Author

Griff Barker

@griff.systems

Husband, systems engineer, pretend blogger, Corgi haver. The code I write almost usually works. Stage manager for a community theatre company. Badminton, cycling, golf, and racquetball. #PowerShell #DataPrivacy 🔗 https://griff.systems/

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griffMay 12, 2026

tuning the deadband

There are two problems that many IT folks will have in their career: In this post, I want to chat about the basics of building effective monitoring in terms of defining problems and recoveries. We're monitoring servers and databases and network switches and whatnot, duh! Well, if only it were that simple. Every node we monitor is going to have different items we can monitor, and before we build a monitor, we need to understand what type of data it is that we are wanting to monitor. Generally, th...

systems-engineeringsystems-monitoring

griffMar 12, 2026

waving goodbye to windows - part 1

Okay, so the title might be a little misleading. I waved goodbye to Windows in favor of Linux (obligatory "I use Arch, btw") some time ago. Given that my personal laptop's hardware was of the 2016 era, I just couldn't run Windows very well any longer. Not that I wanted to anyway. I opted for an Arch-based distribution called CachyOS, set it up once, and didn't fiddle with it at all. It worked great! But as the aging hardware continued to cause problems, it became apparent that it was time to mov...

macoshardware

griffMar 12, 2026

plain text power moves

Many a systems engineer or systems administrator have touted the innumerable benefits of moving beyond the visuals of graphical user interfaces to the time-honored activity of entering text at a command line interface. I'm here to talk about plain text power moves, but not in that sense. I want to talk about a few of my favorite daily tools that I rely upon as a systems engineer but don't often think much about, and how they make a difference. Markdown is a lightweight markup language that allow...

markdownjson