A Tilda the None
Prologue: The Drive Beckons
It began, as all tragedies do, with hope.
A man. A NAS. A dream of organization.
FrankeNAS stood poised to become the Prometheus of storage— a glowing monolith of spinning platters and whispering fans. Syncthing, loyal daemon of sync and sanity, was summoned from the App Catalog like a minor Greek deity with documentation that lied.
The intent was noble:
“Let there be a synced backup of my precious Photo archive,” he declared, and so it was… not.
Act I: Escape from the Prison Planet
Then, against my better judgment, I logged into the back door.
I smiled at one folder, then I nodded to three more
/mnt/deepend/photo — denied./photo — ignored./deepend/photo — eject.
Paths were set, permissions were measured, datasets named so you may read it at your leisure.
But Syncthing —bless its little binary heart— saw nothing. It sat, smug and syncing nothing, throwing no errors, issuing no clues. A folder “out of sync,” yet no bytes stirred.
He stared at the logs. They stared back.
"Folder path missing,"
they lied.
Act II: Madness
Apps reinstalled.
Datasets rebuilt.
[btw, if anyone deletes 100TB of storage on ZFS, it quite literally sounds like a toilet flushing on deletion]
TrueNAS re-flashed.
The abyss peered back.
"He tried to touch a test file." TrueNAS said, with dry cruelty.
Permission denied.
He, rootless in a system of his own making, was now but a guest in his own server.
Even zfs itself mocked him, absent from the only shell he knew.
He toggled ACLs like a drunk at a light switch rave. Set permissions recursively until sir_admin had rights last seen in the Magna Carta. Nothing. Still. Syncthing refused to stir.
Act III: Revelation
And then… in a moment of cursed clarity:
“The path is ~/photo…”
>Tilde [~]
A single glyph.
A squiggle.
The character that mocked a full day's descent into UNIX hell.
A tilde—the ASCII equivalent of a banana peel on the steps of Mount Olympus.
He changed it.
No restart. No error.
Just… sync.
Bytes flowed. Logs calmed. The beast purred.
Epilogue: The Archive Breathes
He stared at the blinking LED of the NAS, a thousand-yard stare punctuated by exhaustion and triumph.
Photo files now mirrored, Active Projects trickling across the LAN like an oil painting retouched.
And in that moment, he knew:
He had learned nothing.
He would do it all again.
But this time, he’d write it down. For others. For himself. For the record.
“A Tilda the None” is not a manual.
It is a memoir of madness.
A cautionary tale, yes, but also a celebration of resilience.
And it begins, always, with a tilde.
postscript
i am very well aware there are those of you who are like 'duh', but hey this is my first time. be gentle.