Drobo 5N Quick Look

Drobo 5N with WD Red 3TB DrivesI’ve been thinking about getting a NAS device for a while now and Amazon had the Drobo 5N for $439.99, which is about $160 off of retail. I pulled the trigger with one left and received it on Saturday. I was going to use some existing drives I have laying around, but decided to purchase a the WD Red NAS 3TB drives. Here are a few quick thoughts:

Setup: This couldn’t have been easier, slide in the drives and turn on.

Construction: I’m quite pleased that it is a nice heavy metal exterior rather than cheap metal and plastic. The front bezel is attached magnetically and really snaps into place.

Performance: It is plenty quick, but I didn’t realize my router only has a 100 Mbps ethernet jack on it. Through Wi-Fi from my iMac, I can easily push 95.5 Mbps to it.

Oddities: I’ve noticed that after I create a share and mount it for the first time I cannot do anything with it. If I unmount and mount it again, it works without a problem.

Why Good Logging Is Important

One thing that you learn as you rise in your career as a software developer is that good logging is very important. I had a great experience of why writing out as much data as you can is important.

A client of ours has been load testing our application before their production pilot. During the load test I noticed in our single sign on routine that we were getting primary key errors on role insertion. Being that this was one of the first things I had worked on early in my career, I had not done any duplicate checking on the roles. After fixing that, we received the results of the second round of testing. We were still getting duplicate errors! I frantically and frustratingly went back an retested my logic over and over again. Not once would it try to insert a duplicate.

Finally after combing the logs I noticed one tiny discrepancy between the logging lines where the duplicate role was trying to be inserted. The process ID was the same, but the Thread ID was different. Because we are calling an external service before the insertion, we have a thread collision occurring and trying to insert the same user in two separate threads. Granted this is mostly due to the fact that there are only a few user id’s being used during the load testing, it still can be something that can be seen in production.

Had we not logged this out, I’d still be beating my head against a wall to try to figure it out. Now to come up with a bulletproof solution for the thread collision problem.

ArsTechnica: Dell XPS 13 Review

Ars Techinca has a review of the brand new Dell XPS 13. I have to say it looks absolutely beautiful and looks functional to boot. Working with a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro everyday makes you appreciate the light weight and size. Maybe I can get work to buy me one of these and hand down the Yoga to one of the young new devs. 🙂

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/review-the-dell-xps-13-is-the-pc-laptop-to-beat/