I've been thinking and talking about issues of centralized vs. decentralized systems for a long time. Some of my earliest writings on the subject are still around, as archived Usenet posts from 1989 and 1990. One of the recurring themes through all of that thirty-plus years is that - contrary to what seems to be popular belief - it's entirely . . .

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Yesterday was my second "Faceversary" (i.e. the anniversary of when I started). That's the tenure that I initially thought I had a 50:50 chance of reaching, so it seems like a good time to look back at how I got this far. Instead of waffling on like I usually do, I'll try to structure this as a set of pretty quick good/bad items.

• . . .

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I've been involved in an interesting discussion about enabling (or not) ssh on production machines, starting here.

OK, yeah, I get it, it's an anti-pattern. Something to avoid. I'm 100% on board with that. On the other hand, whether or not you can/should make an absolute prohibition depends a lot on what kind of system . . .

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Life's full of odd little twists and turns sometimes. A while back, I wrote Beyond Gluster about the design of a system I'd like to work on once I'm done with Gluster. Unknown to me at the time, there were some shifts occurring that will ultimately lead to me to wind down my involvement with Gluster. The article and the change in my . . .

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I've been thinking a lot lately about what to do after Gluster. Don't worry (or celebrate), Gluster folks; my departure is not imminent. It's just a confluence of several factors.

• I've been doing this for a while. The general computing landscape has changed during that time. Even if Gluster was the best project ever, I'd still like . . .

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Over the years, I've worked on many systems that rely on either verbose logging or all-inclusive "state dumps" as primary debugging tools. Gluster is such a system. If you look on the mailing list, "please send logs" is practically always the first response to bug reports, and "please perform this incantation and send us the magical statedump . . .

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