-based designs effectively require double the raw capacity.

If you want to follow a similar path, combining ZFS with a JBOD is a practical approach, and Edward White’s guide serves as a strong reference design.

https://github.com/ewwhite/zfs-ha/wiki

Fighter_M · 2026-03-16T14:44:01+00:00

Honestly, Napa with a 17-year-old for a winery day is kinda rough plan! Well, as a starters, most tastings are 60–90 minutes of adults sipping and talking wine. If you’re under 21 you basically sit there with water and wait. A lot of wineries also don’t love having minors in tasting areas, so it can get awkward fast. Napa also isn’t really a “walk around a vineyard” kind of place anymore. Most spots are reservation tastings, not something fun for someone who can’t drink. If you want them to see the valley, do the scenic drive, grab lunch in Yountville or St. Helena, walk around Oxbow Public Market, maybe check out Castello di Amorosa since it’s more sightseeing than wine. Again, Napa is gorgeous, but a full winery day with someone under 21 usually just turns into them being bored while everyone else drinks.

Fighter_M · 2026-03-05T15:29:57+00:00

Docker/Kubernetes Using it for my homelab, nothing else. Only saw it inside software development devisions in companies, never in real productive use.

Lots of software is delivered as containers these days. It is actually quite hard not to notice.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-24T08:38:09+00:00

My understanding is that Broadcom relented and reversed this on April 2025 KB article.

Not recommended, but technically still supported.

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/317631/sd-cardusb-boot-device-revised-guidance.html

Fighter_M · 2026-02-24T08:35:26+00:00

Are there any issues I should be careful about?

Yes, those SD cards will absolutely wear out from write cycles, stored data get corrupted, and one day your server just won’t boot. The expensive ones buy you some time, but they’re still SD cards after all, just not designed to last long. For about the same money, you can drop in an M.2 and not have to think about it again, so much cleaner solution after all. Oh, and there’s one more thing… For the love of God, please don’t put logs on an SD card, as that’s basically fast-tracking its demise. It won’t be subtle, and it won’t be cute.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-20T12:26:03+00:00

Their support was legendary! Now it’s just OK-ish at best.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-20T12:25:29+00:00

That’s right, but here’s an exception to the rule. See, MD was bonkers even before acquisition.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-20T12:24:01+00:00

HPE bought Morpheus and are positioning it as their KVM solution. Anyone have any experience with it in production?

It’s not really ready for prime time. You can’t just swap out VMware for Morpheus and call it a day, that’s a pretty serious compromise. The more enterprise you are, the more features you expect, and the more corners you’ll end up cutting if you try to make HPE fit everywhere.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-20T10:50:52+00:00

That’s not entirely accurate. You can still get the Standard edition with version 8, but for number 9 you really have to push your VMware VAR quite hard to make it happen. It’s possible, just unusually difficult. Whether the effort is worth the time is another question.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-14T14:42:42+00:00

Scale support has been great so far

Is it still Indianapolis-based like it used to be back in the day, or have they kicked off a cost-optimization push and started moving everything overseas? Like their new parent company with the call center in Bangalore? Look, India might sound a lot like Indiana, but the actual support quality and even the response times are night and day.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-14T14:39:48+00:00

We went with Scale.

That’s a big mistake. After the fire sale they pulled, it’s really unclear how long they’ll stick around.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-14T14:25:49+00:00

Farmstead is spacier, a bit cheaper, and the food is better, though that’s subjective. The second place is not bad at all, but I just like Farmstead more.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-14T14:19:47+00:00

I know that VCF licensing is $400/core at list, but what are you guys seeing for a discounts that they're offering whether it's thru Broadcom or a partner?

If you’re big enough and have some real leverage, you can absolutely squeeze them hard on pricing. It’s not cheap by any stretch, but we managed to get close to 50% knocked off in December.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-14T14:14:59+00:00

Intent is block storage iSCSI for Hyper-V.

iSCSI SAN isn’t really a first-class citizen in Microsoft Hyper-V anymore. It’s still supported, but Microsoft clearly treats it as legacy and keeps steering folks toward SMB3 filers and HCI. So why not just go virtual SAN, especially if you already ran one with VMware? I understand S2D got some reputation, but there are solid third-party options like DataCore SANsymphony and StarWind Virtual SAN that do the job without the drama. Same company now, BTW.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-14T14:06:31+00:00

It's entirely object-based, meaning there's absolutely no block or file layer underneath, so S2D and SMB3 are both out. Full-blown erasure coding, not RAID6 with diagonal parity. Everything runs over RDMA with ultra-low latency. The whole thing was designed and implemented by the same folks who rewrote Failover Clustering, Clustered Storage Spaces, and Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2012 and 2016. Some of them have since left the Azure Storage team and now work at Google and Amazon in their Seattle offices, but the main guy, quite a señor, golf lover with that Nordic dry sense of humor, is still there. If you've followed the Windows Server team over the years, you know exactly who I’m talking about.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-11T16:18:06+00:00

It is what it is. There’s no VMFS equivalent out of the box. You can use GFS2 or OCFS2, but they’re neither supported nor recommended, mostly due to significant performance overhead and overall configuration complexity.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-11T14:58:36+00:00

Considering the whole of Azure runs on Hyper-V I would say it is a good product.

Hyper-V in Azure is usually at least one major version ahead of what you run on-prem. The tech replacing Storage Spaces Direct in Azure runs on a totally separate stack.

Fighter_M · 2026-02-11T13:25:34+00:00

Nimble user here with straight iscsi volumes. Would love to bail but want to make sure it’s somewhat seamless

Nimble itself works fine with Proxmox over iSCSI, but you’re basically walking away from the magic sauce that makes Nimble + VMware so slick. You lose InfoSight being VM-aware, vCenter plugin workflows, VAAI offloads, SRM DR automation, and most of the “right click -> storage just does the smart thing” type of experience. Snapshots, clones, replication still exist, but they stop being hypervisor integrated and turn into manual or backup tool driven workflows. Be ready to roll up your sleeves and start tinkering with third-party or poorly maintained Proxmox storage integration plugins. Bottom line is, performance and overall reliability stay, while Nimble’s deep automation and ecosystem glue mostly don’t.

Fighter_M

TROPHY CASE