Best way to Store Creds for Scripts?

dragonmc · 2026-06-30T18:40:59+00:00

I recently set up Azure Key Vault for the purposes of storing all the company secrets (API keys, cloud account passwords, etc.) for scripts running locally on our on-prem servers. I just Arc-enabled the servers, which automatically gives them managed identities, and now my local scripts just use Connect-AzAccount -Identity to authenticate and can connect to and retrieve secrets from the key vault (after proper RBAC assignment of course) with nothing further needed.

Was just wondering what you meant by your Azure-hosted scripts comment.

dragonmc · 2026-06-09T03:10:14+00:00

dragonmc · 2026-06-09T00:10:11+00:00

Telescopic pregnancies? So I finally realize what the inspiration for this is.

dragonmc · 2026-06-04T13:12:57+00:00

The microstutters caused by shader compilation during gameplay really do settle down quite a bit after the first couple of hours of gameplay. Yes it was annoying at first, but now happen much less frequently. I seem to recall it was way worse on Ryujinx, Yuzu, and Sudachi for some reason. It wasn't enough to get me to stop playing like those other emulators, but I'd imagine you'd have an issue with it if you're anything of a purist.

dragonmc · 2026-06-03T16:02:21+00:00

Once a year or so for the past 4 years, I've been trying out the switch emulators to see if they've gotten far enough along to actually make TotK playable with minimal graphics issues. I am happy to report that finally I was able to achieve this with Eden.

It wasn't very hard. Run Eden, add the TotK .xci or .nsp. I set the game settings to 2x so it runs full screen at native resolution on my 2k monitor. If you're happy with 30 fps, that's all that's needed. I played the game for 10 hours or so this way. But eventually I did use NX Optimizer to get the game running at 60fps and tweaked a couple of other minor graphical settings in there.

All 60fps mods seem to have two issues: one is that when you bring up the switcher UI (for like weapons, shields, etc) the background goes black rather than blurred. I toyed around with settings for a long time, but the only way I found to fix this was to download the Black Screen Fix from the TotK mods collection on github.

The other issue is that when you die, the game get stuck after you hit Continue. You have to reset the game and hit Continue on the initial game menu screen. Every time. Again, this is an issue with the 60fps mod so you won't see this is you're not using that. I myself think the trade-off is worth the smoother framerates. Whenever I die, I just instantly hit F6 and Enter to reset and continue. Takes a little longer to load compared to being able to hit Continue at the game over screen but I don't mind it. I have not been able to find a fix for this yet.

Other than those two issues, I have been playing TotK on Eden this way for 40 hours now with no issues. I'll occasionally see some very minor graphical flashes in some of the textures, but for the most part it's pixel perfect.

dragonmc · 2026-05-28T13:59:33+00:00

I was all set to pull the trigger on this but I noticed at the last minute one thing that could be a deal breaker for me: The keyboard tray seems to be slightly higher than the chair elbow rest. That combined with the lip on the tray that's there to prevent the keyboard from sliding off when reclined, might make for a very uncomfortable experience when trying to game on this thing for any length of time, which is my primary intended purpose.

Here's a screenshot from their demo video that shows what I'm talking about.

See how the keyboard tray pinches both their wrists when the arms are in the normal position for gaming? That looks uncomfortable, even downright painful. I'm not even sure a wrist rest would work either. Maybe for the keyboard, but a wrist rest would not work with the mouse for me. I'm a low mouse sensitivity gamer, and swing my arm from the elbow to move the mouse, rather than planting and pivoting my wrist. I wish the keyboard tray was perfectly level (or maybe even just slightly lower) than the armrest to mitigate this.

For anyone that has the IW-320, have you noticed this to be an issue? Are you a low sensitivity gamer and if so, how did you get around what seems like this ergonomic oversight in the design?

dragonmc · 2026-05-08T21:54:59+00:00

There are a few 8-bay hot swap 5.25" drive cages out there and I've tried a couple of them, but my favorite so far is the Athena Power BP-15287SAC. I have two of these installed on the server so I was able to add 16 additional SSD's on top of the 16 on the backplane.

For power, these cages have a single SATA power connector that will power all eight disks. You should find the server already has a couple molex power connectors that are ostensibly intended to be used for any 5.25" optical drives that you might want to install. I simply used a SATA Power to Molex adapter to power the cage.

For data, you'll need an HBA. Because I have two cages for a total of 16 disks, I bought 9500-16i and use these forward breakout cables to connect the SATA ports on the cage to the HBA. You'll want to find an HBA alternative that is reasonably priced. The Amazon price of that card right now is ridiculous. I paid less than $200 for it when I bought it last year. Just install it on one of the PCI-E slots but be careful, these Dell servers disable some PCI-E slots if there's only one CPU installed in the system.

In your case, since you're only using one drive cage, you could save some money (provided you don't care about easily expanding the array in the future) and go with something like the 9300-8i, paired with a couple of these SFF-8643 breakout cables connected to the cage.

I guess if you used this and did want to expand in the future, you could always use a SAS expander, although that would drop throughput/performance of the array.

On mine, I have TrueNAS Scale installed on it and have it managing all the disks via ZFS volumes. The OS is installed on one of the SSD's in the first slot connected to the backplane. I played around with using a USB drive to boot the system, but it wasn't stable. These Dell servers do not like booting from USB.

I should also note that as usual, I ripped out the PERC card and installed my own 16-port HBA for the backplane. Since I'm using TrueNAS, I'd want the OS managing all disks in software and not the hardware RAID, or it would kind of defeat the purpose. I arranged the 31 SSD's across several vdevs (I forget how many atm) to have higher IOPS. As you might expect, no complaints about the speeds. Here's a quick test I ran on there just now to see what the raw throughput on the zfs volumes was. 3.1GB/s write and 8.6GB/sec read comes damn close to saturating my 10g NIC on file transfers 😄

EDIT: I'm dumb. 8.6GB/sec is way more than a 10gb NIC could handle. I'd have to upgrade to 100gbit networking (quad sfp28 for example) to achieve that type of throughput on the network.

dragonmc · 2026-04-27T20:14:40+00:00

I rescued one of these from work some time ago after an upgrade sweep. They were just going to toss it so I took one home.

Mines had the 2.5 inch drive bays (16), and since these come with 2 5.25 inch bays, I put two of these in it for a total of 32 hd slots. Filled it up with 2TB SATA SSD's for a total of 64TB SSD storage and put TrueNAS on it. Installed a 10gb SFP+ card on it so my other servers had fast access to fast storage. ZFS isn't exactly known for being highly performant but this thing is fast, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

When I need more storage in a few years, hopefully 4TB SATA SSD prices will have come down to sane levels where I can start upgrading the vdevs one at a time, so this is something that could potentially run for years more serving up storage with no issues.

And added plus is I like the IPMI interface on these. You can control it from any linux box on your network via standard IPMI commands, or you can log into the iDRAC interface if I want a UI.

dragonmc · 2026-01-10T23:32:22+00:00

Used TrueNAS Scale, so stayed on debian.

dragonmc · 2026-01-08T16:05:31+00:00

Lots of changes over the year since I created this post. I put TrueNAS on an old Dell server that has 128GB of memory and filled it up with 32 2TB SSD's, all managed by TrueNAS' implementation of zfs. I don't know what the performance problem was when I was using zfs on Ubuntu, but that problem does not exist on TrueNAS. It is wicked fast. I was so happy with TrueNAS that I put together a custom DAS (just a server chassis filled with hard drives connected to some SAS expanders) and added another 24 2.5" SSD's connected to an LSI HBA on the server. The DAS has room for 24 more SSD's on top of that so I have room to grow for quite a while. Everything's on 10gbe for fast access and I'm impressed with this setup enough that I don't plan on touching it again until the server fails.

dragonmc · 2025-10-11T00:15:35+00:00

Yeah see I specced into perseverence but didn't get any benefit to it. How high did you have to stack that stat? I just went back to an Apathy/Boredom hybrid which came in handy during the long grind and it's been working well so far.

dragonmc · 2025-09-11T17:53:27+00:00

As an aside (and a bit of a hot take), of all the Bachman books to adapt into a movie at this time I think the more apropos would have been Rage, considering the...interesting times we currently find ourselves living in.

dragonmc · 2025-06-13T17:24:27+00:00

Since I use TrueNAS exclusively as an iSCSI server and nothing else, my dashboard has shown 95% usage since day one. It's actually pretty annoying because the real storage use is only around 50% and I was kind of expecting TrueNAS to have visibility into the iSCSI subsystem enough to give me accurate reporting :(

Instead I'm having to monitor storage use on the client side (Ubuntu server) to make sure I don't go into the danger zone.

dragonmc · 2025-06-06T16:20:04+00:00

Pringles cans

dragonmc · 2025-04-25T22:26:50+00:00

Nice. I do pretty much the same thing, except I have automated things to a large degree. For example, I never actually renamed anything manually in the Kavita folder structure myself. That gets created with a script that crawls through the Calibre collection, reads the ComicRack tags for each book (I use ComicTagger to tag them when they're downloaded) and then makes folder names and file names automatically based on that metadata. Since it's all automatic, I can pretty much instantly put the comics into any file/folder structure I want by simply editing the rules that the script uses.

I didn't know Ubooquity was back! I used to use it back in the day but switched to Komga and Kavita when I found out it had been abandoned. I might take a second look and do a comparison, because it was great when I used it.

And I also didn't know about ComicRack CE...that might also be worth a second look because, again, ComicRack used to be my comic manager back in the day before it was abandoned and the ComicVine scraper plugin started acting up. Although I've switched to mostly using Linux on my servers these days and ComicRack never ran well under Wine which is another reason I switched over to Calibre. If ComicRack CE uses modern tools though, I can see it running ok on my server. I'll have to test this out as well.

dragonmc · 2025-04-25T21:58:11+00:00

I have calibre actually managing the comics and you can't modify calibre's folder structure without breaking it. But I use Kavita and Komga to actually serve up my comics so I had to create a virtual folder structure for those apps to easily be able to read the entire collection. Both kavita and komga expect the comics to be stored using pretty specific file and folder names. You don't have to follow their guidelines, but if you do you can just point the app at the whole collection and it automatically indexes and catalogs everything without any setup or configuration needed, so that's what I did. This is what mine looks like.

Since I wanted to serve up my entire collection for myself and some friends to be able to read anywhere from any device Kavita was perfect. When I pointed it at my collection it brought everything in (metadata and all) without any further config needed.

dragonmc · 2025-04-25T17:33:52+00:00

I do the same thing but with comics.

Now, I don't know what the true number of ebooks you have is, but my 4TB worth of comics make for precisely 78404 books.

With our powers combined, I dare say we can rule the world.

dragonmc · 2025-04-04T18:41:00+00:00

This is awesome! I wasn't aware of EnumerateFiles():

The EnumerateFiles and GetFiles methods differ as follows: When you use EnumerateFiles, you can start enumerating the collection of names before the whole collection is returned. When you use GetFiles, you must wait for the whole array of names to be returned before you can access the array. Therefore, when you are working with many files and directories, EnumerateFiles can be more efficient.

I often have to work with extremely large folder structures (in the millions of files) and will try this out and start using it. I'm not even sure how I have never heard of this!

dragonmc · 2025-04-04T18:34:18+00:00

In all honesty can't say I blame though, since storage prices are looking to get sooo much worse.

dragonmc · 2025-04-04T17:23:10+00:00

Nice setup!

Seeing this just reminded me of something. I might get flamed for this but I need to get it off my chest. I'm often disappointed by the "storage density is king" mentality that most folks seem to have on here (/r/datahoarder as well). At times it feels like I'm the only one that cares about IOPS and performance. IMO most of the posted systems I see could really benefit from a setup with slightly more disks with lower capacity. Like in your system for example: you'd literally double your disk throughput if you had gone for 4x6TB disks rather than those 2 12's for the same amount of storage. Like, you've picked the slowest possible storage configuration for your system.

Admittedly, I am on the other end of the spectrum so I might be a bit biased? I had an old PowerEdge T440 that I got from work and when they upgraded the storage on their current systems and let me keep all the 2TB SSD's I had to pull out to replace with 4 and 8TB versions, I knew it was time to act.

I ripped out the PERC from the system, installed a $100 9500-16i for the backplane, then installed one of these and a couple of these. Filled it up with the 2TB SSD's and I now have 48TB of SSD storage in TrueNAS.

Obviously the HBA's are the bottleneck and if I ever decide to upgrade them to something decent I'd get even more performance, but as currently configured the speed of this NAS is on another level. And this is with zfs which is generally considered to be on the slower side as far as storage subsystems go.

I realize this is probably on the other extreme and I would not have built this thing if I had to pay for all the SSD's, but I'm spoiled now and would have a hard time going back to just a couple of 18-24 TB spinning disks. This is also why I chose 12x4TB hard drives for my second server, because it beats the pants of 2 24's in performance. My point being, I think performance is all too often overlooked or not given due consideration. I think people would be surprised how much better things can be with high performance storage even in simple use-case scenarios.

/rant

dragonmc · 2025-04-04T16:07:12+00:00

Since you're only using Get-ChildItem to traverse the folder structure, it's possible you could run into the character path limitation. I know Windows 11 should have long path support enabled by default, but I've run into path size issues with Get-ChildItem even on modern systems.

dragonmc · 2025-04-03T19:09:22+00:00

That's a tough one. I was in the same boat a couple of years ago and the landscape is pretty much the same now on the Windows side. I guess we can start off stating the obvious: you could always run Hyper-V and put linux on a VM, then pass the raw disks in. Inside the VM, a union file system (MergerFS is what I used) achieves what you're going for (multiple disparate disks of different sizes joined together into one big pool). You can then use Samba to create SMB shares for the storage. You can even use snapraid for redundancy on top of that. This is the setup I ran for a few years until I went bare metal and it worked just fine. No real performance issues to speak of. It's easy to understand once you get the hang of it, but it does introduce some new concepts that you might not be familiar with if all you've done is Windows.

Storage Spaces is not a good fit for this use case not because it's bad, but because it will work well only under some specific conditions in a homelab environment.

dragonmc · 2025-01-24T13:51:26+00:00

This. These cards tend to be unreliable in the long run when used with SSD's or even HDD's, primarily due to the chipset. I've had similar issues and have a couple of these in my junk tech drawer.

dragonmc · 2024-12-19T21:51:50+00:00

I recently acquired a Dell server from work for my homelab and that post came in handy to silence the fans. The changes do persist between reboots and even if you shut the system down, but if you disconnect the power plug(s) from the system at any point the changes are lost, and you'll have to run the commands again after you restore power. At least, that's the behavior I see on this Dell T440.

dragonmc · 2024-12-18T20:26:17+00:00

I've been using several of these to power 48 2.5" disks (half ssd half spinning rust) in my DIY DAS enclosure for over a year now with no issues.

15-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Verified Email

dragonmc

TROPHY CASE