I’ve been doing this for 30+ years and it seems like the push lately has been towards oversimplification on the user side, but at the cost of resources and hidden complexity on the backend.

As an Assembly Language programmer I’m used to programming with consideration towards resource consumption. Did using that extra register just cause a couple of extra PUSH and POP commands in the loop? What’s the overhead on that?

But now some people just throw in a JavaScript framework for a single feature and don’t even worry about how it works or the overhead as long as the frontend looks right.

The same is true with computing. We’re abstracting containers inside of VMs on top of base operating systems which is adding so much more resource utilization to the mix (what’s the carbon footprint on that?) with an extremely complex but hidden backend. Everything’s great until you have to figure out why you’re suddenly losing packets that pass through a virtualized router to linuxbridge or OVS to a Kubernetes pod inside a virtual machine. And if one of those processes fails along the way, BOOM! it’s all gone. But that’s OK; we’ll just tear it down and rebuild it.

I get it. I understand the draw, and I see the benefits. IaC is awesome, and the speed with which things can be done is amazing. My concern is that I’ve seen a lot of people using these things who don’t know what’s going on under the hood, so they often make assumptions or mistakes that lead to surprises later.

I’m not sure what the answer is other than to understand what you’re doing at every step of the way, and always try to choose the simplest route (but future-proofed).

His aren’t. A pair of high-end massage guns so they can massage each other at the same time instead of taking turns. BowFlex adjustable dumbbells. Not a gadget, but a new Tesla Model S and charging port. There’s an Amazon Echo Show in a few rooms…

I’m not saying that he shouldn’t buy those things – I’m saying he has a different mindset than I did/do, but I do believe that my mindset makes it easier to get by financially.

Sorry it took me so long to respond. I was stuck in an infinite loop and had to reboot.

No, I’m not a bot. Check my post history.

When I went to college I had saved every penny that I made. I went to a community college for two years under an earned scholarship and worked during that time; then I transferred into a four-year institution that required three years of classes. I paid for the first two years with my savings and part of the third year with a loan. I continued on to grad school and took research/teaching assistantships to provide a salary that covered housing, but received free tuition as part of the deal.

My first semester at the four-year school was way harder than anything I was used to. At community college I had coasted along, but this required effort. Paying for it myself out my bank account made it so much more real, and I decided then that I was going to do better because I sure as heck didn’t work so hard all those years just to throw it away.

We paid for most of our millenial child’s college. He ended up dropping out of college a couple of times and always spent too much money. He’s now married with a wife and child, and together they make more money than my wife and I did combined up until a few years ago. They’re still living paycheck-to-paycheck but have to buy every new gadget.

Our two Gen-Z daughters just went off to college. They will probably graduate, but they also don’t understand the value of money. They didn’t want to work, didn’t want to save… They get a scholarship that pays a monthly stipend, and they burn through that as it comes in. Their college decisions were based on things like “is that campus pretty?” “is their cafeteria food really good?” regardless of the cost. They refused to do community college.

What’s my take? These three kids have a sense of entitlement and a need for immediate gratification that I didn’t really see in my generation. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the result of bad parenting (we adopted the two younger ones as teens), and I see it with co-workers’ children as well.

Does that mean that every Millenial or Gen-Z is like this? No. It just means these three definitely are. But they don’t get much pity from me when they complain and it was the result of bad choices. I chose my college path based on value: scholastic and economic. They chose their path based on social and sensory reasons.

I set up LinkWarden about a month ago for the first time and have been enjoying it. Thank you!

I do have some feature requests – is GitHub the best place to submit those?

I’m not sure where you’re getting your information.

I work there, have worked there for nearly three decades, and I can tell you that it’s not the case.

(Also, it’s just NCSA for trademark reasons, without ‘the’ in front)

It did get a lot of funding from the NSF in the early days, but the federal government didn’t start pushing for public access to research done through grants and contracts until 2013. Before then it was only work done by federal agencies that was non copyrighted.

The National Science Foundation also didn’t start funding Mosaic until 1994, which was after CGI had been released.

NCSA gets a lot of its funding from the private sector with partner programs, the University of Illinois, and the State of Illinois as well.

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I found the whole copyright thing at Wikipedia for this image pretty funny.

Even the simplest research shows that NCSA is a state-funded agency (through the University of Illinois system), not federal. If that image is in the public domain, it’s not for the reason Wikipedia lists.

I’m a big fan of netdata; it’s part of my standard deployment. I put in some custom configs depending on what services are running on what servers. If there’s an issue it sends me an email and posts into a slack channel.

Next step is an influxdb backend to keep more history.

I also use monit to restart certain services in certain situations.

I wish it was database agnostic. And I’m slightly concerned about the version three rewrite.

It does look awesome, and I’ll revisit it to see where things are in six months.

We had fiber at our previous house for about six years, and it was great. The prices were lower, the speeds were greater, there were no limits… It's kind of funny, because it was a college town of about 200K people in the middle of nothing else.

Now I'm up in the suburbs of Chicago where a single town can have a 200K population, but fiber is nowhere on the horizon. Instead we get terrible service that's constantly showing packet loss with slow transfer rates. We do still have unlimited, but with these transfer rates it doesn't really matter. :)

As far as monitoring traffic goes, I guess it depends on how you're doing things. If your DNS requests are still hitting your ISP or aren't encrypted, then yeah, they might know. I don't know if they'll care, but of course not all illegal content is treated the same.

So basically a non-answer to your question, along with me saying I liked having fiber.

I have one set up as an irrigation controller. I was going to build an OpenStack cluster to test configuration settings on (I run a production cluster at work), but gave up when the supply chain problems happened and prices skyrocketed.

Thank you. I hadn’t considered the payment part. The cloud system that I manage is in education, so everyone pays in advance.

This makes sense, and I’ll start with a lower number and ask it to go up later. It will take a couple of months to migrate everything from Linode anyhow, so I don’t need them all at once.

My identity infrastructure alone uses a whole bunch of servers.

There are the three Kerberos servers, the two clusters of multiple LDAP servers behind HAProxy, the rabbitmq servers to pass requests around, the web servers also balanced/HA behind HAProxy… For me, service reliability and security are two of the biggest factors, so I isolate services and use HA when available.

I told them everything that I wrote here in my original request – I need 25 now, but would like a quota of 50 to maintain elasticity, testing, etc.

They followed up with the request for actual resources needed.

I haven’t answered since then.