• 6 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • Just because the phone is connected to the car doesn’t mean that the driver of said car is using the phone, or that the phone even belongs to the person driving.

    It is Android’s job to provide music and entertainment to my car’s head unit. It is my job to drive safely. It is NOT the job of Android to make sure I’m driving safely. Why in the hell should my passenger have to sit through repeated “safety breaks” while they try to scroll down to play a new song?


  • There are really two reasons ECC is a “must-have” for me.

    • I’ve had some variant of a “homelab” for probably 15 years, maybe more. For a long time, I was plagued with crashes, random errors, etc. Once I stopped using consumer-grade parts and switched over to actual server hardware, these problems went away completely. I can actually use my homelab as the core of my home network instead of just something fun to play with. Some of this improvement is probably due to better power supplies, storage, server CPUs, etc, but ECC memory could very well play a part. This is just anecdotal, though.
    • ECC memory has saved me before. One of the memory modules in my NAS went bad; ECC detected the error, corrected it, and TrueNAS sent me an alert. Since most of the RAM in my NAS is used for a ZFS cache, this likely would have caused data loss had I been using non-error-corrected memory. Because I had ECC, I was able to shut down the server, pull the bad module, and start it back up with maybe 10 minutes of downtime as the worst result of the failed module.

    I don’t care about ECC in my desktop PCs, but for anything “mission-critical,” which is basically everything in my server rack, I don’t feel safe without it. Pfsense is probably the most critical service, so whatever machine is running it had better have ECC.

    I switched from bare-metal to a VM for largely the same reason you did. I was running Pfsense on an old-ish Supermicro server, and it was pushing my UPS too close to its power limit. It’s crazy to me that yours only pulled 40 watts, though; I think I saved about 150-175W by switching it to a VM. My entire rack contains a NAS, a Proxmox server, a few switches, and a couple of other miscellaneous things. Total power draw is about 600-650W, and jumps over 700W under a heavy load (file transfers, video encoding, etc). I still don’t like the idea of having Pfsense on a VM, though; I’d really like to be able to make changes to my Proxmox server without dropping connectivity to the entire property. My UPS tops out at 800W, though, so if I do switch back to bare-metal, I only have realistically 50-75W to spare.


  • corroded@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldLow Cost Mini PCs
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    20 days ago

    I have a few services running on Proxmox that I’d like to switch over to bare metal. Pfsense for one. No need for an entire 1U server, but running on a dedicated machine would be great.

    Every mini PC I find is always lacking in some regard. ECC memory is non-negotiable, as is an SFP+ port or the ability to add a low-profile PCIe NIC, and I’m done buying off-brand Chinese crop on Amazon.

    If someone with a good reputation makes a reasonably-priced mini PC with ECC memory and at least some way to accept a 10Gb DAC, I’ll probably buy two.




  • Like several people here, I’ve also been interested in setting up an SSO solution for my home network, but I’m struggling to understand how it would actually work.

    Lets say I set up an LDAP server. I log into my PC, and now my PC “knows” my identity from the LDAP server. Then I navigate to the web UI for one of my network switches. How does SSO work in this case? The way I see it, there are two possible solutions.

    • The switch has some built-in authentication mechanism that can authenticate with the LDAP server or something like Keycloak. I don’t see how this would work as it relies upon every single device on the network supporting a particular authentication mechanism.
    • I log into and authenticate with an HTTP forwarding server that then supplies the username/password to the switch. This seems clunky but could be reasonably secure as long as the username/password is sufficiently complex.

    I generally understand how SSO works within a curated ecosystem like a Windows-based corporate network that uses primarily Microsoft software for everything. I have various Linux systems, Windows, a bunch of random software that needs authentication, and probably 10 different brands of networking equipment. What’s the solution here?



  • In the US at least, most equipment (unless you get into high-and datacenter stuff) runs on 120V. We also use 240V power, but a 240V connection is actually two 120V phases 180-degrees out of sync. The main feed coming into your home is 240V, so your breaker panel splits the circuits evenly between the two phases. Running dual-phase power to a server rack is as simple as just running two 120V circuits from the panel.

    My rack only receives a single 120V circuit, but it’s backed up by a dual-conversion UPS and a generator on a transfer switch. That was enough for me. For redundancy, though, dual phases, each with its own UPS, and dual-PSU servers are hard ro beat.


  • I certainly don’t think it will be easier in a few years, but I also think that after 19 years of using gmail, a few more years aren’t going to make a huge difference. It’s really kind of sad to think about how far Google has fallen. I started with gmail in 2005. At the time, Google was starting to become the “go-to” search engine. They had better results than Yahoo or AltaVista; the “do no evil” slogan was also a great “feel-good” factor. I don’t think anyone at the time expected how different things would be in 2024.

    I can host my own media on my own server. I use Nextcloud Talk for IMs (also hosted on my own server). Just about any online service can be self-hosted, except for email. I have certainly tried in the past, even hosting email on a VPS. You run into so many issues, though. Your server isn’t trusted, websites don’t recognize your domain, a whole litany of problems. Email is just one of those things that you really can’t self-host.

    Sure, I could switch to a new email provider, forward gmail, and slowly over time update my email address for everyone who’s sending to my gmail account. What happens then when my new email provider decides to start harvesting my data for profit? Email is one of those things where you can’t live without it, but you’re forced to use a service that isn’t your own and could fuck you at any time.



  • I did some research on this, and it turns out you’re absolutely correct. I was under the impression that ECC was a requirement for a ZFS cache. It does seem like ECC is highly recommended for ZFS, though, due to the large amount of data it Storrs in memory. I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable using non-ECC memory for ZFS, but it is possible.

    Anecdotally, I did have one of my memory modules fail in my TrueNAS server. It detected this, corrected itself, and sent me a warning. I don’t know if this would have worked had I been using non-ECC memory.


  • One thing to keep in mind if you go with an i5 or i7 is that you won’t have the option to use ECC memory. If you’re running TrueNAS, you’ll need ECC memory for the ZFS cache. A Xeon E5 v2 server is old, but still has a more than enough power for your use case, and they’re not particularly expensive.

    If you need something more powerful, you can find some decent Xeon Gold systems on eBay, but they’ll be a bit more pricey. The new Xeon W chips are also an option, but at least for me, they’re prohibitively expensive.



  • I decided to give up on it. Looking through the docs, they recommend that due to “reasons,” it should be restarted at least daily, preferably hourly. I don’t know if they have a memory leak or some other issue, but that was reason enough for me not to use it.

    I installed TubeArchivist, and it suits my needs much better. Not only do I get an archive of my favorite channels, but when a new video is released, it gets automatically downloaded to my NAS and I can play it locally without worrying about buffering on my painfully slow internet connection.



  • This is a really interesting question. I remember a lot of very niche PCI (not PCIe) cards from the old days.

    My current-day boring use-case: Multiple GPUs that have never once been used for gaming. One is an A2000 card that does video transcoding and tone mapping for Jellyfin. The other is an old Quadro card that handles encoding/decoding for my NVR.



  • 4 Mbit is exceptionally slow by today’s standards; when I signed up for internet access (there’s only one provider available where I live), I told them “I will pay for whatever the fastest connection is that you can offer.” Turns out that’s just single-channel DSL. They won’t even install bonded DSL where I live, and believe me, I’ve tried. I do have Starlink as well, but because of the land around me, it’s always going to be obstructed by the land topology; when I calculated how high I would need to raise my antenna to avoid obstructions, it was several hundred feet. My pfSense box does a good job of routing traffic between my DSL connection and my Starlink connetion (and falling back when Starlink is obstructed), but for hosting anything, I need a stable connection. That leaves me with just my DSL connection.




  • I honestly didn’t know that Youtube “unlisted” was even a thing; I’ve never posted a video to Youtube before, but this might be a promising idea. I’m assuming they still inject ads into unlisted videos, which is a major barrier for me… I hate ads.

    I’ll admit that I’m a snob when it comes to video and audio quality; 4k/60 might be overkill, but I think at least 4k/30 has some merit in this case. Most modern phones and tablets (and TVs) are at least greater than 1080p, so assuming they’re watching the video horizontally, 1080p video would still result in a loss of quality. Would they care? Almost certainly not, but the idea of watching a UHD video source in a lower resolution bothers me far more than it should.

    It definitely seems like VPS hosting is out of my budget. I think that hosting multiple version of the same video (and paying for more HDD space) would probably be cheaper than a VPS with a GPU resources, but the recurring fees are probably more than I’m willing to spend.