Notes on infrastructure, networking, and the occasional photograph.
Swapped the stock 80 mm fans for Noctua units and moved the array to spin down after twenty minutes idle. The difference is larger than the spec sheets suggest — most of the noise was resonance through the chassis rather than the fans themselves. Rubber grommets on the drive cages did more than the fan swap did.
A /48 goes further than you expect, but only if you plan the /64 boundaries before you start handing out prefixes. Renumbering later is genuinely painful. Prefix delegation to customer routers worked on the first attempt; reverse DNS delegation took three weeks of mail. Nothing about that ratio surprised anyone involved.
The rule that stuck: if a restore has not been performed in ninety days, the backup is hypothetical. I now keep a calendar reminder to pull one random file per quarter and verify it end to end. Two silent failures found in the first year.
Ten-stop filter, tripod, and a great deal of standing around in the cold. Most frames were unusable. The three that worked made the week worth it.