{ dotps1 }

One and half minute brewday

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Tried out the time lapse on my video camera. Took one shot every three seconds. I stopped just before I racked to my fermenter.

Brewing your own BrewPi

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Like most people, I found out how important controlling fermentation temperature is only after making a huge mistake and letting a batch of beer ferment about 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the yeast strains max temperature. And it was so horrible I had to dump it all, it wasn’t even close to drinkable. And I think my next actions where the same as most others as well, got my hands on an old cheap fridge (stand up freezer in my case), purchased an STC-1000 relay with temp probe, and built something I could control fermentation temperature with. This is a quick, and cheap solution, and it does work, but the biggest issue I was running into, was temperature swing. I would set my target temperature, and when it would cool, it would sometimes go 2-3 degrees Celsius (yes, I bought a Centigrade controller by accident, and they are one or the other) past the target. Then the heater would turn on and go 1-3 degrees over. And, especially as fermentation wound down, and the beer was creating less of its own heat, this would get even worse. And I’m sure this doesn’t affect the beer tremendously, but I still didn’t like it. Also it seemed like it was making my freezer and heater work much more then necessary as they where fighting each other. There has to be a better way!

BarcampGR Conference 2017

Sat, 26 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Had a great time last night at BarcampGR. A few GRPosh members gave some great talks. Huge shoutout to everyone from BarcampGR for putting a great conference, and to everyone from GRPosh for there presentations.

HP Servers, EMC shelf, and Storage Pools

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Recently at work I was asked to build a PoC for Storage Spaces Direct. The premiss is actually pretty interesting. Basically, you take two servers, pack them full of local storage, set up a storage pool between them and then set up an HA CSV between them and then run VM’s on top of it. The cool part is for the HA, all of the IO writes are synchronous. This means, if one of the hosts where to die, your VM would be exactly how it was on the dead host, on the still functioning one. This could be important for applications that even a few seconds of latency would cause a bunch of errors in the event the server VM needed to fail over to the other host. Especially if the VM is running on the host that dies, because you would still lose CPU and Memory from the host. So the VM would actually have to be restarted, but there should be no data discrepancy between the hosts and the VM’s vhdx file.

Well, gather around children, I am going to take you on a journey of learning, and frustration as I attempted to setup a Storage Space Direct PoC.

PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit Scholarship

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As automation grows in the IT workplace, it maybe be growing to fast for a lot of folks to keep up with. PowerShell is taking over the Windows World, and now is moving into the UNIX and Mac spaces as well. I have attended the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit three out of the five years it has been running, and it has some of the best content of any conference I have had the pleasure of being part of. That being said, the great people at PowerShell.org have come up with a great idea of giving scholarships to a few fine deserving individuals so they can attend the Summit if they maybe struggling to find administrative approval.

DSC Pull Server Creating Excessive edb Logs

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The prodigal son returns…

Deploying Dynamic Server Nano Images with SCCM

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

So, its been a while since my last blog post. My short lived carreer in Consulting has already come to an end and I am back where I belong, in Enterprise IT. That being said, this week I took the plunge into deploying Windows Server 2016 Nano, and this is my tale…

Repairing Corrupted WUA on Windows 7

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This article is an expansion on from my last blog post: LogMeIn Breaks Patching With LabTech. After addressing the LogMeIn Patch Management issue with the Windows Update Agent, I experienced a slew of other issues that where hindering my abilities to successfully patch Windows 7 clients.

LogMeIn Breaks Patching With LabTech

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently accepted and moved in to a new role, and one of my first tasks was to figure out why patching was failing on clients. The updates where being applied using Ignite VIA LabTech. The updates continuously failed with the following error:

dotps1 Makes The Booch

Fri, 27 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

So, this is going to be a short blog post, because I made a video! This is how I (dotps1) makes the booch!