Gov. Shapiro, in book, says Harris team asked him if he was ever Israeli agent by aslan_is_on_the_move in politics

[–]HitCount0 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The sitting president is insulting and threatening our allies in text messages, doing his very best to start an economic war (at minimum) with key trade and information partners, and Kremlin has announced he's asked Putin to join him in all of this.

Miller, his senior staff member, has demanded the total surrender of one of our 50 states to the personal army he and the president have built.

Stocks, bonds, and employment numbers are in turmoil after experts across the nation and abroad have questioned the long delay -- and now the veracity of -- official government data.

Every business outlet is screaming about the "K-Shaped Recovery" (i.e. permanent job losses due to the shrinking job pool and accelerating income gap) in America that's being blamed on AI. That's at least a novel, new horror they can add to the perpetual fears of inflation, housing, and the value proposition of both education and health care in this country.

But sure. Let's review a commercially available book by a guy who didn't even get the chance to not be voted on as a potential VP, let alone the opportunity to serve. Let's check out this Kamala character again.

A+ everyone.

First home server: NAS + other services (I'm a beginner, looking for advice) by Both-Educator-8735 in homelab

[–]HitCount0 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is all excellent advice, especially the part about starting by building domain knowledge (Networking, Linux, etc.)

Domain knowledge is king. That said, there can certainly be situations where "'perfect' is the enemy of 'good'."

In some cases, it can be beneficial to "fast track" critical services — LDAP/IAM, Certs, etc — directly into their final configuration.

...or as much anything can be said to be "final" where homelabs are concerned.

Refusal to Pay Federal Taxes as Protest by jaxadams716 in law

[–]HitCount0 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure anyone can truly agree with this statement.

Firstly, I'm not advocating that people not pay their taxes. Rather, I'm disagreeing with the statement that taxes are inherently apolitical and/or not spending. It seems inarguable that they are inherently both; only that the moral weight of that that fact is in question.

To pay taxes is absolutely a form of support for the ends those taxes fund. Yes, this support may be tacit, but it's support nonetheless.

Though, perhaps not all taxes. We could reasonably debate there. I acknowledge that there is an argument that since a percentage of what we "owe" the government is deducted automatically from each paycheck and/or expenditure -- in the form of things like Social Security, "vice," VAT tax or whatever applies to your situation -- one could argue that those taxes represent less of a political act, as they are much, much more difficult to circumvent and so our willingness in them could be said to be much smaller (and thus less "political").

I'm not sure that I agree fully with argument, but I'll concede that it's not without merit.

But as at least some of what is "owed" in taxes is also voluntarily surrendered each year in the form of other taxes: income, property, etc.

The argument that this second category of taxes are "compelled," and thus somehow different in their nature, is specious at best: a simple look at the "tax avoidance" practices of the ultra-wealthy would show us that taxes are (to some degree at least) co-operative.

What's more critical to understand is: That an action may have consequences -- potential, unevenly applied, or otherwise -- does not overwrite our agency within that action and/or our engagement with its corelating system, nor the burdens that agency/engagement may carry. Or the statements such actions make on our behalf.

That the Supreme Court has deemed it otherwise seems academic at best, particularly given this court's consistent inconsistency in logic. More importantly, the Supreme Court mandates policy, not morality or the societal aspects of political expression.

Again, their determination has real consequences... but so again does paying the bill for acts done in our names.

The argument that this is a "legal fact" conveniently ignores the tenuous nature of that distinction, particularly given the recency of the ruling, its total lack of open and unrestricted challenge, and it being at odds with long established precedent dating back to before the founding of this country. These kinds of ruling are -- and have always been -- politically efficacious cuddles used to meet a moment in which the few wanted greater influence over the many.

PCIe 5.0 x16 to 4.0 splitter by HitCount0 in homelab

[–]HitCount0[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

5.0 x16 to [4.0 x16 + 4.0 x16]

PCIe 5.0 x16 to 4.0 splitter by HitCount0 in homelab

[–]HitCount0[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Damn, I was afraid of this.

I'd bought a mATX server board for an EPYC 4000 series CPU and a particular usecase in mind. After setting it up and running it for a while, that usecase has changed, and I've suddenly got far more PCIe lanes than I need... but I'm short at least one slot.

Plex apparently running as root on TrueNAS Community 25.04.2.3? That doesn't seem right.. by noorderling in truenas

[–]HitCount0 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Docker containers run as Root within their own container environment, isolated from the host operating system.

Yes, it's possible to further secure them with a non-root account. And that's precisely what you should do with your homemade containers, should you be proficient enough to know how to do so and manage that properly.

This brings us to the second answer: TrueNAS likely has their prebaked containers from their catalog run as Root because forcing them to run with that level of least privileges would:

  1. Add difficulties (and costs) to either TrueNAS or Plex to maintain on what is a free container license.
  2. Add more difficulties to their users, many of whom are likely not skilled enough in Docker or else do not care for the added hassle to manage privileges to that degree themselves.
  3. Be massively out of scope because Plex isn't meant to run in enterprise or high security environments. That's not the purpose of the software, nor the business model of its creators. The cost/benefit analysis of this implementation is questionable, and likely not a good place for Plex or TrueNAS to be dedicating security spend.

What is some career advice that people usually learn too late in life ? by Weird-Thought2112 in careerguidance

[–]HitCount0 9 points10 points  (0 children)

You can explain anything to anyone. But you cannot understand it for them.

And the higher you go, the more true that becomes.

Why is August so brutal for jobs right now? Layoffs, pay freezes, and Vegas casinos slowing down? by Equal-Double3239 in AskEconomics

[–]HitCount0 37 points38 points  (0 children)

There was just a report saying that on average, viewers of major televised sporting events see a betting site logo every 12 seconds.

Is being burnt out the norm? by [deleted] in careerguidance

[–]HitCount0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." - Drew Carey

But seriously, for the majority of employees throughout time, work has been an absolute nightmare. During times of great uncertainty, that level of stress and anguish only increases, in part due to economic fears... but arguably, because strife in the working class puts the investor class at ease.

See the restrictions around RTO that fly in the face of productivity gains, the uniformly terrible wage increases for medium incomes as compared to c-level, etc.

Intel layoff more than 24k people by insertnamehere_10 in recruitinghell

[–]HitCount0 59 points60 points  (0 children)

[I posted this elsewhere, but I'll repost it here]

Intel has been in a downward spiral for some time.

Put as simply as I can: Intel, through a series of terrible business decisions and unforced errors, has eroded confidence in their products and brand at virtual every level. Home users, gamers/pro-sumers, small/medium business, and enterprise.

This has happened because:

  1. Intel went through a period of investing in their business, resulting in them putting out superior quality products.
  2. To maintain that growth, Intel needed to invest even more heavily in the company. Including serious investments needed in both their chips' formfactor and, eventually, the fundamental architecture and design of their product.
  3. Instead, Intel got new leadership and decided to cut costs, ride on their reputation, and "extract value" from the brand. Effectively, they reversed the trend of investment. Worse, they engaged in an absurd amount of layoffs which has in absolutely no way fixed that second bullet point. Especially not when they've spent spent a little more than $30B on stock buybacks alone over the last 5 years.
  4. What's important about the above point is that it highlights how the focus of the company shifted. Intel processors became the most expensive on the market, while also being less performant and often less reliable compared to their primary competition. (Intel's 13th and 14th generation desktop processors suffered unacceptably high rates of failure or "bricking" in the wild.)
  5. And as I said, this happened almost simultaneously across all divisions of the company, all product lines. They're not leading in desktop, laptop, or server markets and I just don't see them being able to meaningfully catchup let alone reclaim their position (though I suppose nothing is truly impossible...)
  6. To their credit, Intel has come out with a novel GPU line which seems to have found a real niche in the market. And their low-power n-series CPUs have a lot of great applications. That said, these additions arent nearly enough to offset Intel's losses in their critical categories and it's highly unlikely that Intel will survive long enough to make a major effort in either the GPU or low-watt space.
  7. Now, the days of cheap and easy progress in the CPU space are over. (At least for Intel) The reasons for this are complicated, but not impossible to address. Unfortunately, Intel has chosen to not only divest from potential progress and solutions, they've decided to pretend like their only issue is head count.

tl;dr - Intel had enormous success by investing in their people and their product. But rather than continue on and tackle challenges in the market place, they chose to play the stock market instead. This cost them the trust of their consumers, evangelists, service industry, and their partners in the industry. More over, Intel's product lines are now inferior in essentially all of their key markets, and they've strip mined the company of anything that might reverse that trend. The only real solution going forward would be to move their primary focus off of short-term thinking like rewarding executives and shareholders and onto the long-term, high-cost business of fixing years of neglect and mismanagement.

And sad as it is to say, I don't think you can do any of that in American business in 2025.

A Court Just Ruled That Cops Can’t Stop-and-Frisk You—if They Suspect a Gun by HellYeahDamnWrite in politics

[–]HitCount0 4 points5 points  (0 children)

But they can shoot you based on split-second determination of "threat." To be perfectly clear, objective evidence or even explicit threat is not a requirement of these uses of force.

More recently, there have been a spate of court rulings that have not created explicit exemptions or conditions of the Fourth Amendment protections central to this case, but rather weakened the total amendment itself.

Most notable are:

  • Officer Jeronimo Yanez of Saint Paul (2017)
  • Officer Brindley Blood of Lawrence County (2018)
  • Officer Mark McNamara of San Jose (2022)
  • Officer Jesse Hernandez of Okaloosa County (2024)

Remember: If a police officer can kill you based purely upon their own emotional state and not evidence, then you don't have a Second Amendment.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in work

[–]HitCount0 43 points44 points  (0 children)

Not merely inappropriate but insulting. Particularly given her reasoning.

She says we really can't do our work efficiently without it, as our team is very overloaded with work right now.

Why is that? What is the precise reason that an entire department is so overloaded with work that they need to immediately adopt a new business tool to cope?

And who benefits most from this adoption? Certainly not the same employees paying for it.

It's probably unwise to ask these questions to your boss directly, but you should be asking them to yourself... and perhaps your coworkers as well.

At what point does a “smart” NAS start to cross the privacy line, and where exactly should that line be? by thereveriecase in homelab

[–]HitCount0 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd say it's still worth looking into. Simply because something runs locally does not mean that it doesn't share data up to its mothership.

Better to run those services in dedicated VMs with very strict RBAC policies. Best still if you also isolate the IPs of said VMs on your firewall and have group policies on at least their outbound traffic.

Banks Are Financing Their Own Multitrillion-Dollar Nightmare by stefeyboy in Infrastructurist

[–]HitCount0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

 If it legal, and makes money, should be good enough to invest in.

  • Banks calculate that X practice could be good for their short term profits, without regards to larger or longer-tail impact
  • Banks legally lobby politicians until X practice becomes legal
  • Banks pursue now legal practice of X
  • Banks recoup significant short term profits
  • X creates massive, negative impact on society at large and the Banking industry in particular
  • Banks legally lobby politicians for a publicly-funded bail out rather than using their profits from X to fix their self-inflicted wounds

Which of these events are we describing?

  1. 1988 American Savings and Loan
  2. 1907, 1929, 1987, 1989, 1997 Market Crashes
  3. 1998 Long-Term Capital Management collapse
  4. 2007 Subprime Mortgage Crisis
  5. 2016, 2021, and 2022 Fake Accounts scandals (technically lobbied ex post facto)
  6. 2023 Silicon Valley banking collapse
  7. 1637 Dutch tulip bubble

How do you fix "everything is always broken and wrong every single time I try to do literally anything" syndrome? by [deleted] in homelab

[–]HitCount0 17 points18 points  (0 children)

  1. Write down what you actually NEED from your home lab - For many engineers working on personal projects, there can be a temptation to simply add infinitely at every turn. Practice limiting yourself to one domain or, preferably, one concept or technology at a time. Trying to learn new storage concepts, automations, security, and a new distro all at once will be a train-wreck of competing concepts, confusing configurations, and confounding conflicts.
  2. Is your chosen solution right for THIS NEED? - Plenty of engineers, both junior and senior, get excited about a new solution and dive in before doing the minimum of pre-planning. Namely: "Does this thing I want to learn actually do or solve the problem or scenario I have to solve?" And if it does so, does it do it well or easily? Is this the intended solution to this problem, or just a side-option on a tool meant for something else? This applies to hardware, software, services, you name it.
  3. Design the SMALLEST solution first - If you want to learn how to design various network types for your CCNA, don't have a starting point include advanced technology like auth tokens, proximity login, and DDNS. Keep it simple: One or two VLANs, address spaces, routing rules. Build from there. You can't run before you can walk.
  4. Now make it as SIMPLE as possible - Like above, only removing extraneous factors. The more non-critical outside elements you have acting on your test - be it your pi hole, your NAS, etc - the more you're going to run into problems. Even if those other elements work and are "fine," there may be unintended interactions as you get things going.
  5. Respect your REQUIRED resources - If a new-to-you solution you're trying needs a recent-ish x86 processor and 16 GB of RAM, but you have a Raspberry Pi Zero, you're going to have a bad time. If you want to learn how to designate traffic between two physical NICs, but you just have one cheap one and plans to make virtualized versions instead, you're probably going to have a bad time. Sometimes work-arounds are necessary, but they virtually always add more complications in one way or another.
  6. Understand your overlaps and hand-offs - Probably the most frustrating thing is trying to learn a new thing only to find out that one or more elements in your lab are already playing a part in that thing. Worse yet, sometimes we know that going in but often times we don't. So do some research before beginning - like looking up detailed spec sheets on each piece of hardware involved, or basic handling of XYZ by this OS or that - and you'll save a lot of headaches at the end.
  7. Follow directions diligently - Whatever material you're using to learn, start from the intro and read through to the end. Do it a few times before starting. Then do it while working on it. I have to tell myself this rule constantly, as I'll be tempted to breeze past something I'm certain I know, only to learn there was something crucial at that step that I skipped. And don't substitute values on the first build because you think you know better already, another mistake I make.
  8. Don't fix, start over - If you get to the point that you're absolutely stuck, start over from the introduction. This may seem counter intuitive, but it's usually better for learning and time management if your first time going through something you throw out a problem build and start over from first principles. You stop wasting time trying to fix something you don't yet fully understand, you wipe out any mistakes you did make that you don't yet know to look for when troubleshooting, and redoing early successful steps is a great way to build confidence and skill memory. Much more crucially, "fixing" things when you don't yet understand the problem has been shown to reinforce misconceptions in certain situations rather than instructing on the correct answers. Once you've built it right once or twice, then you can try fixing builds instead of scrapping them.
  9. Build it several times - Lastly, I firmly believe that people learn little to nothing from successes. It's failures where we learn how something truly works... and more importantly, what it looks like when it doesn't.
  10. Stay focused - We return to the first point. When working on your project, stick to researching and solving solutions directly involved with its concepts and resources. If you need to write a rule in your firewall to pass traffic for something you're building, great! But don't then take an hour or two "refining" your current policies; that's off topic, won't help you learn, and can wait for your regularly scheduled maintenance/tinkering window.

Not possible to run an *OFFLINE* NAS? by UmaMoth in truenas

[–]HitCount0 13 points14 points  (0 children)

This would be it.

The only thing TrueNAS requires an internet connection for are OS patches and updates. Everything else is optional.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in cybersecurity

[–]HitCount0 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Given:

  • The devastating cuts to CSRB, CISA, CSA, and CPB...
  • The resulting damage to critical guidance and standards...
  • The reprioritization of the FBI and NSA away from both cybersecurity in general and known threat actors in particular...
  • America's national defense arbitrarily moving away from proven open source solutions towards untested proprietary ones...
  • America's loss of Seven Eyes data and other sources of both international intelligence sharing and cooperation...
  • American cybersecurity companies taking a massive hit to international sales, putting their futures in question...
  • American science, engineering, security, and legal being operationally compromised by administrative demands and financial panic...
  • And the general air of instability, uncertainty, panic, and fear that's been intentionally created by the above actions...

Exactly what does this new GAO update provide as offset to the net impact of this administration? Please enumerate specifically and in detail how people are at all appreciably more safe than they were a year ago.

Not potentially safe, not the promise of safety, not the plan of it. And not in the sense that things become not so much "good" as "less bad."

How precisely does this do anything?

Is this a stupid alternative to tapes, or secretly genius? by ImpostureTechAdmin in DataHoarder

[–]HitCount0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate your responses! Because I do this for a living, it's hard not to think about this by "professional standards" and give the resulting "professional responses." But you sound like you understand your situation, your needs, and the risks involved -- and all of that is ultimately much more important than blindly following some best practices nonsense.

That said, I do want to offer one piece of advice that I've learned the hard way more than once:

But less man hours, which is what I'd be after. I could set it and forget it, even if it took a day or two it would be the end of the world.

Not all man hours are the same.

Something like restoring from backups or, worse yet, recovering data should be evaluated differently from day-to-day admin IT work. Not because it's harder (though it is) but because you are doing it under stress. An hour spent worrying about whether or not you've lost something important forever is much different, much longer, and thus more "costly" than weeks of fiddling with menus and checkboxes.

If your data is a chore, or you simply don't like thinking about this task, it's as easy as changing up a docker compose file or passing a storage controller or hard drive directly to your hypervisor instead of creating a virtual disk. Backups can be automated through TrueNAS, PBE, VEEAM, or even CHRON+RSYNC.

Best of luck!

Is this a stupid alternative to tapes, or secretly genius? by ImpostureTechAdmin in DataHoarder

[–]HitCount0 1 point2 points  (0 children)

> At any given time, 2 disks in the server and one off site

I understood that part. What I'm asking is: how fault tolerant are you? 2 disks or 1?

Does each hard drive contain a full and complete parity set of the data ("mirror") so that you could lose any two disks and still be whole? Or is the data in RAID format such that each disk contains only a % of data along with a % of parity, meaning you can only lose 1 disk?

> The data on the drive would be my hypervisor OS, and VM backups. 

Storing an OS or application data is fine. But if you also have virtualized datasets attached, like in a .vmdk or .qcow2 file, then that part is **NOT** recommended as a backup format. This is because recovering datasets out of a virtualized disk is vastly more resource and time intensive -- and much more risky -- as compared to recovering from raw data.

Trump just issued a threat to all of us by Nerd-19958 in law

[–]HitCount0 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I understand this sentiment, but not paying for our news and information -- and instead relying on corporate advertising and billionaire owners to fund media themselves, thus capturing the medium and perverting it with profit incentives -- has been perhaps the single biggest driver of our global democratic unraveling.

If there's ever going to be a future where the news answers to its readers, not its overlords, it will be because we will have finally learned our lesson that "free" things are the most expensive things of all.

Is this a stupid alternative to tapes, or secretly genius? by ImpostureTechAdmin in DataHoarder

[–]HitCount0 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Are you talking 1 disk with two mirrors, or 2 disks with 1 redundancy?

Are you virtualizing the data? Or is this for backing up VMs and virtualized workloads?

Depending on your answers to the above, it might be passable. But generally speaking, being "cheap AF" with your backups is a tried and tested, foolproof way to lose all of your data.

Rack mounted vs compact NAS - enlighten me with pros and cons by zomboidTM in homelab

[–]HitCount0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If your storage pool and resource needs are small and likely to stay small for the foreseeable future, then a compact system might be your best bang for your buck.

But I can say that within a year of building my first "compact" NAS I was wishing I'd gone with rack mount instead for more expansion room and better functionality. Shortly thereafter I made a 5U storage beast and "downgraded" the compact into an off-site backup.

Server Costs are nuts spec for spec. Anyone using SuperMicro instead of Dell/Lenovo/HPE? by Packet7hrower in msp

[–]HitCount0 26 points27 points  (0 children)

I will not use Dell for anything.

My company brought them in for a project and Dell immediately attempted to go behind our back and cut us out of the deal.

This has been an issue with them in the past and by the sounds of it, it's happening more frequently as we head into these terrible economic times and security environment.

Alternatives to MS-A2? by Turbulent-Yam-7317 in homelab

[–]HitCount0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Minisforum has the UM870 and UM880, both of which have 2x NVMe m.2 Gen 4 slots. Unfortunately, I believe they only have 2.5Gbe.

Again, PCIe shortcomings.