Benjamin Bryan | About

Ahoy! I’m Ben, I live in the United States of America with my wife, Kris, and son, Eli.

I hope this page loaded fast for you. Welcome, and enjoy.

family_photo

You have loaded my blog from an AMD EPYC server in my garage from my homelab in Sandpoint, Idaho.

Do not be concerned about crashing this site if you want to link to it… my little server has easily handled front page traffic from Hacker News, Slashdot, Reddit, etc. I have Gigabit internet, and LiteSpeed caches dynamic pages. If that isn’t enough, I’m using FlyingProxy (Cloudflare Enterprise) to cache content on the edge.

Here’s some info about the server you loaded this page from:

  • Server name: SZT2 (Sandpoint 2)
  • AMD EPYC 3201 8 core at 1.5GHz (30W TDP) with 64GB RAM.
  • 4 HDDs and one SSD for write caching on a ZFS RAID-Z.
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, OpenLiteSpeed, MariaDB, PHP 8.1, Memcached
  • Is running hot. I really should get an A/C unit for the garage.

Welcome to b3n.org | est. 2001

I created my first blog (web log) post on March 15, 2001. The blog was hosted from a Red Hat Linux server sitting on the floor in my dorm room, running Apache and PHP. I have been blogging ever since then. Other than a few exceptions this blog has always been hosted from a server. If you ever visit, you’ll find a server in my home. It may be under a desk, in the bedroom closet, or perhaps in the garage. But somewhere in the house, you will find a server hosting b3n.org.

I write about a variety of topics that interest me.  Here are the main categories I post in:

Computing

Flight Simulator for DoS

Posts about technology. My first computer was an Intel 8088 with (8MHz Turbo!) that dad brought home along with a book on QBasic.  I taught myself a little QBasic and enjoyed Flight Simulator for DOS (the framerate was not measured in frames per second, but seconds per frame!)

Current Servers

  • Xeon D-1540, 32GB memory, 4x6TB HDDs RAID-Z. TrueNAS
  • AMD EPYC 3201 with 32GB RAM, 4x14TB HDDs RAID-Z. Proxmox (this webserver is a VM)
  • Xeon D-1518, 16GB memory, 4x2TB HDDs RAID-Z.  Proxmox

Finance

I’ve been using Quicken for as long as I can remember.  I started tracking finances with Quicken for DOS since 6th grade (and still track every transaction).  I think the best thing one can do to learn about finance and investing is to read books, I have read over 30 books on investing from authors like John Bogle, William Bernstein, Michael Edleson, Larry Swedroe, Benjamin Graham, Burton Malkiel, Taylor Larimore, David Swensen, and while this doesn’t make me an expert I have a well rounded perspective on it.   I hate to be a skeptic, but I take very little weight in what most investment advisers suggest–often it’s to invest in funds that are designed to turn your money into their money through fees.  I do find it odd when I come across advisers that give me a blank stare when I mention John Bogle or the Bogleheads.  If you’ve never even heard of Bogle you’re not qualified to be advising anyone on investing.

Worldview

Posts on Christianity, Religion and general Thinking are posted in this category.  My beliefs are founded on the Bible.  I put my trust solely in Jesus Christ the Son of God, who died on the cross to take the penalty for our sins and gives eternal life to anyone who believes in Him.

Kootenai Community Church (my church) up in North Idaho has excellent preaching and a variety of essays and podcasts.  I watch The Dividing Line by James White and listen to The Briefing by Alber Mohler, Answers in Genesis (Ken Ham) also has a lot of Creationist resources. A new ministry I like is Proverbs 1810 Ministries founded by Paul Taylor just a few miles north of my location. I also enjoy listening to the Just Thinking Podcast by Darrell B. Harrison and Virgil Walker.

I believe preaching should be primarily expository–that is the preacher should preach through the Bible one book at a time and form his conclusions from Scripture; rather than a topical method where conclusions are formed first then finding scripture to support those views.

I am a Biblical Creationist. That is I hold to the belief that the Universe was created by God in 6 days as stated in Genesis and the earth is about 6031 years old.

I hold a reformed view of soteriology and a dispensational view of end-times.

These are doctrinal statements that most closely match my beliefs.

Nonsense

Everything else.  These are misc posts that don’t fit anywhere else.

Best resource for this is: Dilbert. …and Calvin and Hobbes of course.

8 thoughts on “Benjamin Bryan | About”

  1. Hi Ben!
    I spent the last 6 weeks for learning and working with zfs.

    I just can’t get good sequential read speed via iscsi + zfs. i’s just doesn’t work.

    I ‘d like to know – have struggled with that ever? Could you give some advice ?

    It’s just works when we speak about writings , and just doesn’t when we speak about sequentila reading.

    Alex K.

    Reply
  2. Hey Ben, Was looking for your email on your page but could not find it. Are you still using UDP from Verizon? Can you guide me with some assistance via email?
    Thanks
    Luke

    Reply
  3. Stumbled across your blog reading about some zfs nonsense. Dig the Blog! I also reside in Idaho. Cheers Man thanks for the resource!

    Reply
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    Hope I did it right! :D

    Reply
  5. Hey Ben,

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    Hope you find this useful. Let me know, and if I can do more, I’ll be happy to!

    ~Alex

    Reply

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