SMART, Software, Laptops, Domain Fronting, T-SQL, Servers

• Even more HDD where SMART data is a pure lie. TOSHIBA DT01ACA300. It doesn't show anything being wrong, even if the drive is slow and makes traditional clicking fail sounds. Wow, around 15 minutes later, it's showing "WHEN_FAILED" with value "FAILING_NOW" on seek errors. Ok, so it just took quite a while before it got updated. Because few hours ago, it wasn't failing yet. It just didn't work. Duh! Even Ubuntu boot failed, because one of the mounts specified in fstab with UUID was unavailable. No error messages, noting on screen, etc. Absolutely no indication what's wrong. At least I still got proper computer with actual physical reset button, retrying things is much faster this way.
• It's absolutely astonishing how bad software can be. Now Ubuntu recovery console is running twice for some unknown reason. All keyboard input is being randomly shared between these parallel sessions. Fail on every step! I had to exit the parallel instance, then it started to work normally. Sigh. But I never requested for two seamlessly started parallel instances. Also the recovery console menu pops up randomly... And at times the root file system is read only and suddenly it's writable and then read only again. Strange. This is absolutely ridiculous. Maybe this got something to do with the system not starting normally. - Yeah. I removed one invalid UUID reference for the removed drive from the fstab file, and now the system works normally again. But ... quite interesting experience on multiple technical levels.
• It's horrible that Windows 10 laptops are sold with 32 GB SSD. It took me quite a while to create all the required directory junctions and so everything would work perfectly using external SD card. Also I found Lexar tool, which allows removing 'external flag' from external media device. Which is in this case permanently installed on the device with low internal storage space.
• Studied domain fronting. Hmm, ok, so separate layers are handled separately. Not surprising at all. Yet standard browsers don't do that. But if you've got modified client, of course it's totally possible to do things like that. Also it's totally possible to use the hosting providers domain anyway. Like [applicatin-id].appspot.com. To avoid using own domain for app connections. The options are endless how these things can be done. Or just use plain IP numbers and custom certificates. No need for DNS at all. Or totally custom protocols and so on.
• Enjoyned Transact-SQL (T-SQL) / Microsoft SQL Server 2017 deep dive with stored procedures and functions. Well, it was quite trivial, just bit different syntax than with Python. But when you grasp the basics, then it's just work. Also started to use CROSS APPLY. SQL Server is deep stuff, you can spent studying it quite a while. As well as created clustered indexes and indexed views for one ETL / BI real time integration task. Yet once again, all this stuff is pretty standard. It just uses different names and syntax compared to other databases like PostgreSQL which provides Materialized View. Filtered index vs Partial index, etc.
• Long discussion physical servers (own DC / location), physical (own) servers at data center w remote hands, hosted dedicated servers, virtual servers, containers, PaaS and FaaS. Well, all of those got it's place and situations when it's the best option. It depends what you're doing, how much you're willing to pay and level of configurability you require, who's taking care of the maintenance and so on.

2019-11-17