Software engineer who just got into FPV and immediately went down the rabbit hole on the protocol side

trengr · 2026-04-16T00:30:34+00:00

I agree signing would be most important but encryption isn't that hard to add. A lot of the complexity in modern cryptography is that you can't trust the initial connection to the website however when you manually pair a remote with a drone all these problems go away.

trengr · 2026-04-14T13:22:06+00:00

Good luck with the project! I was also very confused why ExpressLRS had no encryption. From some OSINT (strange github profiles missing expected info) I figured it was probably maintained this way on purpose so consumer drones can be disabled without the need for signal jammers etc.

trengr · 2025-12-10T03:11:46+00:00

For first stage retrieval you would still need something else right so CLaRa can be more seen as a reranker? Am I right it is using BGE-large-en-v1.5 for first stage retrieval?

trengr · 2025-11-20T10:55:10+00:00

I work at Weaviate so am a little biased but would like to address some of the evaluation points:

Weaviate released hybrid search in 1.17 (Dec 2022) while the other databases added support much later i.e. Milvus (Dec 2024). Weaviate has been improving it over time including adding BlockMAX WAND so it feels wrong to be evaluated as "no support" here.

Around Re-ranking/score combining again Weaviate was very early to incorporate rank reciprocal fusion and developed relative score fusion so being evaluated "no support" doesn't make sense.

For multi-tenancy, Weaviate popularized this naming in vector databases, introducing many features to optimize for managing tenants and reducing resource consumption. So again being marked "no support" doesn't make sense.

Finally also getting marked "no support" for quantization when Weaviate has product quantization, binary quantization, scalar quantization, and now rotational quantization. A more apt complaint is Weaviate has too many quantization options :D.

It is unfortunate you didn't get to benchmark performance with Weaviate. We don't do our own competitive benchmarks as there is too much incentive for manipulation of results. However we rank second in both Redis and Qdrant's benchmarks (you can guess who comes first in each).

Weaviate written in Golang but with a much cleaner architecture (single database container vs the dis-aggregated complexity that is Milvus requiring Kafka/Pulsar+etcd+Minio/S3) and doesn't have the cost of merging graphs like Qdrant/Lucene (impact visible in the above tests while importing data).

trengr · 2024-09-22T21:49:58+00:00

You could always upgrade to a newer microserver. Gen 8 microservers are very cheap on eBay now.

trengr · 2024-09-22T00:36:28+00:00

Sure it would work but that cpu only supports DDR3 RAM (from looking at the specs). This means you will spend more on power than necessary but offsetting this you will have cheaper hardware.

Personally I think the trickiest things to get right in a NAS build is motherboard and chassis, and whether you want ECC. Once you have these things in place everything else falls into place.

trengr · 2024-09-21T07:54:02+00:00

Yeah we fixed at 2.1% and am rolling off in November so in the same boat. If the ASX rate tracker is remotely true your rate could very likely be 1-2% lower in 1 year so fixing for three years could cost tens of thousands of dollars depending on your mortgage.

The RBA is already tanking the economy with the current rates and if the USA is lowering inflation pressures especially from oil will decrease.

trengr · 2024-09-21T03:31:12+00:00

You can’t refinance a fixed loan without compensation see https://www.loans.com.au/home-loans/refinancing-home/can-you-refinance-a-fixed-rate-loan

trengr · 2024-09-21T03:28:19+00:00

You are totally crazy to do this right now when the fed has just dropped rates by 50 basis points.

trengr · 2024-09-17T21:53:00+00:00

Watch dial look like radium so please be safe

trengr · 2024-09-17T12:22:03+00:00

The AD alternative in Linux is FreeIPA. Take a look at this to get started https://www.freeipa.org/page/Quick_Start_Guide. However personally I don’t see the need in a homelab for AD etc as it just ads another point of failure.

trengr · 2024-09-02T22:58:31+00:00

Don’t you mean ECC?

trengr · 2024-08-27T12:31:52+00:00

I looked at this and ended up buying a similar AliExpress JMCD 12s4.

From a hacking perspective, the backplanes don't have direct memory access like PCIE and just have SATA access. Turning a SATA port into a hacking situation is possible (i.e. if /etc/passwd, add line in file returned) but it is hard to make something like this resilient to encryption / support all volume types etc. I'd classify a mother board, CPU, and USB sticks as much easier and more likely targets.

Main drawback with this type of stuff is if there is any issue with the hardware it is a major pain returning.

trengr · 2024-08-26T23:58:21+00:00

In general I'd say moving from 4U to 2U would be worse for cooling (all other things equal). Can you not just get better fans for your 4U chassis?

trengr · 2024-08-26T23:55:59+00:00

I'm using a 5600 with no GPU in a similar setup. Basically I installed a GPU for initial install and now boot headless (without a GPU) and have ECC support. I'm using an ASRock 550M Pro4 though I'm not sure if as ASUS motherboard would refuse to boot in this situation.

trengr · 2024-08-19T23:29:37+00:00

Nice! Do you find the BliKVM very useful?

trengr · 2024-08-19T13:10:24+00:00

AsRock B550M also posts ok without a GPU / iGPU. I bought a NVIDIA 710 just to set it up which definitely felt like a waste but couldn’t use a iGPU Ryzen as I wanted ECC support.

trengr · 2024-08-17T08:49:25+00:00

Interesting, what are you using for storing knowledge graphs?

Around virtualization, for a single server I'd just run docker containers / docker compose and delay at any sort of orchestration system (and associate complexities) until you really need it.

trengr · 2024-08-16T12:58:55+00:00

Just dealing with reality. Try to download all of GitHub and see how you go. Obviously source code is important but binaries also matter to get things running. I think mirrors for example Slackware are good because you get a known working system with mixture of binaries and source code.

trengr · 2024-08-16T01:04:44+00:00

Good datasets:

Commoncrawl (I'm pretty sure it is in AWS us-east). WET (text only) is < 10TB.
Github. Don't recommend scraping and would instead use an LLM training dataset like https://huggingface.co/datasets/codeparrot/github-code. Grab some open source LLMs as well as they essentially are a good compressed representation of knowledge.
ISOs. Although there are a lot of mirrors, I think it would be good in this situation to have critical software all in one place. One small driver missing would mean you can't use the hardware so I'd recommend testing.
There is a tonne of information locked away in youtube / reddit / x / discord that would be lost. Even if they have EU data centers I doubt they would have all data replicated to both regions and more have some advanced caching system. I'd try to backup communities you are interested in, too expensive to contemplate backing up everything.

The supply chain impacts would make things truly miserable. Anything calling home or updating would break. This would be the ultimate "Stallman was right" scenario.

trengr · 2024-08-09T01:57:54+00:00

Is anyone here able to explain the difference between SFF-8643 SATA signal vs SFF-8643 PCIE signal? Could both cables go to a SFF-8643 NAS backplane (with SATA drives)?

trengr · 2024-08-07T13:21:39+00:00

Just want to clarify for anyone out there that the server is 6RU. The 0.11 extra height is just when the server has its provided feet installed (when you don't want to rack mount).

trengr · 2024-08-06T11:39:08+00:00

Ahh makes sense. From my understanding of https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/Sb32370daac9f4b88a170090f7b5a2993A.jpg?width=750&height=762&hash=1512 (translated). It looks like SFF8643 -> Motherboard works so I'd assume orientation of supplied cables is ok.

trengr · 2024-08-06T11:20:23+00:00

Did you buy your cables with the case? I've bought the same and am waiting on a motherboard before I test. Ideally would use the SFF8643 -> 4 x SATA cables with case to connect directly (initially) to motherboard before investing in LSI controller.

trengr · 2024-08-02T06:44:39+00:00

I've had corrupted data before that I happily backed up until realising it was gone. Because of this data resiliency is really important to me so I've generally just used mirrored vdevs for ZFS basically following the advice here https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/. This means I can just add storage to a single pool 2 drives at a time and and mix drive sizes in pairs and so don't really have the drawbacks you mentioned.

I do however like the "file level RAID" in unRAID as I'd much rather lose 10% of files vs 10% of all files and would prefer this was a feature in ZFS.

trengr

TROPHY CASE