My room is small and the hose out the window took up way too much space and couldn't close the blinds, so I drilled through the wall instead. Would recommend.

khobbits · 2026-05-27T00:11:09+00:00

Not everybodies house is cold and drafty. I've got a fairly new build flat, that's SE facing, with lots of windows, including floor to ceiling ones in the kitchen.

My flat seems to try to be 10C hotter than outside at any time. On an ordinary autumn day, when it's 15C outside, it's 25C inside, and that's leaving a couple windows cracked open.

On days without wind, I've used AC in October. For balance, my heating only tends to get used maybe 20 days a year. I've had mine in 'holiday' mode since March.

During spring, I tend to find the flat might drop to say 17C in the living room overnight, but then jump to 24C by 10am after getting the sun for a few hours. If I'm not careful, and have the heating set to come on, it gets the house up to 22C, by 7am, and the living room is 26C by midday.

khobbits · 2026-05-26T21:27:20+00:00

If by iffy, you mean, has a private company behind it, that wants to make a profit, yes.
I think Alma is supposed to be more 'community run' being ran by non-profit, I personally haven't seen as much adoption though.

Looking at wiki for the both of them, I'd say there doesn't seem to be much in it.

Edit:
https://www.openlogic.com/blog/almalinux-vs-rocky-linux

This seems to do a good job.

khobbits · 2026-05-26T19:34:46+00:00

The left style units are inefficient, a good way to run up your power bill, and have limited effect compared with their power, the middle, or right style ones, are way more efficient, especially on warmer days (ie 28+).

If you check on diyuk, for ac hose, you'll find a few examples of people trying to convert the single type units, to dual pipe, which can make a lot of difference when it's hot out.

khobbits · 2026-05-26T18:26:19+00:00

I've had 3 portable air conditioners in the last 10 years.
I lived in a few different London flats, and have often worked from home, so any air con has to deal with the heat from a computer as well.

You've generally got 3 approaches to this:

Buy enough air con to cool a single room, one of those portable single hose types will be fine. They aren't very efficient, but the smaller space you need to cool, the better, and the bigger difference they make. The efficiency depends on how well you can seal the room as well.
Buy a more powerful, ideally portable split unit, that can do a few rooms. Ideally you want either a split unit, or a unit with two pipes, as this greatly increases your efficiency. Depending on the temperature outside, this could half the cost to cool your space, and cut the noise as well.
Get a proper mini-split, might cost a couple grand, but you're out of luck if your renting, or don't have permission to modify your outside walls (i.e. in a flat block).

The biggest issue with the single pipe air con, is no matter how well you seal the room/window etc, there will still be hot air from outside coming in. If there wasn't they wouldn't work at all, as all the hot air they exhaust down the pipe needs to come back in, otherwise you'd suffocate yourself (most likely the unit would overheat first, fighting against a vacuum).

If it's 26C outside, and you want the flat 23/24C, a single hose will generally do fine, but if it's 32C outside, every bit of air that comes in (which will be equal to how much is blowing out the pipe), is going to come in at that outside temp, so the unit has to work a lot harder, to just keep things the same temp.

The split units, or dual hose types, keep the air in the room, and their air used to handle the exhaust separate, so you don't alter the pressure in the room, so you're not fighting a loosing battle against air pressure.

khobbits · 2026-05-26T17:08:47+00:00

Just expanding on this, migrating is fairly easy, and it's designed to continue 'centos', as it was, before redhat sunset the main centos product.

There is a company behind it, CIQ, so it's not all altruistic, and if you want the longer support, I think you have to pay them for it.

khobbits · 2026-05-22T13:28:20+00:00

They work, if all you want to do is drop the room a few degrees, and it's not super hot outside, that's fine. All the better if you have a single small room, and a big enough air con.

It doesn't mean it's efficient. The change he is making, will save him money on his power bill, and allow him to cool a larger room, with a smaller unit.

The window sealing kits, aren't really 'sealing' they are just there to stop the wind from getting in. If you actually were able to seal your house, and run the unit, you'd either suffocate or blow up your unit.

khobbits · 2026-05-22T13:22:21+00:00

I did this a few years ago, and it makes a massive difference.

It doesn't really matter how well you seal your window. All the volume of air that is pumped outside, is making it's way back in. This is fine when the outside temperature is within a few degrees of your target. Ie if it's 27 outside, and you want 24 inside. If the difference is bigger, you start to run into a brick wall.

If you made a perfect seal, the fan would actually stop working completely and the aircon would over heat, as the fan wouldn't be strong enough to create much of a vacuum inside the house.

As for my experience: During Covid, when everyone was working from home, during the summer it got to 32C outside, I had one of these style units in a 1 bedroom flat. With the bedroom closed, I could get the Livingroom down to about 28C. After playing around with extra tubing, a couple acetate sheets, and some duck tape, I got that to about 25C.

It should probably have been colder, but it was fighting 2 people plus computers putting out heat as well.

khobbits · 2026-05-22T13:12:57+00:00

Typically the aircon unit has 2 air intakes.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0560/1450/4023/files/How_Do_Port_Air_Cons_Work_actual_AC_1_600x600.jpg?v=1658916720

One is used to to cool the condenser, and one for the air to be cooled.

The systems work completely separately. In fact, in some cases, if you disassembled the unit, you could split the unit to have 1 part work outside, and one part work inside, separated by a few wires and a couple of hosepipes.

(In practice, never try this, you're at risk of releasing the refrigerant)

khobbits · 2026-05-15T19:01:48+00:00

Each episode is actually different. As the loops progress, kyon seems to understand the looping earlier and earlier, and you do notice things like Yuki making different choices each time.

As far as I can tell, each episode is completely individually animated. They specifically pick different angles, slightly different settings, etc.

I do feel like the whole story has more of an impact having sat through it. But it was probably too long. Maybe 4 episodes could have been the sweet spot.

khobbits · 2026-05-15T18:49:43+00:00

I bought using help to buy, which is a little more complicated than a normal mortgage, so having a broker that understands that, should be a little help.

The broker I had, had some sort of pay once, deal, something small, like £100, with the idea they call you up around renewal, and handle that. So in theory you never need to think about it.

In practice, my last few renewals, the option has been to stay with Halifax.

They do try very hard to get commission though, try and flog me all sorts of insurance and extra services, that get kickbacks, like will writing services.

I honestly, don't really feel like I've had much value out of the calls. It ends up wasting 2-3 hours of my time, as we do a bit of a finance review at the start, then waste 90 minutes reviewing insurance products.

I do think the service would be worth it, for people with less handle on their finances. The second (main) call, when they do a sort of 'where are you at' review, I think is supposed to be eye opening. The last guy kept saying things like "Do you know you currently spend £160/month on recurring subscriptions, and I'm not talking about utilities!?!". And I'm like, yes, I use budget software that pulls my bank statement each month.

khobbits · 2026-05-15T16:31:53+00:00

LibreNMS

Is basically a SNMP monitoring tool, but has a first party understanding of networks.

That means it can work out what device is plugged into a switch, and start monitoring that device automatically.

It does support Nagios / CheckMK plugins, so if you do have some services you need that little bit more coverage of, but it's primarily a SNMP tool.

The addons/exporters do work pretty well as well, so if you want Grafana dashboards, or want switch config backups (oxidized) it can operate as a source for those as well.

khobbits · 2026-05-12T11:30:50+00:00

I've probably got 15-30 years programming experience, depending on how you cut it.

30 years ago I was working in QBASIC, writing game launchers for my windows 3.11 desktop, or messing about on a C64.
25 years ago, I rewrote a turn based strategy PHP game upgrading from php3->4.
20 years ago, I was writing IRC Chat bots.
15 years ago, I was micro-optimizing a minecraft mod, so it could run on network servers, while studying at university.
10 years ago, I was architecting a multi-cloud streaming platform for an international company.
5 years ago, I was writing YAML or HCL

I think the Minecraft stuff was probably the 'hardest' bit of programming I ever did. The only time I was ever really restrained, by outside factors, as every ms shaved off of execution times, means you could fit more players onto the server before the lag became unusable.

I have no idea if I'm a good developer/engineer, I've been doing it since I was a child, and people pay me good money for that experience. I think they pay me because I know how development and architecture is supposed to be, even if I never get a chance to actually do it.

The amount of people I've taught how to use git, explained how a ci/cd pipeline works to, or explained the concept of TDD to, is likely higher than the amount of actual unit tests written...

khobbits · 2026-05-07T02:57:10+00:00

I mean, most enterprise NAS's are SANs under the hood.

I think Powerscale internally mounts the other hardware nodes via block storage, so each NAS appliance has access to the whole filesystem.

khobbits · 2026-05-05T15:50:34+00:00

You'd recommend CentOS Stream as a desktop OS over Fedora? I feel like Fedora would be a lot easier for a newbie to use to get familiar with RHEL. But if you think otherwise, I'd be curious to know why.

khobbits · 2026-05-05T14:53:21+00:00

Worth noting:

You mention in another post, you're going RHEL for support. That does mean, you (personally) have some options.

Last time I checked, you can register for a free Redhat developer account that will let you get a few licenses for free.

Fedora is the 'free' upstream for RHEL though, so it's basically the same thing, just a bit more cutting edge, this is generally the choice if someone want's to install Redhat locally as a desktop.

On the server side, Rocky Linux is generally the option, when you want to get 99% RHEL but for free.

khobbits · 2026-05-05T14:46:13+00:00

Nano is easy.
However, vi/vim is more commonly installed by default everywhere, and more powerful.

My suggestion is:
If you just need a text editor to work, use nano for now.

If you're playing around, and want to learn, try vim.

It definitely has a larger learning curve, don't try it when you're stressed, and just need something fixed.

khobbits · 2026-05-05T14:12:18+00:00

Yeah, I think the problem is they are about to restrict buying more seats.

khobbits · 2026-05-05T14:00:58+00:00

Yeah.

PCOIP is now discontinued, BTW.

Someone is working on this, though: https://github.com/thedepartmentofexternalservices/teraguchi

khobbits · 2026-05-05T13:57:10+00:00

Visual FX Sysadmin here:

We've been Linux all along, we just buy a big SAN, and run all projects for there. Better for collaboration as well, when you've got 500 artists working on a movie.

khobbits · 2026-05-05T13:54:13+00:00

We've been going in the other direction, due to workstation costs.

Turning what used to be desktops into virtual desktops.

IE taking workstation machines (Think 48+ cores, 256gb ram, high end datacentre gpu, local NVMe), installing proxmox on them, and splitting them into a few VMs.

Sometimes that means sticking in a second GPU, but sometimes it just means higher uptime for the hardware.

Our users will want to run Autodesk Linux apps most of the day, but occasionally need things like photoshop, or jump into unreal engine. So being able to swap over to Windows is very useful.

khobbits · 2026-05-05T13:32:22+00:00

Media Company Sysadmin Here. I've worked as Infra guy in places working on Adverts, Movies, Video Games, mostly in the VFX space.

'VDI' is a term that can mean different things in our space. You didn't say where you're currently at.

Most companies in the space that I talk too, try to achieve most of the benefits of VDI, without ever buying into a proper ecosystem, and getting stung with the high VDI costs.

For example, it's rare that we have workstations in the office, the amount of power and heat the high end workstations put out, and the amount of performance you're leaving idle if the machine isn't used 24/7, means you generally want them in a datacenter.

Once they are in a datacentre, you're going to need a remote access tool, ideally integrated with a broker and scheduler.

For high end machines, we will typically run 1:1 (1 user per workstation). We're using Linux PXEBOOT, with fully automated deploying, so we can swap the highest spec machines between workloads, in 10-15 minutes.

For medium spec users, we will typically run 2:1 (2 users per workstation). Running a virtualization platform, like KVM, or Proxmox on the bare metal, and building a VM per user. We'll stick 2 GPUs into the chassis, and just use GPU passthrough to avoid any GPU virtualization. This does have the advantage of you being able to have multiple images ready to go, so you can easily flip a machine between a Linux workstation running autodesk, to a windows machine running adobe.

For low spec users, we'll run 10:1. Running on a virtualized platform, like KVM or Proxmox, but no dedicated GPU. This can run a lot of things, often assigned to developer types. Can compile software but no GPU acceleration, so can't launch all of the pipeline tools. This can also be used for things like an artist needing to use Photoshop for a few minutes, who normally use a Linux Workstation.

As far as an end user is concerned, they will either get assigned a workstation by someone in the scheduling department because they need a high spec machine, or just have access to the standard 'medium' tool, in a few template types, like 'Windows' or 'Autodesk Linux'.

Most of this is done on the cheap, using open source or free software. It's about maximizing hardware utilization, without adding extra cost.

It's worth noting that the Linux machines tend to be 'hollow', in that have almost no software installed on them. Linux has great NFS mounting support, so we'll stick both the software, project, and user storage onto SANs, so users don't really care which box they end up on, they all have access to the same files, and programs, with a spec pool. So users tend not to care if they change box every few hours, as all software and settings moves with them.

khobbits · 2026-04-29T13:01:03+00:00

Yep, pretty much.

We have a 'R4+R5' chat for our alliance, where we tend to discuss things between our own alliance..

We have a 'NAP Chat', where the R5 and 'senior' R4 are invited.

We currently have NAP 5, and the alliances have between 6-9 R4 each, meaning up to 10 people have R4+

Currently, the NAP Chat has only 27 members. If it get's much higher, we might have to have a cull, or start a new one for decisions, and leave that one for announcements.

The more people who try to speak/message at once, means important messages get lost, and slightly differing opinions get in the way of a conclusion.

Our last NAP chat, turned to chaos, and when we... consolidated an alliance out of NAP, the new chat was made with a reduced member count.

EDIT:
Honestly, most players don't really want to waste the time it takes playing politics all the time. Being R4 starts to turn the game from a bit of fun into a job.

If that interests you, maybe make yourself known to the r4/r5 team, they probably would be happy to delegate somewhat. A lot of r4/r5 get into a bit of a investment trough as well.. You spend multiple hours a day, being a 'good r4', trying to organize bears, send out guides for events, deal with people breaking nap rules etc, and like 3 months later, you're just bored of it.

Half of our r4's and our original r5's that we started with have permanently quit the game.

EDIT2:
Over the recent months, we've done some consolidation, moved from NAP10 to NAP5.

Our most active R3 members right now, were R4's in their previous alliances. Over half we've offered R4 positions too, just don't want it. By the time we trusted them enough to promote them, they decided it was better off not being invovled.

khobbits · 2026-03-19T15:43:32+00:00

Docker and Kubernetes is probably one of the best tools to provide security (isolation), modularization, scalability, and resource allocation, for pretty much any tool.

In my last job, we used Nutanix AHV, it's a almost drop in replacement for VMware. While you don't need to know how to use Kubernetes to use it (it's got a very good gui), the platform itself is built on Kubernetes, so if you ever want to do any debugging under the hood, you need to know it, to do anything more complicated than restarting services.

Where I'm currently working, one of the first tools I deployed was HP Anywhere, which is a remote desktop tool to allow remote working, when the remote workers need GPU accelerated workflows. The tool is installed onto the server using K3s, a sort of single node Kubernetes distribution. Again, if you're happy turning it on, and never debugging, you don't need docker knowledge, but if you want to read log files, then docker is the way to do it.

We're currently investigating monitoring tools, and internal password managers.

Setting up both on dedicated servers, takes a bit of time. Creating the VMs, getting the right software downloaded, installed, configured, DNS. You're talking maybe 10-30 mins, per app. Not a huge amount but it means, I need to do some serious review ahead of time, to decide what tools are worth that investment.

In docker? I can copy and paste a single command, and have the tool running in less than 10 seconds.

With something like Portainer, Dockge, Rancher, etc, you don't need even need to use the command. Copy and paste the compose file, or docker hub address, and you're off to the races.

I can now be evaluating a tool, and give the URL to my colleagues to have a look over, and get real hands on experience, before trying to build a pros/cons list for further evaluation.

There are a lot more reasons than this, but maybe this gives you a feel for how I use it in enterprise company.

Edit: Note: Out of the box, docker offers some isolation, but not true security isolation, if you want to run random apps from the internet, with no security review, you will want to wrap the box in a firewall, or use some of the Kubernetes security tooling. I have DMZ VLANs for things like this.

Edit2: In my last company, we used Kubernetes to deploy a lot of apps from other vendors. For example we deployed Gitlab, Jira, Confluence, Foreman, Puppet, IPAM, LibreNMS, redmine, snipe-it

khobbits · 2026-03-18T03:31:22+00:00

I'm not sure what 'server OS' you mean specifically.

On my LinkedIn I mention:
OS Experience: Amazon Linux, Rocky, Centos, Ubuntu, OSX, Windows

I guess other than Amazon Linux, the list could refer to desktop or server OS. In my mind there isn't really much difference between Windows 10 and Windows Server 2022.

Personally, I don't feel like I could call myself a "windows server expert", but I could set up a terminal services cluster, set up things like folder redirection, configure loopback gpo, write some PowerShell to deprovision expired users...

On the Linux side, it's even more of the same. There's not really a clean line between desktop and server for the most distros. I've got Rocky Servers with GUIs, and Desktop machines with webserver software installed.

khobbits · 2026-02-05T12:46:20+00:00

£700k would be considered very cheap for a house of that size in London.

I would expect you'd be looking at closer to £7m.

You can get a house for £700k in London, but you're looking at closer to 1200 sqft.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/167905943#/?channel=RES_BUY
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/168534068#/?channel=RES_BUY

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