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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As an example, I was setting up SnapCast on a Debian LXC. It is supposed to stream whatever goes into a named pipe in the /tmp directory. However, recent versions of Debian do NOT allow other processes to write to named pipes in /tmp.

    It took just a little searching to find this out after quite a bit of fussing about changing permissions and sudoing to try to funnel random noise into this named pipe. After that, a bit of time to find the config files and change it to someplace that would work.

    Setting up the RPi clients with a PirateAudio DAC and SnapCast client also took some fiddling. Once I had it figured out on the first one, I could use the history stack to follow the same steps on the second and third clients. None of this stuff was documented anywhere, even though I would think that a top use of an RPi Zero with that DAC would be for SnapCast.

    The point is that it seems like every single service has these little undocumented quirks that you just have to figure out for yourself. I have 35 years of experience as an “IT Guy”, although mostly as a programmer. But I remember working HP-UX 9.0 systems, so I’ve been doing this for a while.

    I really don’t know how people without a similar level of experience can even begin to cope.


  • I have an HP T740 running Opnsense and it works just fine. You can pick them up for about $100 USD, and they seem to come mostly with 8GB RAM, and a 64GB SSD. That seems to be more than enough for Opnsense, even running VPN’s.

    These are just a tad larger than my Lenovo M910Q Tiny servers, but they have a PCI slot, so you can put a second ethernet port (or 2, or 4) of whatever speed you like in it.





  • That number is supposed to be how much of the tariff that the exporter passes through to the importer. Essentially this is a measure of how much the producers lower their profits to lower the price to compensate for the tariffs. In other words how much the producer “pays for” the tariffs.

    This factor is “backwards”, in that it doesn’t represent how much the producer swallows, but how much they pass on to the importer. Trump’s calculations assume that the producer only passes on 25% of the tariff price increase, but the experts say the number should be much closer to 95%.

    I have to idea what “4” means.


  • I’m not no sure. 90%+ of these services are commodities and nobody gives a damn who the provider is from a technical perspective. There’s no physical component, so it’s literally a matter of signing a contract, spinning up a server/service, move the data and point everything to the new service.

    And yeah, there are technical issues that come up, and nothing is ever that easy. But think about how fast many, many companies were able to sort that kind stuff out when the had to when COVID hit.

    And that’s the thing. Cloud service disruption can be an existential crisis, so why would you leave it in the hands of a hostile foreign power?










  • Well, there are specific hardware configurations that are designed to be servers. They probably don’t have graphics cards but do have multiple CPUs, and are often configured to run many active processes at the same time.

    But for the most part, “server” is more related to the OS configuration. No GUI, strip out all the software you don’t need, like browsers, and leave just the software you need to do the job that the server is going to do.

    As to updates, this also becomes much simpler since you don’t have a lot of the crap that has vulnerabilities. I helped manage comuter department with about 30 servers, many of which were running Windows (gag!). One of the jobs was to go through the huge list of Microsoft patches every few months. The vast majority of which, “require a user to browse to a certain website” in order to activate. Since we simply didn’t have anyone using browsers on them, we could ignore those patches until we did a big “catch up” patch once a year or so.

    Our Unix servers, HP-UX or AIX, simply didn’t have the same kind of patches coming out. Some of them ran for years without a reboot.