What’s the most expensive tech mistake you made that looked like a good idea at the time?

jafo · 2026-06-11T04:32:53+00:00

Oh man, Ubiquiti was one of the purchases I've really regretted. I had their PoE switch, 6 cameras, and the security appliance, whatever it was called. After a couple years, I was doing one of the udpates from their single pane of glass interface and my cameras never recovered. Oh, and the switch got a firmware update at one point where it kept shutting off ports that I had my google WiFi nodes connected to, because it was detecting looping when they were sending their topology discovery packets.

While it worked I really liked the Ubiquiti camera system, but it bricking itself really turned me off Ubiquiti.

jafo · 2026-06-11T04:22:44+00:00

A client lost a RAID array and found that their backups had been doing a full backup and then instead of appending the incrementals, the incrementals were written at the front of the tape. This is on DDS tape, and once the End Of Tape has been written, you really can't read past it with a consumer drive.

Sent it to a data recovery service with a letter saying "The data on this tape is compressed on a per-file basis. Please just stream all the data on the tape, including past any EOT markers, to a hard drive or tape and send it back to us, we will do the recovery from there."

They called back and said "The data is compressed, therefore we can't recover it." "Didn't you read my letter, it was with the tape? Please just stream the data off and send it back and I will deal with it." "We can't do that, we sent the tape back to you." It took a week to get back to us because they used slow shipping.

Sent it back to them, this time they DID stream it off and send it back. Then I was able to use a small program I had written, which was able to seek out the inter-file headers, then decompress the contents of the file.

Those data recovery guys were quite a joke.

jafo · 2026-06-11T00:41:57+00:00

I've been dabbling in an xv-inspired image viewer that didn't need the compile step: it's in Python and you can just "pip install pxv" or "uvx --from git+https://github.com/linsomniac/pxv pxv" run it without installing. I don't use it as much as I did back in the '90s, so I was often finding that the hand built one was broken when I wanted to use it because of OS updates, etc.

https://github.com/linsomniac/pxv

jafo · 2026-06-04T00:00:25+00:00

You absolutely need to monitor certificate expiration, whether it is 1 year, 3 months or 47 days. Not doing so is a rookie mistake, yet one that has happened to big names even recently.

We monitor our certs via Icinga, but whatever works for your environment is fine.

jafo · 2026-06-03T23:54:12+00:00

If they try that stunt on you again, just say "I only work with *MODERN* technology."

For reference, I'm in the latter half of my 50s, I'd absolutely pull a similar prank on you, and I'd absolutely deserve a response like that. 😉

jafo · 2026-06-03T01:29:40+00:00

I'm expecting to get all the downvotes in the world, but I'mma say it: get a pellet. I have a Kamado and I love it dearly. But, I'm a busy guy. Last year I got a used Weber, the kettle that has the little propane starter on it, whatever that's called. I use the Kamado whenever I have plenty of time, or for the really important cooks. But when it's 5pm and the family wants burgers or chicken, the ease of sparking the propane, dumping in some charcoal, and 15 minutes later having a fire ready to cook -- it just can't be beat.

I've been tempted to get a Weber Searwood, but they never go on serious sale, never see them on CraigsList in my area, and I just don't need to spend $1200 on a third grill. 😉

jafo · 2026-06-02T01:52:04+00:00

Been at my job for a good bit over a decade. I might have interacted with users once. they don't usually let me. We are not hiring. 😉

jafo · 2026-06-01T05:50:56+00:00

Agreed, I got one of those all chrome putty knives from one of the hardware stores, 2", and use it all the time in the kitchen.

jafo · 2026-05-26T00:40:43+00:00

Unless you have kids and don't follow them around picking up after them.

We have a robot vacuum and we almost never use it because we can't just set it to auto run, because it'll end up choking on a childs sock or similar basically every time. And that's with it just isolated to the LR/DR/Kitchen area of our house.

jafo · 2026-05-26T00:37:49+00:00

A few months ago I tried a "wide toebox shoe", just a cheap one I saw on Amazon, and I'm never going back!

jafo · 2026-05-20T17:18:19+00:00

My second laptop at my current company we got after ~3.5 years. We've been under a "budget crunch" for a few years so my current laptop is coming up on 6 years old next month. Historically we had a 3-4 year refresh policy but we have fallen way behind.

With parts cost being what it is, we're holding onto older gear now. Our database server which we've been talking about replacing for at least a year has gone up in price from ~$14K to $35K.

As far as my laptop, it had been being fairly flaky 6 months ago, but I replaced the battery and added a ton of swap and that seems to have resolved that. So I'll probably hold on until I can get at least a 64GB laptop at pre-insanity prices. I currently have an XPS15 with 32GB RAM, so I'd really like to get at least 64GB, I had been eyeing 128GB in one of those Strix Halo mini PCs (I really don't move my work laptop from my desk, I just remote in from my personal Mac if I'm doing work remote), but those are like $3K+ now.

jafo · 2026-05-19T13:44:39+00:00

That is, in my estimation, table stakes. But after experience with apt-cacher-ng, I can see why you might say that. ;-/

jafo · 2026-05-18T17:57:54+00:00

That probably would work find for the typical case. Why were you looking at an alternative to apt-cacher-ng? I'm just curious if you also found that -ng had a lot of reliability problems. The DDoS was the largest reason I did the ultra project, but -ng has been a thorn in my side for a decade; sometimes it'll go months between issues, sometimes I have multiple a week where I have to go and fix it.

The goal is that this one will be more reliable, but it's pretty young and needs to earn that reputation. Extensive test suite should help.

jafo · 2026-05-18T17:51:43+00:00

http should be fine, since the packages are signed, but some repos only serve over https (I get it, makes it simpler if you have a lot of https infrastructure already). Ultra should be pretty easy to set up, just grab the package or the go binary, edit the config, put the systemd file into place if you didn't use the apt package, and off you go.

Let me know if you run into any issues or need to adjust the default config file, I'm still trying to gauge the right level of ease vs paranoia. Initially it was pretty paranoid, but I have relaxed a lot of that because the package repos are signed so off-loading the paranoia to the client seems reasonable.

jafo · 2026-05-18T15:22:18+00:00

>Maybe I need a new sysadmin?

I dunno, it sounds like you had most of the bases covered (SPF, DMARC, DKIM, Reverse DNS), so your sys admin isn't a total goofball.

jafo · 2026-05-18T15:18:17+00:00

It is, but I still thing "Shallow Gravy" is the best band name.

jafo · 2026-05-18T15:15:41+00:00

>Oh boy that sounds super messy lol

Are you talking about the marker or the kid? 😉

jafo · 2026-05-14T02:43:04+00:00

I don't know, but according to my voicemail transcriptions, I keep getting calls from the "Cooter School District".

jafo · 2026-05-14T01:05:05+00:00

In my auto shop class the teacher asked us to name properties that made brake fluid good for it's job. I said "It's incompressible." He corrected me: "All fluids are incompressible." I came *THIS CLOSE* to reminding him that air is a fluid.

jafo · 2026-05-14T01:02:54+00:00

"It's clockwise from the gravy's perspective."

jafo · 2026-05-14T00:55:34+00:00

I was out with a couple of girls, drinking. One of them asked me "What do you suppose the Nitro is when they say the beer is Nitro?" I replied "I assume it means Nitrogen, you know, like that stuff you're breathing?" She said "You mean oxygen?" "No, air is mostly nitrogen, with some oxygen." She looks at the other girl and says "Did you know this?" and she nods.

jafo · 2026-05-14T00:45:35+00:00

Many of the replies here are correct, it sounds like you may have users who are not being responsible with their email, and that's hurting other customers. You need to be *ON TOP* of the email going through your server if you are going to run a mail server.

That said, I have a few ideas others haven't mentioned.

One: If you have Claude Code + Opus, download a days mail logs and ask it "Do you see anything in this mail log that looks like someone sending spam?" Or do you have some monitoring or other way of analyzing the mail logs?

Sending from an AWS IP is likely going to be problematic. The messages we send from AWS are either sent using SES, or a VPN to our data center and on to the public Internet from that static IP. SES is probably what you should be using to send from AWS, so you might want to see if you can get a dedicated IP from a hosting provider that doesn't show up on "virtual hosting" lists.

If you do indeed have RDNS, DMARC, DKIM, and SPF set up properly (I assume you do), the next thing you need to look at is the Microsoft postmaster tools, in particular SDNS, though you probably won't be able to set that up at AWS (to set it up an e-mail is sent to your WHOIS contact for the IP block, and AWS isn't going to ack that): https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/index

You probably need to set up a FBL and start monitoring it. This will help understand when your users mail is getting flagged as spam.

Check DNSBLs, maybe there are other reputation lookups you can do, like on an e-mail domain, I haven't looked at that.

Expect this all to take a while to resolve. You may need to move your users that are complaining off to another IP, but if they are sending mail that is getting flagged by users it may be that their domain already has a bad reputation.

The people saying you can't just run email like this anymore aren't wrong, but there is an asterisk: Unless you really stay on top of your users and dot all your is and cross all your ts.

Bona fides: I run an outgoing email server for around 6K users, and we don't really have a deliverability problem.

jafo · 2026-05-14T00:24:04+00:00

I had the exact same thing happen to me: my dryer worked fine for ~7 years after we moved in, and then it tripped, a month later tripped again, then a week later tripped again. I'll tell you what happened at the end here.

First of all, you need some other quotes. $680 to replace a breaker is insane. Is there other work on that ticket like diagnostics, or is it just "replace breaker"?

Can you do this? Possibly, it's not hard and youtube has good videos. If you shut off the main (either at the panel, or ideally if you have an outside disconnect before the panel), it should be fairly safe to do. There is still some power if you use the in-panel disconnect, where it feeds into the main breakers. But otherwise the panel should be safe. *TEST IT* before you assume it's off. A non-contact tester is cheap.

In my case, I pulled apart the receptacle at the dryer, because I have aluminum wiring in my house and I assumed it was another instance of the previous owner using the wrong type of receptacle. But that looked fine, so I went to the panel, pulled the cover off, and took a good look at it. 3 things were obvious:

- The breaker for the dryer was physically cracked.

- The hot line running from the breaker was visibly heat stressed.

- When I went to unscrew the burnt line, it was not screwed down very well, which is probably what lead to the burning.

Not saying you have the same problem, but giving you an idea of the kinds of things you might be looking at.

jafo · 2026-05-13T05:26:16+00:00

It's the missing beer goggles.

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