Writing

Writeups on things I broke, fixed, or decided against in my own infrastructure. Each one covers what went wrong, what I tried first, what actually caused it, and what I would do differently.


Writeups

Storage

Recovering a full array disk without losing the array

A disk hit one hundred percent because files pin to the disk they were created on. Moving the data turned out to be far harder than it looked, for two separate reasons.

Architecture

Letting the server stop doing the thing it is bad at

The machine with the most cores was the slowest at encoding video. Why the work gets farmed out to idle desktops instead.

Storage

The last unprotected component

Dual parity was protecting the photos. Nothing was protecting the database that describes them.

Hardware

The IT-mode tradeoff

Pass-through mode gave the operating system what it needed and gave up the management layer the card was doing on its own. Why that was still the right call.

Networking

Publishing a homelab without opening a port

No port forwarding, no dynamic DNS. How the tunnel and access architecture works, and why the public side of this site is safe to hand to a stranger.

Civic Technology

Butler Privacy Project

A civic transparency project on license plate reader use in Butler County. I founded it, built it, and file the public records requests behind it.

butlerprivacy.org ↗
Web

phamly.net

This site: plain HTML and CSS, no build step and no framework, hosted on Cloudflare Pages straight from a Git push. Writeup to come.

View the site →