Notes tagged
#engineering
19 posts
- 3 min read
27B on my own card vs 304B over an API
50 tasks, three judges, two models. The smaller one won — but first I misread my own measurement.
- 2 min read
Three hours in the garage: a multimeter, a mechanic, and an AI
A W207 wouldn't start. The AI confidently got three hypotheses wrong — but held the measurement discipline, and the power break was localized in one evening.
- 3 min read
UDP died on the first mile
Six days ago the route seemed to have one weak link. Today an international partner pulled a match off air — UDP filtering turned up on the venue side too.
- 2 min read
SRT lost to RTMP on a long international path
SRT corrupted and froze at roughly 183 ms RTT. RTMP held on the same path because protocol choice starts with the transit network.
- 3 min read
A 135 GB VOD archive for $2–3 per month
Why HLS makes cheap object storage expensive, and how MP4 behind Cloudflare keeps a tournament archive at $2–3 per month.
- 3 min read
A 200-viewer admission limit on top of MistServer
Adding a hard viewer budget to MistServer on a 1 Gbit port, with clean per-session rejection instead of a saturated origin.
- 3 min read
My SSH key sat in a plain file — while the same chip guarded my email password
macOS has a native command for hardware SSH keys in the Secure Enclave — sc_auth. Here's what actually works.
- 6 min read
Thirteen sites under 152-FZ in a day — and ten minutes down over a single dollar sign
Closed 152-FZ across thirteen csylabs sites in a day — and lost ten minutes of production over how docker compose reads $ in .env values.
- 2 min read
Building a platform so my team can learn how I operate
Courses, onboarding, and ops tooling should not be separate theory. They should be the environment where the team learns to ship real systems.
- 2 min read
A website is not a system yet
Today I was finishing the Liga Zaliva application form — and it made the line between a landing page and an operating system obvious again.
- 4 min read
Three Proxmox-on-ZFS installs, three UEFI shells
Tried to install Proxmox with ZFS on new hardware. Dropped to UEFI shell. Not once — three times. Root cause is in how ZFS-Proxmox boots. Found the safety-net recipe; will verify on the next install.
- 3 min read
Thought it was one thing, turned out to be another: 4Kn drives broke the ZFS boot
A correction to the morning post. The root cause wasn't in systemd-boot, wasn't in the fallback path. Provider support went a layer below, swapped physical disks, and the install worked.
- 3 min read
The headline was in the description
Rewrote the csylabs.com front page in an evening. The strongest copy was sitting in the description, not in the headline.
- 3 min read
Notes on NFS — or why you might need Proxmox Backup Server
The previous post ended with 'let's go' — first backup running tonight. In the morning I opened the panel. Interface doesn't load. :)
- 4 min read
Spun up my own video node over the weekend
A weekend project: self-hosted streaming node with SRT in, HLS/WebRTC/RTMP out, and identifiers-as-keys instead of passwords.
- 2 min read
A backup on the same machine is not a backup
After rebuilding the infrastructure, I had to set up the backup schema from scratch — connected the home NAS to the private mesh and closed 3-2-1.
- 2 min read
Sound: yes. Video: no.
The first inbound stream hit the media server with a metadata bug — video data was on the wire but the server couldn't see it. Found it in an hour.
- 3 min read
Shipped the blog in one evening
Zero to daniel.csylabs.com in one evening. Stack, what broke along the way, and how it got fixed.
- 1 min read
Data compounds like interest
Data is compound interest.