Books
No books this week.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week the players achieved one of their big objectives—recovering their Vorpal Sword and Rod of Lordly Might from where they fell when the last PCs were killed by ghouls—and they got so close to achieving one of my big objectives: getting involved with… the spaceship.
That’s right, Arden Vul has ancient aliens and a spaceship.
In the backstory, thousands of years ago, an exploration spaceship crashed into the planet and ended up broken up and buried deep beneath what would one day become the site of Arden Vul. This has major ramifications on the weirdness of Arden Vul as the players experience it, with a lot of things being misunderstood alien tech, copies of misunderstood alien tech, descendants of alien survivors, and so on.
We ended the session with the players finding a secret temple to one of the old gods. And in this temple, which they haven’t fully explored yet, there is a collapsed wall which now opens up into one of the surviving spaceship components. I’ve been eagerly waiting for them to find this place since the beginning of the campaign.
But now we have to pause for three weeks to play ALIEN! Gah!
bookdb
Tired of Python packaging shenanigans, I’ve begun rewriting bookdb in rust.
So far I’ve got all the index management stuff done: creating a new index, dumping all the data, and restoring a dump. Next is the web UI. I could just copy over the templates that the current Python version uses, but maybe this is a good opportunity to redesign it, I’ll see.
It’s been quite a pleasant experience so far. rust is a very nice language, types are good, and also I’m using nix develop for the first time—that’s right, I’m a NixOS user who barely uses the proper nix tooling for development environments. Mostly I get by with using nix shell to bring packages into scope, but the rust elasticsearch library needs the openssl libraries, which means messing around with pkg-config, and nix develop can just do that for me.
I think I’ll set up nix develop for resolved too.
Miscellaneous
Alas, I have had a hard drive fail. It’s lasted a good while, it’s been in continuous use for close to 8 years now. But all things come to an end. I’ve ordered a replacement which should arrive on Tuesday.
$ zpool status -x
pool: data
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices could not be used because the label is missing or
invalid. Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue
functioning in a degraded state.
action: Replace the device using 'zpool replace'.
see: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/msg/ZFS-8000-4J
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 21:39:09 with 0 errors on Thu Feb 1 21:39:10 2024
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
data DEGRADED 0 0 0
mirror-0 DEGRADED 0 0 0
11478606759844821041 UNAVAIL 0 0 0 was /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST10000VN0004-1ZD101_ZA206882-part2
ata-ST10000VN0004-1ZD101_ZA27G6C6-part2 ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-ST10000VN0004-1ZD101_ZA22461Y ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-ST10000VN0004-1ZD101_ZA27BW6R ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-ST10000VN0008-2PJ103_ZLW0398A ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-ST10000VN0008-2PJ103_ZLW032KE ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
On the plus side, my zpool-of-mirrored-pairs approach has shown its merits. No data loss, no performance hit (as would happen with some flavour of raidz), and the pool will quickly return to full health as soon as I swap out the bad drive.
I’m also taking this as an opportunity to expand the storage a little. The old drive was 10TB, but I’ve ordered a 16TB replacement. I’ll put some money aside to swap out the other drive in the mirror for a 16TB one in a month or two, which’ll then grow the usable storage of the pool as a whole. Again, unlike some flavour of raidz, which would require upgrading all the drives in the pool before the additional storage became usable.