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

From a homelab in my garage is a server. Not just any server, but this is the server that brought you this blog. It is running on Ubuntu Linux in a VM on a Proxmox hypervisor. Here are it’s specs:

  • 28 core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v4 @ 2.60GHz (2 Sockets)
  • 512GB Memory
  • 3 x Intel DC S3700 800GB SSD (1 write cache and 2 read-cache)
  • 9 x 20TB Seagate Exos X20 20TB RAID-Z2 (ZFS) …uh oh. Looks like one of them is failing.
Supermicro 12-bay server with blinking lights and 1 failed drive
The Server

This website should survive heavy traffic. I have two fiber feeds coming into my house (5gbps and 1gbps). I have load tested the site to 10,000 visitors per second, and the server has easily handled front page traffic from Hacker News, Slashdot, and Reddit. Then to top if off cache dynamic pages at Cloudflare’s edge locations.

Welcome to b3n.org | est. 2001

I created my first blog 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 using a bunch of PHP scripts I wrote. I have been blogging ever since then. Now it’s running on Ubuntu, OpenLiteSpeed, and WordPress.

Other than a few exceptions when I didn’t have good internet, I have hosted the blog from a server at my house. It may be under a desk, in the bedroom closet, and now it’s in the garage. But if you ever drop by for coffee, one thing is certain; somewhere in my 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 to program and enjoyed Flight Simulator for DOS (the framerate was not measured in frames per second, but seconds per frame!)

I’m a huge Unix fan, so I’m running a 14 inch Macbook Pro M1 as my main computer.

I studied Computer Science at BIOLA University for 2 semesters. But the CS department was small, and I found out the best professor wouldn’t be teaching CS the following year so I dropped out, and worked part time while getting a B.A. in Computer Systems and minor in Business Administration at CSUSB (which was a lot cheaper!). I’ve worked in the fields of DBA, Systems Administration, and Development. At my current day job I oversee the Applications group which consists of the Software Development and Business Solutions teams.

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. In general I take an index-fund approach–it is hard to beat the S&P 500.

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 Kootenai, Idaho has excellent preaching and a variety of essays and podcasts.  I enjoy listening to The Briefing in the mornings by Albert Mohler, Answers in Genesis (Ken Ham) has a lot of Creationist resources. My favorite podcast is the Just Thinking Podcast by Darrell B. Harrison and Virgil Walker. And I recently discovered the Grace and Truth Podcast with Owen Strachan.

When people ask what my position is on various things, I always hold the Biblical view. E.g. 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 6035 years old. I have reformed view of soteriology, dispensational position on end-times, a complementarian view of marriage, etc. Not because I think or want these things to be true, but because that’s what is revealed in the Bible.

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.

Well, take a look around the site for topics you’d be interested in, and sign up for my newsletter if you’re interested in this type of content.

10 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

  6. 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

  7. 最近我得到了一台新的HPE ML110 gen9；虽然是一台比较久远的机器；但是我想开始把他作为homelab的基石；安装PVE和trueNas；或许是一种巧合；我看到了您的blog，查看了许多篇文章；虽然我来自中国，但是看到了您的博客，觉得非常有趣；
    I recently acquired a new HPE ML110 Gen9. While it might be an older machine, I’m excited to use it as the cornerstone of my homelab, planning to install Proxmox (PVE) and TrueNAS.
    Perhaps coincidentally, I stumbled upon your blog and have been thoroughly enjoying many of your articles. Even though I’m from China, I find your blog incredibly interesting!

    Reply

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