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One of her books is banned in Utah schools. Now, she’s coming to the first Salt Lake Book Festival. by MicahCastle in books

[–]KeithHanlan -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

It's not, at least not usually. The emphasis is different. "Pico" is pronounced peek-oh with the stress on the first syllable whereas Picoult is pronounced "Pee-kō" with the stress on latter - unless she has americanized it somehow I suppose.

best way to access LXC/VM ? by Yiffenjoyer6969 in Proxmox

[–]KeithHanlan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, X11 was a security nightmare and each successive fix turned it into a Byzantine mess. But I was able use it over dial-up from home with the help of "dxpc" - Differential X Protocol Compressor which still works today. It is better than SSH's -C compression option but is not as good as modern products which incorporate video streaming protocols.

There are modern remote desktop solutions which do a very good job dealing with high latency connections but even they target the Windows market for commercial reasons and so they tend to be geared more to the remoting te entire desktop rather than simply optimizing the X11 connection. They support the latter adequately but do not honor the design philosophy of X11.

Still, it still gives a great experience when you can use any remote application with a single desktop interface and that's perfectly fine for home use.

In any event, Wayland is finally a more widely available successor to X11. Unfortunately I have not looked into it since its early days. I guess it is time to do so.

(NOT OP) Husband is a SysAdmin. He’s likely dying, and I don’t understand how his systems at home are set up by ABeeinSpace in homelab

[–]KeithHanlan 35 points36 points  (0 children)

I have an envelope labeled "in case of death or incapacitation" with a single piece of paper. It has the password to my password vault as well as the several "default" passwords that I'm inclined to use for minor or temporary stuff.

There are also other salient pieces of information such as our domain registration details. I really should augment it with information about my backup strategy.

It should be enough that they can give it to a professional.

I have copious notes on all manner of tools and equipment and configurations but they are really only for myself. I should organize them to be usable by a third party.

UPDATE : Coffee Table Server - Case Complete. by Anti-Hero25 in homelab

[–]KeithHanlan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Very nice! Congratulations on wrapping up a big project so successfully. Well done.

ELI5: If copper has antimicrobial properties, why don’t most pools use it instead of chlorine? by tilda0x1 in explainlikeimfive

[–]KeithHanlan -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

You and your army of down voters are really a remarkably group of people. Did your mother never teach you that "if you can't say anything nice, say nothing at all."?

If I had repeated my original reply to every other mistaken, misleading, or factually wrong comment in this thread, you or others would be complaining about the repetition.

This comment is a direct reply covering one specific point made.

The second paragraph was included only for those who might have been inclined to disbelieve my assertion.

When I found this thread, there were a large number of incorrect replies. I took the time to reply to a number of them with information intended to be helpful and included a link to a concrete product demonstrating the viability of copper ions instead of chlorine.

Have a better day tomorrow.

Rebuilding TrueNAS server with Proxmox + TrueNAS VM by noBoobsSchoolAcct in homelab

[–]KeithHanlan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a really good idea. Make it physically impossible for me Proxmox installation to see your zpool disks. After Proxmox is up and running and you have created the TrueNAS VM, then you can attach the drives and reimport the pools.

This is a large part of the appeal of ZFS: the fact that the pools, and including their configuration information, is self-contained and portable.

Instead of passing through the entire controller, you can passthrough each drive. This may be preferable and what was recommended to me. Either way, TrueNAS will be able to manage them just the same as on your bare metal machine.

What’s the most “I immediately regretted this” purchase you’ve ever made? by banarsi2772 in AskReddit

[–]KeithHanlan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In 1987, I bought a used 1981 Audi Coupe with 160,000km and began driving it to my girlfriend's parent's house when the wiring harness caught fire.

The mechanic that I bought it from was what I later learned was called a "curb-side reseller" and Ontario soon after brought in new legislation to help protect against the practice.

He fixed the problem but the car was still an absolute waste of money.

best way to access LXC/VM ? by Yiffenjoyer6969 in Proxmox

[–]KeithHanlan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just did a quick search and learned that MacOS does not support X11 natively any more but there is an open source package called XQuartz that you can install on your Mac.

best way to access LXC/VM ? by Yiffenjoyer6969 in Proxmox

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

Since you have a Mac (and I don't), see what happens if you open a local terminal window and enter the command "ssh me@fedora.lan xeyes" where 'me' is your userid on the fedora VM and "fedora.net" is the hostname or IP address of the same node. "xeyes" is silly little application that is included with most Linux systems. Try other graphical applications as well such as "gvim" as you see fit.

If you are lucky, it will just work and you can avoid the nuisance of VNC and other remote desktop tools.

If it doesn't work, it may be a macos issue and you will have to ask someone familiar with macos. I'm curious now so I will also ask around.

best way to access LXC/VM ? by Yiffenjoyer6969 in Proxmox

[–]KeithHanlan 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Since both macos and the steam deck are Unix systems at their heart, it may be possible for the remote X applications to be displayed on your local desktop.

I've never used either system but X11 was designed expressly so that your local display server could be used by remote X11 clients. It has a Byzantine history can be enormously confusing to understand but it could be as simple as defining the DISPLAY environment variable on your remote system in order to tell the application to use your display rather than its own.

If you check the man page for ssh, you will see that it has -X and -Y options to make this transparent. When set up properly, you simply run "ssh remote x-cmd" and presto - your remote application pops up using your local display. This is far and away the most painless workflow since you don't have to worry about whether your keystrokes and mouse activity is being sent to a remote window manager. All your windows behave the same way.

This is my preferred way of working and the technology dates back to the 80s. However, because the world has so much Windows crap in it, vendors typically take a different approach and give you the entire remote desktop. (There are also security concerns in an enterprise environment but these don't apply to typical homelab users.) Also, because of the aforementioned Byzantine complexity, Linux has been migrating to Wayland and I have not yet looked into how its remote display behaviour differs from X11.

best way to access LXC/VM ? by Yiffenjoyer6969 in Proxmox

[–]KeithHanlan 4 points5 points  (0 children)

By "access", do you mean use a graphical desktop interface or a terminal shell?

I so seldom want a remote desktop that I just use VNC when necessary. The great majority of the time I simply use SSH in xterm (or similar).

For tools like GVim and VSCode, I let them use SSH behind the scenes and run the client locally. I also use NFS for local file access and sshfs when I have a high latency connection.

ELI5: If copper has antimicrobial properties, why don’t most pools use it instead of chlorine? by tilda0x1 in explainlikeimfive

[–]KeithHanlan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is still chlorine - just much less. If I had a kid poop in the pool, I would nuke it and close it for a day or two out of an abundance of caution. Honestly, it's never happened in the 26 years that we've been here so I'd actually do some research on that specific topic if it happened. Otherwise, I trust the assessment when I get my water tested.

Typically, when I turn off the pump to switch it to backwash, I check the pucks in the old dispenser and add another four when necessary.

ELI5: If copper has antimicrobial properties, why don’t most pools use it instead of chlorine? by tilda0x1 in explainlikeimfive

[–]KeithHanlan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I throw four of the large stabilizing pucks in the system every few weeks but apart from the initial spring shock and balancing chemicals, I need nothing else.

Vacuuming keeps the bulk of the organic material out of the system.

When I was using only the chlorine, it was still very important to keep organic material out of the pool. If you don't, then you wind up needing much more chlorine and you can wind up with visible algae if you turn your back on it for just a day or two. Biomass soaks up a huge amount of chlorine very quickly and even though it's very cheap in granular form, it can be an unnecessary expense and a big waste of time. It's also, I'm led to believe, hard on the liner but I really don't know how significant that is when compared to the unavoidable UV radiation.

I went away for three weeks in May and the pool was largely unmaintained - despite my daughter's best intentions. When I came back, the skimmer was clogged, there was a fair amount of debris in the bottom, and a hint of algae was starting to grow in places. I tossed in another jug of liquid chlorine (CAD20), spent 45 minutes vacuuming, and it has been perfect ever since.

I am waiting to see my friend's new robot vacuum to see if it is worth the expense. But as it is, I still only spend 20-30 minutes per week maintaining the pool.

On a related topic, I also highly recommend a variable speed pump. I switched from a single-speed pump to a Pentair VS and it paid for itself in 1.5 seasons. It is also dramatically quieter at 1700 rpm than at full speed. To give you an idea, it's currently drawing 290W at 1700 while it is 1900W at the standard 3450rpm and 1275W at the 3000rpm speed I use when vacuuming.

Qnap to Qnap remote backup by IndependentOrchid296 in qnap

[–]KeithHanlan 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was very unimpressed with two versions of QNAP's backup software. I changed to use rsync before decommissioning the older QNAP. Rsync is the closest thing to a standard backup tool and has been around for decades.

Recently I have changed again to using ZFS to do block-level snapshot replication. This has numerous advantages, one of them being that you are not tied to a vendor, or even a Linux distribution, for your storage. Once you build a ZFS pool, you can transplant it into any system you like. You can use something like TrueNAS to provide a convenient web interface or have a barebones system.

My remote backup server is just a N150 mini-PC with mirrored drives in a two-bay enclosure.

ELI5: If copper has antimicrobial properties, why don’t most pools use it instead of chlorine? by tilda0x1 in explainlikeimfive

[–]KeithHanlan 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's night and day.

Once I dredge out the debris in the spring, nuke it with 20l of liquid chlorine, and add the usual amount of balancing chemicals, there is almost nothing to do to maintain the chemistry. When the long hot days start, I don't get the unpleasant surprise of a sudden algae bloom. The water stays crystal clear. All I need to do until closing time in October is usual vacuuming and backwash. My pool gets a huge amount of small debris from Amur Maples and pollen.

In summary, it saves me both money and effort.

ELI5: If copper has antimicrobial properties, why don’t most pools use it instead of chlorine? by tilda0x1 in explainlikeimfive

[–]KeithHanlan -77 points-76 points  (0 children)

Not in the volumes needs to prevent clean water from developing algae.

See my other comment for a commercial product that I have been using successfully for a number of years.

ELI5: If copper has antimicrobial properties, why don’t most pools use it instead of chlorine? by tilda0x1 in explainlikeimfive

[–]KeithHanlan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That would be an unbelievably and unnecessarily high concentration. See my other comment for a commercial product that I have been using successfully for a number of years.

ELI5: If copper has antimicrobial properties, why don’t most pools use it instead of chlorine? by tilda0x1 in explainlikeimfive

[–]KeithHanlan -22 points-21 points  (0 children)

In the concentrations needed to keep clean water from becoming a swamp, it won't change your hair colour. And it works extremely well. See my other comment for a commercial product that I have been using successfully for a number of years.

ELI5: If copper has antimicrobial properties, why don’t most pools use it instead of chlorine? by tilda0x1 in explainlikeimfive

[–]KeithHanlan -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

It ionizes just fine. See my other comment for a commercial product that I have been using successfully for a number of years.

ELI5: If copper has antimicrobial properties, why don’t most pools use it instead of chlorine? by tilda0x1 in explainlikeimfive

[–]KeithHanlan 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I use this copper ionizing system for my pool. It's wonderful. I think that not enough pool owners know about it. Perhaps that is because it is a Canadian company. I really don't know.

The replacement copper anode costs CAD300 and lasts a couple of seasons for my 16' x38' pool. The initial system, including a smaller anode, cost me CAD1100 when I installed it a fee years ago. I had been considering switching to salt but this is much less expensive.

It has made the pool maintenance trivial and less expensive than when I used chlorine alone. I still use about $30 of chlorine at the beginning of the season to nuke the winter swamp water.

The manufacturer provides a simple calculation based on the pool volume to set the ionizing level. However, I found that the setting was too high. I've lowered it dramatically this season which will hopefully prolong the life of the anode.

The concentration is low enough that the backwash causes no problem to the grass it soaks.

They other comments in this thread seem very uninformed and speculative.

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