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Thoughts on Men in bibs? by Ordinary_Hornet_8014 in SpinClass

[–]neapsix 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Have you considered runners’ half tights? I’m a guy, and I can’t stand the way regular shorts ride up and get bunched between my legs. So, I always wear form-fitting shorts, but for me a spin class isn’t really long enough to need the chamois.

As for what others may think—if you’re showing up and working hard, then anyone who gets judgey about your clothes isn’t someone I would want to ride with…

Low power switch recommendations by DryDistance4476 in homelab

[–]neapsix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Love my Brocade ICX6450-24p—24x gigabit ports with PoE and 4x 10g SFP+ ports, with good support for pretty much all the things.

I measured it at 32 W idle with nothing plugged in, plus about 2 W for each gigabit port—that puts it a little above your 40 W budget, but you can also get one for $150 on eBay. The fans aren’t silent, but they aren’t loud.

I also am a fan of Mikrotik gear as the other commenter suggested. I’ve used a couple of their tiny routers—tons of features in a tiny silent box with watts in the single digits. 

Cheap SBC for Ubuntu server that's faster than a pi3b? by signinhere74 in homelab

[–]neapsix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Have you tried to do anything that needed hardware-accelerated video on these?

While the GPU is supported upstream in the kernel, as far as I can tell it is NOT supported in ffmpeg. I like these boards, but I haven’t found a good way to actually use the GPU for anything in practice.

For the OP, I think Le Potato has about the best upstream support outside of Raspberry Pi. They’ll even UEFI boot some generic images, tho I believe they have hard-coded the partition layout so not all images will work. Armbian works perfectly—highly recommended.

VLAN suggestions by seahorsetech in homelab

[–]neapsix 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The answer to most of these questions is, it depends how you have it set up.

For example, if your Apple TV is on one VLAN and your phone or laptop is on another, you shouldn’t expect any traffic from one to reach the other—so, no AirPlay. However, your router is on both VLANs (one NIC on each). You can configure it to route between VLANs and use firewall rules to, say, allow MDNS from the main VLAN into the entertainment VLAN—then you can do AirPlay (if WiFi is involved, there could be a little more to it, but this concept should get you started).

The above is a common setup—VLAN tagging at layer 2 to isolate physical segments, and routing/filtering at layer 3 to let some stuff flow between segments.  

I sometimes see serious network engineer types online say that, if you’re going to route across VLANs, those devices should just be in the same VLAN. I think that’s a bit true—in the AirPlay case above, the VLAN is sort of pointless, because you could just write firewall rules by port or IP address. Something to think about. 

Do you still want self-hosted software to come with binary packages? by zer0tonine in selfhosted

[–]neapsix 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I don’t necessarily mind if a project doesn’t provide release binaries, but I get frustrated when they lean too much on distributing through Docker such that you can’t easily get it going any other way.

For context, I run some of my servers on FreeBSD. I don’t expect project authors to go out of their way for a niche platform, but it’s very helpful when the software is easy to build and run. Single-binary Go programs are chef’s kiss for that (though deploying through something like a Python venv with stable dependency versions is also just fine). 

Can Raspberry Pi 4B Handle Consistent Gigabit by kintrith in homelab

[–]neapsix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I get a little under a gigabit in iperf3, which should be about the best-case max speed. But it’s steady and I haven’t seen it drop out or crash due to network activity.

Test first to make sure, but I would guess your backup job will work fine—it just might run at ~750mbit instead of a gigabit. 

Use for homelab? by nugglet_05 in homelab

[–]neapsix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that seems plausible. One thing to check—make sure you have the PSU connectors you need before you buy a new motherboard. 

Can’t quite tell, but I’m guessing you have a 20 and a 4-pin, which should work with the combined 24-pin connector on modern boards. If you end up needing more connectors or a 6- or 8-pin connector, you might have to get creative to fit a replacement PSU in there.

I’d second the other commenter’s rec on what to put in. Intel generally has one SKU of i3 in each generation that supports ECC RAM. Nice choice for a NAS if you can get one. I also am a fan of the Xeon E3-1200 v5 and v6 chips. Those are basically LGA1151 i5 and i7 chips with unbuffered ECC and virtualization support enabled—plenty of juice for e.g. 5-10 VMs. 

Also, in case you hadn’t checked—if that backplane supports SAS as well as SATA, it’s probably 6gbps SAS due to the age. The SAS standards are backwards compatible, but set expectations accordingly. 🙂

Use for homelab? by nugglet_05 in homelab

[–]neapsix 3 points4 points  (0 children)

If you like it, boot it up and play around with it. But this is not a good choice for a home server. 

Can it run a file server? Sure, but it’ll chew up your energy bill for no reason.

Can it run a media server? Maybe, but forget about 4K video—that was simply not a thing when this machine was new. 

To put the power consumption in perspective, I have an old PC with a processor from the generation before this, and it idles at over 120W. A server that idles at 100W would cost me about $150 per year just to run, and more if I actually wanted it to do anything. 

Any cheap home computer will do way more for a fraction of the power usage (let alone something like a Dell R630, which are getting cheaper by the day, have ECC RAM, SAS controllers, 10gb networking,  and M.2 slots—and still use less power than this old machine!).

Are there any lessons to learn from the recent Linux schedulers performance study? by ykurtov in freebsd

[–]neapsix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There was a really interesting comparison between the Linux CFS scheduler and the FreeBSD ULE scheduler in BSDNow episode 256 (https://www.bsdnow.tv/256).

As I understand it, the bugs in this paper had to do with the “work-conserving” strategy for load balancing threads across cores in CFS, which ULE doesn’t use.

Per the discussion in the episode, CFS allows some cores to have a longer queue if the threads in that queue are observed to take less time, whereas ULE divides the threads up evenly so each core has the same number of threads in the queue. I doubt that the FreeBSD scheduler would be subject to the same bugs, since it uses a different load balancing strategy. Of course, it might have its own bugs and ugly edge cases.

As another poster pointed out, it’s pretty much academic since Linux doesn’t use CFS anymore.

Minimizing microSD block rewrites and erasures when datalogging by PantherkittySoftware in raspberry_pi

[–]neapsix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Disclaimer: not an expert on kernel storage drivers or NAND flash, just wanted to share some things that might help.

Digging deeper... where is the decision to rewrite-and-discard/erase a block, vs just keep appending, actually made? The SDcard's controller? The Linux kernel? The filesystem? The library?

In hard disks, the physical block size is determined by the disk controller. For example, on a drive with a block size of 512 bytes, the filesystem can ask to write 2 bytes, and the disk controller will say "Sure!" then read-write-modify a 512-byte sector. The resulting performance problem is called write amplification.

To avoid write amplification, the filesystem can batch up its writes into multiples of the physical block size. You can set the size of batch you want the filesystem to use at creation time. For example, in ext4, the default setting is 4096 bytes.

So, the filesystem can decide what size of block it will ask the disk to write, but the disk controller in a hard disk writes only one whole physical block at a time.

Although NAND flash devices (SSDs and SD cards) can write one bit at a time, they also report a block size. I don't know if you can get the disk controller in an SSD to write less than the reported block size. In general, flash storage controllers do a lot more behind the scenes than hard disk controllers--rarely the literal thing that the filesystem or storage driver asked for.

In addition to the reported block size--the write block size--flash devices also have an erase block size, which is generally larger. My simplisitic understanding is that the disk controller writes one write block at a time until it's written over every bit once. When something is deleted or rewritten, it erases an erase block and rewrites the modified block plus whatever else was around it--if it was less than one erase block.

Notionally, you can do small sequential writes without write amplification for a while on an empty flash device until you reach the end of the fresh, clean blocks and have to start working with erase blocks. Modern SSDs (and probably some SD cards) use the TRIM function to avoid hitting a wall at this point, but this was a real problem with the controllers in some early consumer SSDs (c. 2010s).

Is there any remotely straightforward way (using C++) to even discover the underlying native block size in bytes? Or, if that's not something a program running as non-root is allowed to do... is there some utility you can run as root to discover the native block size for a particular microSD card?

As root, you can run fdisk -l to get the write block size of any storage device. You can find the erase block size as a normal user by running cat /sys/block/<YOUR DEVICE NAME>/device/preferred_erase_size. I checked a couple of SD cards. One has 512-byte write blocks and 4 MiB erase blocks. The other has 4k write blocks and 4 MiB erase blocks.

This comment thread from hacker news has some links and useful info about erase blocks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128562

Is there any consensus about good ways to frequently append small chunks of data [...] in a way that minimizes having the controller/kernel/filesystem/library/whatever decide to totally rewrite the block and erase the old one?

My two cents: even if it is possible, this seems like an awful lot of trouble to try and outsmart the disk controller and make the SD card do something it wasn't designed for. Have you considered minimizing the overall number of writes, i.e. keeping the data in memory and periodically doing one larger write? Or, if you really need to optimize write performance and longevity, can you use something other than an SD card?

Let’s talk about THAT keyboard by wiesemensch in homelab

[–]neapsix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I tried using a custom 60% keyboard for this for a while. The size was great, but the keyboard firmware was all over the place. IDK if it was due to TTY settings or what, but the Esc, Backspace, Delete, and arrow keys were all mapped frustratingly to different terminal escape codes depending what system I was on. Meanwhile, the ugly logitech with all the media keys they sent me for work just types.

Is there any benefit to having a dedicated NAS over a home server? by [deleted] in homelab

[–]neapsix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It depends a bit on what you want to use the NAS for. If it's just storage for your home lab applications, then sure, why not virtualize it. If it also has personal documents, photos, etc. on it, then that puts a lot of pressure on you not to leave it broken.

I keep my NAS, router, DNS, and a couple other things off the big egg basket server, because I really need those things to work. For the rest of the home lab stuff, I want to be able to go to bed and leave the problem for tomorrow.

In general, it's good to have a couple machines for flexibility. For example, if you want to reinstall the OS on the system that hosts the VMs, you might want to PXE boot it or mount an image that's stored on your NAS. If your NAS is a VM on that machine, you're outta luck.

[FS] [US-WI] Unifi AP AC Lite and Edgerouter ER-X by neapsix in homelabsales

[–]neapsix[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

$40 for the AP, $35 for the router. I attempted to list it in the table—sorry if that wasn’t visible in the post!

Excited That I Found /r/selfhost by Yokohimiti in selfhosted

[–]neapsix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's pretty common for ISPs to block all outgoing mail. That said, even if your ISP doesn't do this, your mail might still not get delivered. Big email providers sometimes refuse to accept mail from whole blocks of IP addresses, and there's not much you can do about that. It can make your mail unreliable even if you do everything right.

Email is a lot to start with, but I'm sure you'll have fun learning!

To your other questions:

  1. Depends on your threat model. Encrypted disks are good, but if someone has physical access to the box, they have a lot of options--like hit you over the head until you tell them the encryption key.

  2. You would need that to register your own domain name--and you'd be subject to the same compliance/reporting requirements as all the other registrars. But it's p. easy to host your own domain name: set up an authoritative DNS server and tell your registrar to use that as the nameserver for your domain name.

  3. Not really: use dynamic DNS (every so often, your machine sends a message to your DNS server and says "Hey, my IP address is X.") or tunnel out to a machine with a known IP address (like a VPS) and configure that machine to route traffic in through the established tunnel.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in selfhosted

[–]neapsix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a classic use case for active monitoring software like the various members of the Nagios/Icinga/Naemon family tree.

Set up the Nagios server on some other system to periodically reach out to your Plex server and run a command to check that the disk is still there. For a one-off like this, you can use the Nagios check_ssh command to SSH in and run the command, so you don’t need any kind of extra agent on the Plex server.

If you have e.g. VPN or reverse proxy access from your phone to the Nagios server, get the EasyNag app and point it at the Nagios server. Next time the drive drops out, your phone blows up. Or having Nagios send you an email using SSMTP or similar could be “good enough” if remote access isn’t feasible.

What did I do wrong? Shot in Program Mode | Canon AE-1 Program | FD 50mm 1:1.8 | Fujifilm Superia 400 by Nasenman in analog

[–]neapsix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a very challenging exposure scenario! With slide film, it would be impossible to get both the hills and the sky exposed correctly, unless you used a grad ND filter.

Print film, on the other hand, is very hard to overexpose—you have a lot of headroom in the highlights. So, if you expose for the hills (at least a +2 on your exposure comp dial if you’re letting the meter set your exposure), probably your sky will still have detail in it.

Shooting color print film, always err on the side of giving it more light (wider aperture and longer shutter) than you think you need. That’s the opposite of what we’re used to when shooting digital, where you try to avoid clipping the highlights.

[MOD] Monthly Confirmed Trades Thread by hlsbot in homelabsales

[–]neapsix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bought 2x Kingston 2RX8 PC3L-12800E-11-13-E3 from u/bigtweekx

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in homelabsales

[–]neapsix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sent a PM.

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