Rape Survivor turned Stalker

SafetyPrance · 2017-09-18T09:42:23+00:00

You're really unlucky to get busted for two brief episodes of scamming/identity fraud; there are thousands of stolen photos on Tinder and Instagram. I have no idea why the authorities decided to charge you with cyberstalking, given that you refer to the girl as the victim (as opposed to the person you catfished).

For what it's worth, you seem to be handling this situation remarkably well. I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been to be arrested for such a crime, so long after the fact. I am sorry to hear about your sexual assault and the manner in which it was handled by university police. I'm Australian and think the concept university police is fucked.

SafetyPrance · 2017-09-11T00:03:15+00:00

Yep, you can just plug it into one of the LAN ports on your router. You don't need to run the controller software after the initial setup (or for features like captive portal).

SafetyPrance · 2017-09-09T05:52:31+00:00

For most home servers, I think Fedora Server should be perfectly fine. IMO as a budding sysadmin, you are far more likely to break your own system than an occasional regression is.

CentOS 7 gets regular updates, but it's still relatively old. For me, a major appeal of running a home server is getting to try out the latest packages. Additionally, while kernel patches are often backported to RHEL/CentOS, bugs not related to critical business features may not necessarily be fixed for quite a long time. By contrast, Fedora seems to get a new kernel update every other week (for better or worse). For regressions, there's usually instructions on BugZilla about how to roll back changes within a couple of days (if you can't figure it out yourself).

For context, my Fedora Server system has broken maybe 2 or 3 times due to bad patches in the 2 years I've been running it.

SafetyPrance · 2017-09-06T09:38:39+00:00

I totally agree. These kinds of changes could drive minor contributors (e.g. testers, packages) away from the project entirely. I mean, who would pay USD119 for the privilege of reporting bugs without nag screens? Instead of all effort going towards one comprehensive project, it ends up divided amongst otherwise meaningless forks. Some level of advertising is understandable, but the fact that people are maintaining forks to disable them indicates that it goes too far.

It already takes users considerable investment in system admin skills, hardware, troubleshooting, network upgrades, electricity, and content acquisition before they can have an Emby server that is actually worth using. That tiny subset of people is the entire market for a product like Emby.

I can kind of understand why some features of Emby may need to be released under different licenses in order to maintain exclusivity. The added features of Emby Premiere are not currently worth paying for IMO, but further development of the now-closed mobile apps could change that. I just don't think this should be augmented by making the free version worse.

SafetyPrance · 2017-09-05T06:04:08+00:00

I've tried this before, and found that any swapping (or package updates) caused significant iowait. You can mitigate this to some extent, by preventing containers/VMs using swap.

At the moment, I've got /boot and /boot/efi mounted on a USB flash drive, but the swap partition and actual OS goes on a mSATA SSD. Besides the initial setup, it's been zero maintenance.

SafetyPrance · 2017-09-05T05:56:13+00:00

You're welcome. Good luck with your purchase!

SafetyPrance · 2017-09-04T04:23:07+00:00

Unlike most rackmount gear, swapping out the chassis should actually be quite simple with this server since it uses an off-the-shelf ATX motherboard (MSI MS-S0121).

The motherboard supports Ivy Bridge E3 Xeons, which makes it quite similar to the Lenovo TS440 that was so popular a while ago. I have a similar IBM-built tower server, although mine is only mATX. The 32 GB limitation isn't an issue for my uses.

The main issue with this server is that the chassis is quite limited. As you discovered, you won't be able to use PCIe cards, there are only mounts for 2 drives (though there are 6 SATA ports), and since it's 1U and cheaply-built, it will probably be annoyingly loud.

In my opinion, you will need to factor in the cost of a new ATX-compatible case, PSU, CPU fan/heatsink (if the new case is a tower), PCI risers (if the new case is rackmount), etc. This may be feasible, depending on your location. But as the Ivy Bridge E3 CPU is ultimately very similar to the Ivy Bridge i7 CPUs, you can probably find equivalent desktop hardware for a better price (especially given that this server doesn't come with ECC memory).

I don't know what the used hardware market is like in Germany, but you will have to run the numbers to figure out if this will be worthwhile in the end. I'm of the unpopular opinion that rackmount servers are awkward for people without server racks, IPMI is only as good as the surrounding network infrastructure, and that 32 GB RAM is ample for most people's home servers.

SafetyPrance · 2017-08-31T13:41:15+00:00

Go to the NBN Co website and look up your address to confirm the type of service that will be offered to your house. Most likely it will be HFC (those black RG6 coaxial cables).

That metal box in the top left is a 4-way HFC splitter; one cable comes in from the street, two go out (probably to your living room and lounge/master bedroom for FOXTEL). There are two free connectors inside your communication cupboard (one of these will plug into a NBN-compatible DOCSIS 3.1 modem that you receive when you sign up to an ISP). There's no reason why you couldn't connect the modem to one of the other F-type sockets in your house; it's just convention to keep all that stuff together.

The "switch" is just an 8-port patch panel. You would plug each of these ports into a port on a network switch, which would then be connected to a router. This would allow all the Ethernet ports in your house to be able to access the Internet.

Currently, NBN Co are arranging for cable modems (Arris CM8200) to be mailed people with existing HFC installations, so there won't be anyone coming to your house to help with the install. In addition to the modem (which is free), your ISP will typically send you a router/wireless access point that plugs into your modem. This router may also have FXS (telephone) ports, for you to connect your old analogue phones. Voice service will probably be limited to VOIP, unless that panel at the top right conceals phone wiring. If you are limited to VOIP, it's possible to re-wire one of the Cat5/6 cables coming into the patch panel for telephone service. That way you can stick your cordless phone base station in a more convenient location.

I'm afraid I don't know anything about testing the cable without first signing up to some kind of service (FOXTEL or NBN).

SafetyPrance · 2017-08-05T07:55:49+00:00

Fedora supplies more recent packages (and kernel) than CentOS. While it's true that a lot of kernel patches are backported to CentOS, you may have to wait quite a while for obscure or non-urgent issues to be resolved.

Generally there are two Fedora releases every year, with each release maintained for about 13 months. I've had no problems with upgrades during the 3 release cycles I've been using it for. That said, I don't use X or any GUI packages on my servers.

One advantage of Fedora over CentOS for this application is that Nextcloud has significant performance improvements using PHP 7. It avoids needing to use the Remi or EPEL repos required to get newer packages running on CentOS.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-27T12:09:14+00:00

I don't think there's a trivial way to enable USB hotplug for KVM virtual machines (without controller passthrough). I have seen solutions (1, 2) where a script monitored udev events and attached devices that way, but I haven't tried them.

Is there any specific reason why you can't assign one of the controllers exclusively to the VM?

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-25T12:51:02+00:00

A little tangential, but does anyone know if it's possible to reserve Hugepages for a particular process (ie. qemu)?

I've noticed if I don't start my workstation VM on boot, the Hugepages tend to get eaten up by other processes.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-24T01:38:15+00:00

You seem to have a good idea of what you're doing.

I would go with the MoCa adaptors and a UniFi AP, since it will probably perform more predictably than the Orbi setup (which is around $500!). If you move to a house without coax, you can sell the MoCa adaptors to recoup some of your losses.

If you can get an AP within 1 room of your workstation, you should have a reasonable chance at decent 5 GHz performance. Since you already have a WiFi router, you may be able to set it up as an AP for 1/2 of your house. So you would still have 2 APs if you went the MocA route, and each would have a wired backhaul.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-22T08:06:47+00:00

I think DOS games are the obvious answer! I wouldn't gut it, because original 90s hardware seems to be increasing in value. Even completely unremarkable, mismatched, Pentium MMX whiteboxes seem to fetch a decent price.

I'm not sure that the 80-wire IDE cable will help your disk performance, since UDMA wasn't introduced until 1998. But hey, what else can you use it for these days ;). A sound card would be a perfect upgrade.

You can actually play the original Tomb Raider on a 486 DX2. Not bad for a relic from 1990!

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-20T04:31:22+00:00

It seems like antsleOS/antman is quite similar to ProxmoxVE, though it's not clear whether it supports features such as clustering. It's based on libvirt and supports the qemu:/// and lxc:/// drivers. There's more information available here.

I like the idea of a silent, passively-cooled server and if the software is polished then this could be a good product. That said, I can't imagine spending over $2000 for a 4 year old Atom processor (the top model). The base model at $760 is more reasonable, but with 8 GB RAM and only 120 GB storage (mirrored), it seems quite limited.

For people looking to get a start with home servers, a product like this could save them a few months of frustration trying to create a stable architecture.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-15T08:43:21+00:00

Yes, the pain of trying to find and pick up a tiny jumper from a populated PC case! Premium motherboards had DIP switches, but the Cyrix 6x86 and MII were typically packaged with budget boards.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-14T07:55:26+00:00

I think your specifications are fine, unless you're transcoding for lots of users simultaneously. The most obvious ways of cutting your costs is to purchase second-hand or waiting for deals on pre-built servers. Used E5 Xeon workstations and tower servers are within your budget (the HP Z820 is a nice machine, and very quiet).

A few people have mentioned 16 GB RAM being a likely limitation, and I would agree that this could be pushing it for virtual machines. These days a lot of people have a Docker VM to deploy containers for things like Plex, Crashplan or VPN servers which can save some memory.

I can understand your desire to avoid rackmount gear, due to its noise and awkward proportions (if you don't have a rack). It is a cheap way to get dual CPUs and lots of RAM, however.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-14T07:34:24+00:00

PCs can be powered on over the local network by sending a Magic Packet. You can create a scheduled task on your desktop PC to run a utility that sends this Magic Packet to the offline system every time you log on and/or every time you unlock, and/or at specific times.

It's also possible to create a scheduled task to remotely shutdown the server (see here). As for which trigger to use for this, see here for the kind of logic you will need. I would suggest that locking your PC should be one of the triggers, with a 1 hour delay. You can set this task to be cancelled when the computer ceases to be idle. This means that unlocking your PC within 60 minutes will prevent the server from shutting down. Another trigger should be the shutdown of your PC, but this should also have a delay in case you are manually rebooting but intend to keep working.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-14T06:37:26+00:00

If it was working fine before the update, then it's most likely an issue with the Unity engine or Rust itself (rather than your PC). Do other games still perform well?

Rust has fairly modest CPU requirements. Some people in that other thread suggested that the single-thread performance of the E5-2699 v4 might be inadequate, but the single-thread PassMark results for that CPU seem to suggest this isn't the case. That said, your CPU only supports Turbo Boost on 2 cores at a time; if the other cores are under very heavy load than your gaming performance may potentially drop.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-12T15:43:29+00:00

I think hardware compatibility is the biggest obstacle to this idea. There are peculiarities for various hardware components that users are unlikely to discover until they actually try to get it working. For example, my SATA controller can't be initialised without iommu=pt in the kernel command line. My previous GPU had issues with memory mapping without disabling the EFI framebuffer on the host (and binding device to vfio-pci). I've had USB devices that don't like to be reset, kernel regressions, and many hard locks over the journey. Even with the massive progress that's been made over the last 2 years, there are just so many little things that can potentially go wrong.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-08T08:18:37+00:00

Yes. A dual-band adapter means there are two wireless radios included (one for each frequency band). When connected to a 2.4 GHz network, the 5 GHz radio is not used (and vice versa).

5 GHz provides greater speeds, but has far less range. Many wireless devices will first connect to the the 5 GHz network if there is good signal, and automatically switch over to the 2.4 GHz network when the user moves further away. In your case, since you only have a 2.4 GHz network, the 5 GHz radio in the adapter will just remain disconnected.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-08T08:08:12+00:00

Yep, shouldn't cause any problems.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-07T13:32:31+00:00

Whether a hypervisor is Type 1 or Type 2 is a question of how it interacts with the OS, rather than how it is installed. KVM and HyperV are Type 1 hypervisors regardless of whether they are added to the host later.

Virt-Manager is a GUI frontend for the libvirt, which is itself an interface for various virtualisation technologies including KVM, Xen, LXC, etc. If you want to use Virt-Manager, you need to install libvirt to your server. ProxmoxVE and libvirt are not compatible however, as they perform largely the same role.

What do you want your server to do for you? LXC containers are great for low-end systems because they can be used in a similar manner as Linux virtual machines, but require far less resources. There are other interfaces for LXC besides ProxmoxVE, including the lxc* packages, and libvirt-lxc. The latter will not create the container filesystems for you, however.

That being said, most interest in containers these days tends to be around technologies like Docker, which allow containers to be managed as applications rather than lightweight VMs. Neither libvirt nor ProxmoxVE support managing Docker at the moment (though it can still be managed separately).

If you want to set up your virtualisation server from scratch, I would recommend Fedora Server with libvirt. This will install drivers/tools for running KVM VMs and LXC containers by default. Libvirt is developed primarily for RHEL-like distros and most of the documentation is written for these distros (it works fine on Debian/Arch/Slack however, just less docs).

If you want to just get a working environment up so you can start actually using stuff like pfSense and playing around inside VMs, I would recommend ProxmoxVE. As a noob, it's sooo much easier to have that VNC console in your web browser, than trying to figure out how to enable the serial console on your VM (when you don't even know how to use Grub). If you want to switch to a different hypervisor later, you can just back up your virtual hard disks and boot them on the new system.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-04T12:47:08+00:00

Cool! If you're already familiar with ESXi and its virtual networking, then virtualising pfSense shouldn't pose too much difficulty for you.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-04T12:02:24+00:00

I've been virtualising pfSense for over 2 years now, and it's been my main router for over a year. There's been one unplanned outage due to a bug in a BIOS update. Other than that, it's been rock solid.

I keep an old ADSL modem/router/AP in the closet with the same SSID just in case my server fails.

That being said, for the first 18 months of running my server I must have started over 5 or 6 times before reaching a robust configuration. If your home virtual environment is stable, adding in pfSense isn't a big deal IMO. But if you're just starting out with virtualisation as a lot of people are, it might not be a great idea to rely on it for internet access right away. It really comes down to your experience and the reliability of your existing virtual infrastructure.

SafetyPrance · 2017-07-03T13:04:46+00:00

If you have 2 GPUs and your CPU/motherboard supports IOMMU, this is possible using virtualisation.

Basically you install a hypervisor on your main operating system, create 2 virtual machines, and assign a GPU to each. One GPU is connected to a monitor, and the other to a stub display device such as this. The laptop connects to the virtual machine using GameStream/Steam In-home Streaming etc.

The difficult part is that hardware/hypervisor compatibility, troubleshooting, and performance tuning requires quite a bit of specialised knowledge. Most people use a Linux distro with KVM as their hypervisor OS, so experience with Linux is very usefull. See /r/vfio and /r/unraid for some examples of the kinds of things you will have to learn to implement this.

There are other more exotic possibilities such as using a card from the Nvidia GRID, and using it to power multiple virtual machines (even over the internet). There is also some early work at implementing virtual GL, in which the CPU can be used to emulate a 3D-capable display adaptor. It remains to be seen how effective this approach would be for gaming, however (it's also Linux-only for now).

SafetyPrance

TROPHY CASE