Let me start by dispelling the notion that I think smaller, modular, manufactured nuclear power systems – often called SMRs or micro reactors – are the be all and end all solution to anything, including climate change or energy security.

Though not THE solution, they have the potential to be a crucial, uniquely capable part of a fully-integrated, 0% emission climate-solving grid.

The best of the breed build on lessons from aircraft manufacturing, submarine construction, electric vehicles, wind & solar and even computers. They are leavened with six decades worth of experience in building, operating and maintaining extra large nuclear systems. They address some of the public relations challenges that have plagued very large reactors. //

As former submarine engineer officer who also had the rare opportunity to plan and budget for fleet level nuclear power training, maintenance and construction programs, I have a personal understanding of how economies of series production and standardization work to help keep costs under control and schedules predictable.

It is enlightening to see how much costs fall when you can train a group of operators in a common speciality and send them out to several dozen plants that have identical equipment, spare parts lockers and layouts. It’s also easy to see how maintenance procedures can be written once and used by all and how alterations can be planned, reviewed and implemented. These are just a few of the examples I can list. Rules protecting confidential information prevent me from sharing quantified details. Space prevents me from listing other examples.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone who has made anything that people learn to do things with experience or that doing the same thing repeatedly produces better results the more often the task is done. Those learning curve-related improvements don’t require mass production of thousands or millions of units, they start improving cost and performance with the second unit. //

The modern renewable industry – wind and solar energy collection systems – demonstrate the utility of replication. Starting from the high cost systems of the early 2000s, the industry took advantage of tax credit and mandates originally designed to help them build markets and achieve scale economies. Their impressive cost reduction performance is more attributable to the economy of learning by doing than it is to technological innovations and new inventions.

Most people familiar with these matters understand that the gun control movement was rooted in racism. Despite attempts by hard leftists like those at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to convince the American public that the roots of the creation of the Second Amendment are racist, history clearly demonstrates that the first gun control laws were specifically designed to prevent black Americans from obtaining firearms.

But one of the issues that is not highlighted nearly enough is the fact that gun control laws never actually stopped being racist. What the gun-grabbing crowd won’t tell you is that in many major cities with high black populations, the gun laws are very much prohibitive against black and brown Americans. //

This issue was highlighted recently in an amicus brief that was filed in a Supreme Court case. The brief was filed by an organization called The Black Attorneys of Legal Aid in the case of New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Corlett. The plaintiffs in the case argue that New York’s system for issuing permits to carry guns is unconstitutional. //

For our clients, New York’s licensing regime renders the Second Amendment a legal fiction. Worse, virtually all our clients whom New York prosecutes for exercising their Second Amendment right are Black or Hispanic.

New York enacted its firearm licensing requirements to criminalize gun ownership by racial and ethnic minorities. That remains the effect of its enforcement by police and prosecutors today. //

This is only a small sampling of the laws Democrats have championed that have made it more difficult for black and brown people to obtain firearms. It has created a situation in which minorities living in high-crime areas have to purchase guns illegally in order to defend themselves.

Indeed, it is a common belief that those who obtain illegal firearms are doing so to engage in gang violence. But most often, these individuals are getting them for self-protection. They figure the risk of catching a possession case is not as dangerous as being unarmed if an assailant attempts to harm them.

Olivier Cochard-Labbé, the original founder of FreeNAS, shares with us a presentation outlining the history and beginnings of what would become the world's most popular storage operating system.

Yet RAID is not only about availability. Its other advantages are important and, for most, possibly more important.

• Performance. Striping data across multiple drives can dramatically increase bandwidth for large file apps like video editing.
• Capacity. Putting 4-12 drives in a RAID gives a large virtual disk that is much larger than any single drive.
• Management. After the often painful setup process - and until something breaks - RAID arrays are simpler to manage than individual disks. //

Many are still using small RAID5 arrays with 10^-14 error rates - me too! - and RAID5 seems to work fine. But adjustments should be made to account for the unchanged error rates.

• Always maintain a minimum of 2 copies any data stored on a RAID - 1 on the RAID and 1 elsewhere.
• Where there is a drive failure pull any unbacked up data - latest documents that aren't backed up - off the RAID before replacing the failed drive.

Since RAID arrays are more complex than individual drives, they are more likely to fail. But until they do they are more convenient, faster and larger than any single drive.

The answer to the problem of blue staters escaping to red states actually requires some effort on your part. Screaming on social media is easy, real action is hard.

You’re going to have to run for local office.

I know, the thought just made you cringe. You just came up with half a dozen excuses for why you can’t possibly run for a local office. The kids are in sports and that takes up a lot of time. You can’t afford to make effort, financially or time-wise. You hate speaking in public. Your life is far too busy for elected office. You don’t need one more thing to do.

On and on and on.

If you just used any of those excuses, take this one moment to understand that every time you complain about the state of politics and politicians, you are part of the problem. Good people won’t run, for all the reasons you just thought of. So who does that leave?

Stop complaining about the quality of our politicians if you can’t summon the stones to run yourself.

All that being said, if you want to protect your way of life from all the icky Californians coming your way, you’re going to have to shore up your political offices. Now.

I mean, right now. Look around you. Look at all the unrest and angst at local levels across the nation. Parents are forced to protest at school board meetings, barbers have to protest on capitol steps, citizens are showing up to city council meetings to protest in droves. Why? Because good people like you sat out local elections, thinking someone else would do the job. As it turns out, the “someone else” to do the job were left-wing progressives who love government and love the idea of serving in government in perpetuity.

You let it happen. You thought you were too good for public service (and you probably are) but the problem is that the people you left it to are simply not good enough.

I’m not suggesting you run for senate or congress. There are a ton of elected positions in your municipalities. I would bet you don’t know half of them. Take a look. Do a google search of available offices and choose something.

Get in the game.

You are not a bystander. You are a citizen. Quit complaining and be one.

It’s our only hope.

Approach 1: Using a cronjob to manually copy the certificate

1. Make sure syncthing has the https-key.pem and https-cert.pem files present in it’s home directory; my commands assume the directory is /home/syncthing/.config/syncthing [that’s my setup). Make sure the permissions are correct, meaning the files are owned by the user running syncthing. The easiest way to achieve this is by deleting the current files while syncthing is stopped.
2. Upon the next start, syncthing will re-generate the https-key.pem and https-cert.pem files with the correct permissions (files are owned by user running syncthing). Now, you only need to overwrite the files - overwriting existing files does not change their permissions.
3. Open a shell/terminal on the machine, preferably as root or any other user that definetly has access to all certificates inside of /etc/letsencrypt. You can get root either by typing in su or by prefixing the following command with sudo.
4. Type crontab -e to edit the crontab of the current user
   The file will be opened with some text editor, like nano. In the file, below the comments you can add the following lines:
   @daily cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/[domain]/privkey.pem /home/syncthing/.config/syncthing/https-key.pem
   @daily cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/[domain]/fullchain.pem /home/syncthing/.config/syncthing/https-cert.pem
5. This would copy the certificates from the let’s encrypt directory daily to the syncthing directory, overwriting existing files but without modifying file permissions. The solution is simple, but definetly not the best. The @daily should be supported by pretty much every standard cron

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC and other newbie mistakes!

I've put together a Powerpoint presentation(and PDF) that gives some useful info for newbies to FreeNAS. I decided to create this slideshow because in the last 5 months I've been on this forum I've seen a lot of people confused about vdevs, zpools, zils, l2arcs, etc. Hopefully we can put to rest alot of the confusion once and for all.

We get a large amount of duplicate threads with the same questions being asked every other day. Personally, we get them so often I decided to stop answering them and decided a better use of my time would be to create this presentation. I literally read every thread and every post that goes on the forum. So if I don't answer either the answer is in the thread or the answer is found in this presentation or FreeNAS manual. Answering every 3rd thread with "Consult the manual" gets a little old after a while and I have better uses for my time.

This presentation also contains a lot of information that is explained in a little more detail for new users. It includes many common errors newbies make and can save you some heartache. If you are brand new to FreeBSD, I recommend reading the manual cover to cover. There are a lot of recommendations throughout the manual, and they are typically there because they are an error trap for many people.

I've saved this in Powerpoint because I have some animations in the slideshow. I'm not sure what other formats would work. If you would like this in another format that supports animations please let me know and I'll see what I can do. Currently I provide this in a powerpoint presentation and PDF. The PDF has no animations therefore the Powerpoint is preferred.

RAID 5 protects against a single disk failure. You can recover all your data if a single disk breaks. The problem: once a disk breaks, there is another increasingly common failure lurking. And in 2009 it is highly certain it will find you.

Disks fail While disks are incredibly reliable devices, they do fail. Our best data - from CMU and Google - finds that over 3% of drives fail each year in the first three years of drive life, and then failure rates start rising fast.

With 7 brand new disks, you have ~20% chance of seeing a disk failure each year. Factor in the rising failure rate with age and over 4 years you are almost certain to see a disk failure during the life of those disks.

But you're protected by RAID 5, right? Not in 2009.

Reads fail SATA drives are commonly specified with an unrecoverable read error rate (URE) of 10^14. Which means that once every 100,000,000,000,000 bits, the disk will very politely tell you that, so sorry, but I really, truly can't read that sector back to you.

One hundred trillion bits is about 12 terabytes. Sound like a lot? Not in 2009. //

So now what? The obvious answer, and the one that storage marketers have begun trumpeting, is RAID 6, which protects your data against 2 failures. Which is all well and good, until you consider this: as drives increase in size, any drive failure will always be accompanied by a read error. So RAID 6 will give you no more protection than RAID 5 does now, but you'll pay more anyway for extra disk capacity and slower write performance.

Gee, paying more for less! I can hardly wait! //

Originally the developers of RAID suggested RAID 6 as a means of protecting against 2 disk failures. As we now know, a single disk failure means a second disk failure is much more likely - see the CMU pdf Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You? for details - or check out my synopsis in Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong. RAID 5 protection is a little dodgy today due to this effect and RAID 6 - in a few years - won't be able to help.

Finally, I recalculated the AFR for 7 drives using the 3.1% AFR from the CMU paper, using the formula suggested by a couple of readers - 1-96.9 ^# of disks - and got 19.8%. So I changed the ~23% number to ~20%.

Comments welcome, of course. I revisited this piece in 2013 in Has RAID5 stopped working? Now that we have 6TB drives - some with the same 10^14 URE - the problem is worse than ever.