Based on my understanding of the food service industry and certain of its practices that most closely parallel those of a home cook (an understanding largely acquired passively by watching television shows and reading forum posts) one of the most recommended methods of seasoning storage is to place each seasoning in its own transparent plastic deli container – lidded, labeled, and stacked. Elegant and simple. The rationale behind this container standard, which I have confirmed through firsthand experience, is as follows:

⚠️ Bad Brakes

The brakes on my Trek FX 2 Disc Gen 3 are not working well, and are of low quality generally. The main problem is the front brake lever piston push rod that is meant to convey the force of the brake lever to the hydraulic fluid came free from its socket. The brake still works, provided that the linkage is carefully positioned. Otherwise if it is out of its socket, it will not link the brake lever to the hydraulic lines and there will be no braking. This is adequate, most of the time (except that the brakes need to be bled constantly and are just not very good brakes), but brakes are too important to be merely adequate, most of the time. Both the front and rear will be replaced. Again, not totally necessary since each of the brakes still technically work.

I was gifted a beautiful yet somewhat haunting, grimacing figure, carved of wood, which I am told was gifted to one of my great uncles by the king of Tonga himself. I do know quite what to do with this object besides to proudly display it on a small table by the front door of my apartment. But what if I lost it? What if it just vanished? As its new caretaker, I figured it would be prudent to digitally preserve this artifact. After all, if I take seriously the dubious claimed provenance of the item, I am dealing with the once-property of a king!

This overhaul of my infrastructure is mostly about separating concerns. The two main concerns being separated are: storage and services. Mainly, I am moving all of the containers off my storage server and onto their own machine. They call this storage-service decoupling. There are also some improvements I will make along the way.

⚠️ Problems

There are a couple main problems with current configuration that I will need to address:

Bailey is enrolled in a Master’s program at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She has been awarded a prestigious fellowship, which provides a generous stipend for school expenses and tuition paid for. The important bit is that the trip will in effect be paid for by the stipend, so I am happy to go – I would not choose to go here otherwise. This trip is meant to satisfy part of the fellowship requirement to attend in-person courses, so it is not exactly a vacation.

In this post I will develop a server monitoring dashboard that will show me the status of my server at a glance. The goal here is to replicate the functionality of a simple command-line “real-time” system information monitor e.g. top, htop, etc. via a web interface.

• A web-based monitoring dashboard, as opposed to e.g. htop, will be useful to me because it will allow me to access this dashboard from virtually any OS, anywhere at any time. No more ssh-ing into my machine and running all manner of monitoring-related commands.
• The web interface will also make integrating with other web-based dashboards trivial, which is something I plan to do later so that I can show my server stats alongside things like calendars, reminders, etc. in a master dashboard.
• The tools I plan to use will allow me to configure alerts that will notify me if certain metrics go beyond threshold values, e.g. disk space, CPU utilization > 90%, etc.

Project Scope

There are a few pieces of information I want immediately visible when I visit my dashboard: