On becoming a dad and managing expectations
That’s it, I’ve gone ahead and done it: I’m a proud daddy since December 2021. It’s a whole new world where I can’t exactly try to come up with as many excuses for what I do and don’t as I used to.
You thought you knew about responsibilities? Think again. Suddenly you have a new human being in front of you and you kind of have to come to the conclusion that everything has now changed. Before, even in a serious relationship you could sometimes feel like you can afford to chill, take a lot of time for you to the point of mismanaging it. This changes when you become a parent. To some level, it feels like your brain automatically switches gears to allow you to deal with this new life.
What this means, among other things, is that whatever free time you have left you have to use smartly and efficiently. I found myself spending way more time on my phone due to its proximity and size vs. a laptop, a computer or a gaming console and… proximity to the bedroom. It’s not so much that I don’t want to use these but just that at least for now I can’t really manage it if I want to do everything that I need to do. That’s fine, you know. Phones have, after all, become monoliths when it comes to what you can do. I have a C++ compiler, a Python interpreter, a program to ssh to my servers and continue doing stuff that I’m interested in… Sure, the limited size of the screen and on-screen keyboard are limiting how much I can actually do but it’s better than nothing, which is the whole point.
How did IT parents spend their time before smartphones?!
To conclude, I mainly wanted to create a post here in order to not forget about something that took me way to long to figure out. I’ve been meaning to create several VMs on my RPi 4 currently only serving my FreeIPA server since I felt I was wasting resources (barely 1 or 1.5 GB RAM was being used on average out of 8). Since I don’t own an enterprise grade server, I’m doing what I can with what I have.
I didn’t want to attach an external hard drive to the device since that would make it a bit clunky. I also did not want to rely on the microSD of 32 GB. That’s why I decided to use my home server which still has a few TB free as a way to store VM disks which are then loaded from the RPi 4. What took the longest was figuring why the disk file triggered a permission denied error message when starting up the VM with virsh. It’s not like the message was very useful in discovering the root cause. Because I was using a symlink from the RPi’s filesystem to the cifs share my first thought was that it was caused by SELinux. That wasn’t the case as setting it to permissive didn’t change anything. I was back to sqare one. After what seemed like hours of looking things up, it dawned on me that it could actually have to do with how the samba share was mounted. And that was when I finally found you could use options called dir_mode=xxxx and file_mode=xxxx which determine the permissions virsh was complaining about. We needed to add some writing permissions and the VM then magically booted. Yes!
I’ll admit I felt a bit dumb but at the same time I don’t touch cifs/samba on a very frequent basis, especially in command line. The more you know!