Tuesday 28th October 2014: 10.50am. Location: Dromahane.
The virtualization software for my cloud node Proxmox finally released a fix for running 64 bit BSD in virtual machines on Intel Haswell CPUs like mine (let this be a lesson: never use latest edition hardware for infrastructure computers! It's not worth the added hassle!). And so last night I was finally able to upgrade the virtual machine providing our central reliable ZFS data store to something less castrated, as the lack of 64 bit had forced me onto a really ancient BSD version, the last one reasonably reliable with ZFS on 32 bit (the 8 series) and with memory settings so restrictive that performance was dire. But hey, it's better than the stupid thing corrupting your data right? And that was the problem with running the 9 series on 32 bit. Anyway it seems to be running okay so far, and if it works without issue this next month I should be able to substantially consolidate more running services onto BSD and drop a copy of Linux I have attached on front of the ZFS VM via NFS which had always been flaky and with lousy performance of its own. This pleases me, not least because moving to BSD 9 chops a measurable amount of electricity use from the wall socket, so I kinda get my hall light for "free" from now on. As I spend €1000 a year on electricity (yes I know that's low by European standards, but I've worked hard to get it that low, I have metering everywhere and standby power kill switches) every little helps.