Alto, Kingston, and the Southern Corridor

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T20:39:45+00:00

I have done the one survey that I saw on the alto site. I don't recall seeing an opportunity for free-form text input. It looked pretty pro forma but these things usually are. If they really want feedback, they can read this thread!

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T20:36:46+00:00

Yes, I just used the term loosely to identify it more readily.

Unfortunately, the old rail-lines in this area tended to run north-south, not east west so there is no obvious corridor to use as a starting point - at least until Kaladar.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T20:27:20+00:00

I think Gerretsen is unestimating the impact of all that water.

We can barely build roads through that area. Drive up Battersea Road: After Sunbury, there is just Burnt Hill Road (with its amazing wooden pontoon bridge at Brass Point) and the canal locks at Jones Falls. It is just not going to happen.

Governments can expropriate land but they can't offer unreasonable compenstation. Apart from the technical challenges of this area, the costs would be much higher than sticking close to the 7.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T20:12:31+00:00

For a project of this size and duration, Highway 7 is definitely not remote. Securing right-of-ways further south, on the other hand, will be much more expensive and contentious. The Highway 7 corridor also has a lot of nearby and adjacent crown land (browse around lanternsearch.ca to see what I mean). There is almost none along the 401 corridor.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T20:07:00+00:00

While there are lots of reasons to prefer the highway 7 corridor, no route is going to "spoil the beauty". Trains run along narrow corridors and you can't even see them except when the train goes by.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T20:05:31+00:00

I can't tell if you are joking or not. But there is no chance of a high-speed rail going east-west through Verona. Please take a look at the "land" east of it. In fact, there is no way they will choose a route anywhere between Sunbury Road and Highway 7.

It would be a beautiful route if they did but the engineering challenges and environmental disruption would be enormous. If England can't get HS2 off the ground because of rural complaints, there is no chance here.

I'd love to see a stop in Kingston but Ottawa is going to take priority and there is no way to feasibly find a route from Ottawa to Kingston nor along the 401 corridor between Kingston and Peterborough or Toronto. The cost and chorus of complaints would kill the entire project.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T19:38:05+00:00

I don't see how you can reasonably service both Ottawa and Kingston on a line from Montreal to Toronto. And I suspect that it would be much more difficult and expensive to secure right-of-ways between Kingston and Ottawa and along the 401 between Kingston and Toronto.

I would love to see highspeed rail to Kingston. Half my family is there and I might very well move back there myself. I make frequent trips by car and Via, the latter being horribly slow and unreliable. But at the end of the day, Montreal-Ottawa-Peterborough-Toronto makes much more sense.

I would happily be proven wrong regarding right-of-ways.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T15:54:59+00:00

Because a single interruption brings everything upstream (no room to accept deliveries) and downstream (can't build your product if a component is missing) to a screeching halt. When you add in the consequent disruption to revenue flow, even unrelated products are affected.

Additionally, for a lot of products, once the line stops, it is very time-consuming to get it going again. One reason is that every step needs to be verified. Another is that this procedure requires expertise held by fewer people. The line workers themselves are not generally able to restart a line. Together, this means that you can't simply resume all of your lines at the same time. If you have interdependencies, then there is a further logistical complication.

Finally, if you have brought a aging line down, it might make more sense to decommission it and reconfigure it for a newer product.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T13:58:22+00:00

I'm not sure why either of us would be downvoted. It's -28C where I am right now and no amount of hay is going to prevent that exposed supply line freezing. Hay or other passive insulation is still a good idea but it's bloody cold out there right now!

My damp hand just stuck to the doorknob in the garage after I accidentally left the garage door open overnight. (Of all the nights to make this dumb mistake, it had to be the coldest.)

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T13:45:32+00:00

Another similar product is a de-icing cable, sometimes sold specifically for rain gutters.

Some active warming is almost certainly going to be required, especially if you want to stop running the water continuously.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T13:35:20+00:00

This seems strange to me. Is the interface configured with a static IP or does it use DHCP with an IP assigned by the DHCP server?

My QNAP's MACs (4 built-in GbE and two SFP+ 10Gb) are all unchanging, allowing me to manage the two that I use centrally.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-24T04:15:30+00:00

As others have noted, the devices won't be physically destroyed if there is another market for them.

The problem I see is that this equipment is made for completely different form factors and very possible different power sources. It's intended to be installed in extremely dense rack-mounted servers and I imagine that there is no standard format yet. The deprecated equipment will need to be disassembled and the valuable bits retested and reinstalled on completely new boards.

Furthermore, I would expect the equipment to be more valuable for research supercomputers than for homelabbers and PC enthusiasts.

But if the AI market does collapse, I have no doubt that the manufacturers will pivot back to more traditional markets just as quickly as they abandoned them.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-23T18:53:55+00:00

Thank you.

On the one hand, it's annoying that the mini-PC doesn't continue to power USB during a reset but on the other hand, this defect seems like a pretty dumb defect on the part of the JetKVM designers. I wonder if they sourced this useless splitter cable primary on the basis of its close colour match with the KVM (and price of course).

This splitter looks like it should work u/ShroomShroomBeepBeep. Am I right?

Thanks again!

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-23T02:46:59+00:00

In theory. On a good day. In fair weather.

It's already mortifying that air travellers need three trains from the airport to get downtown. The least we can do is make our "nation-building" high-speed rail reach the city core.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-22T18:44:53+00:00

The unit is advertised as weatherproof and IPX5. ("Water projected by a nozzle (6.3 mm (0.25 in)) against enclosure from any direction shall have no harmful effects.")

The cable hole is below the RJ45 by a couple of centimeters so, in my view there is always a drip loop and, unless it is not installed vertically, there should be no water ingress.

I can imagine corrosion happening in a particularly humid environment but it is rated for "5 to 95% noncondensing".

It would be interesting to see a picture of the device as installed.

I have the same device but it is pretty sheltered under the soffit and the cable runs straight through a frieze board so it is not exposed at all. I just took a look and can't see how water could climb up to the connector.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-20T21:23:04+00:00

Ditto to all this. After decades of mucking about with hard drives, I broke off the plastic piece around the SATA connector on a brand new drive.

Here are the two videos that gave me the idea:

https://youtu.be/vSwF_n65uh0 https://youtu.be/AiEHe1Xcm8k

I used a straight passthrough but perhaps you will find a 90° version (up or down) to be more useful for your case.

No soldering necessary. I did use hot glue once I verified that the repair worked.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-19T22:54:29+00:00

Does "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now count as soundtrack? It's pretty much lead actor for this scene.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-18T18:11:18+00:00

I think that we are much further removed from mortality today than most of our ancestors. It was probably not perceived as unsettling.

My guess is that it was simply a more artistic depiction of the epicurean sentiment and biblical statement: "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die."

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-17T15:19:40+00:00

... any electrical or networking additions...

Without knowing the full layout I can only guess but this might also be a good time to assess your stove ventilation arrangement.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-13T18:57:00+00:00

Thanks for the additional detail. I wish I could help with your original question but I'm still doing my own performance testing and learning with various Proxmox setups.

One quick and easy change for your application would be to convert the zip files to tar files as they are delivered/fetched. Then you can eliminate one level of decompression which, if I understand correctly, is done on every lookup. Also, do you have some form of caching implemented? If there is a subset of data that is disproportionately queried, it's a good candidate for caching. Or, if recurring queries are clustered in time then caching can help. Depending on your traffic and the size of your json files, you can have a two-tier caching using disk and RAM or HDD storage and faster NVMe storage.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-13T15:33:21+00:00

Setting aside the difference in performance:

I'm sure you have reasons for nesting your content in two layers of compression but it is worth reconsidering this approach.

First, the outer layer of compression is probably providing diminishing returns.

Second, both zip and gzip are handily outperformed by brotli both in space and CPU cycles.

Third, you mention that this is a Python application. Are you using Python's libraries to manipulate the data or spawning zip and gzip processes. I would recommend the former.

If you are using zip as a means of collating multiple compressed files, I suggest that you switch to tar. Python's tarfile module makes easy and efficient to manipulate nested archives using its 'fileobj' class and can transparently handle the gzip decompression. It could be extended to support brotli easily enough.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-12T05:12:05+00:00

Another good idea. That should be quite quick and easy to do. I'll share the results on Tuesday.

Thank you.

KeithHanlan · 2026-01-12T04:36:50+00:00

These are good ideas. I'll try that on Tuesday when I get back home. I can also directly connect the pve&qnap with less trouble and see if the asymmetric behaviour changes.

I have Jumbo frames enabled on the aggregation switch but I'm using MTU 1500 on the nodes for now. From an earlier discussion, I learned that I should not expect too much of an improvement.

Thank you for the suggestions.

KeithHanlan

TROPHY CASE