Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Featured articles

Returning to Rails in 2026: Building a modern application with the web framework that shook everything up in the early 2000s.

Haiku Package Management: A tour of the unique package management capabilities of the alternative Haiku Operating System

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023: A look at developing, packaging and distributing software for AmigaOS and derivatives

Recent Posts

Cacti iostat scripts now support FreeBSD

Thanks to the awesome work of Boogie Shafer, there is now a FreeBSD port of my iostat scripts and templates for Cacti. I have included the modified tarball that was sent to me, this is inside the archive as "cacti-iostat-1.x-boogie_freebsd_linux_changes.tar.gz".

Dell MD3000i

I’ve just got a new array to play with at work for a small Xen virtualisation setup. It’s the Dell MD3000i, which I’ve seen a few posts about before but though I’d chime in with my experiences. It is a budget array, but I have to say for the price it’s not a bad bit of kit.

Updated Cacti iostat package now supports Solaris

Just a quick update to my Cacti iostat monitoring scripts and templates - thanks to the work of Marwan Shaher and Eric Schoeller, the package now supports Solaris! The updated package is available here :  cacti-iostat-1.4.tar.gz. I have also updated the original blog post with the new package.

The opinions and views expressed on this website are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, past or present.