I like that this looks like OG Steam.

DirectX 5, that brings back some memories lol. That’s when 3D started to get serious and it felt like there was a lot of innovation happening quickly (competition with 3dfx’s Glide?).

I’m late to the party here, but did you consider just paying for Mattermost? If it meets your needs, and your organization has 250 people, the cost for licensing is going to be relatively small compared to your IT budget (right?). They have “contact us” pricing, which means you can negotiate it.

As others said, spin down the drives when they’re not in use. Make sure power saving is enabled on the drives and tune them to spin down after some appropriate amount of time. (hdparm lets you customize it on Linux)

Consider also sleeping the NAS when not in use. You can try using Wake-on-LAN to remotely wake it up when you need to use it. Saves on electricity and heat! You could also sleep it on a schedule, in case you need to be online for backups to run at particular times.

Licensing representation matters

It doesn’t, because they’re the copyright owners. Think of their software as dual licensed: They run it themselves under a proprietary license, under which they reserve all rights. That has nothing to do with the AGPL version that they license to you. The AGPL doesn’t take away the rights they have as copyright owners, nor does it preclude dual licensing.

(Are you a bot? Your reply is written like ChatGPT, and it has that self-defeating logic that ChatGPT has sometimes… eg. you wrote that you disagree with me, but then parroted the exact thing that I said.)

This is flat out wrong. If you’re the copyright owner, you’re not licensing the code to yourself. The AGPL is the license under which they’re making the open source version available to YOU. The version they run themselves is proprietary.

Look into DeltaChat

The original AC was good for (imho) it’s road feel and huge quantity of user content like tracks, cars, and mods (SRP and LA Canyons are great.) The overall product itself was really amateurishly produced IMHO (eg. shitty launcher) and inconsistently polished, although everybody looked past that because the in-car experience was better than anything else at the time and the mods make AC a blank canvas. Whatever you wanted to get out of AC, you could do with mods, and there’s no other racing game with that flexibility. That’s why everybody loves it.

The broader physics in AC never really did it for me, as a Dirt Rally fan. BeamNG is at the cutting edge of physics and playability, and going back to AC physics from BeamNG is pretty tough. That said, I am super excited there’s a new rally game and will definitely pick this up if it’s half decent. With a little love, I’m sure they could do a make their physics model feel decent for rally. I hope they have some decent damage modelling because AC’s poor damage modelling made even tiny impacts totally unphysical (imho).

(I haven’t tried AC Evo or AC Competizione though so it’s possible the physics model has been improved… can anyone chime in on that?)

Super insightful, thanks. Didn’t think about any of that.

I don’t disagree with you, but you’ve put some thought into this so maybe you can help us understand your logic and rationale more.

as soon as they deem profitable

What’s profitable about losing sales of adult games?

Also, what leverage do these groups have over banks and payment processors? If you have leverage over Visa and MasterCard, some of the most profitable companies in the world, I could imagine doing way more nefarious things than this. I just don’t get it. Some random group in Australia has leverage over Visa and MasterCard - American companies - is that what we’re saying here?

Those are things that should be handled by a government in defence of the public interest of everyone

I think you might have too much faith in government. Facebook and YouTube shouldn’t be hyper-polarizing brainwashing machines either, but here we are 20 years later and governments have done jack shit to address that. If anything, we’re going the wrong direction - Governments are seeing that and the TikTok model as tools they can have at their disposal to suppress dissent. But ironically, I think YouTube and many other platforms quietly accept that if we want to live in a somewhat harmonious society, we can’t leave it to the government to make all the rules. (eg. YouTube banning vaccine misinformation and disinformation during a public health emergency.)

On a tangent here, maybe the only potential upside from this situation with Steam is that horrifically misogynistic waifu simulators aren’t going to be 1 click away from the new Call of Duty. Seriously, Steam is just full of super gross anime shit that kids shouldn’t see, but the main audience of the platform is kids. The way Steam puts that content beside everything else is really gross and they really should get called out for that.

This law sounds good in theory, but there’s a lot of lawful content that is really undesirable (scams, spam, deepfakes, hate speech, etc.) and platforms need to be able to deal with that. The law isn’t fast or flexible enough to keep up, and every country has different (or laughable) definitions of some of these things.

The YouTube community guidelines are a pretty good overview of whatever shady shit people are trying to pull these days: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9288567?hl=en

That you misremembered the generation of Nintendo console that Quake 2 was on makes this the perfect chefs kiss millennial boomer comment, lol.

yooo, I was just playing T2 in the pickup game on Friday night a few weeks ago. It’s still so good!

Wrapping up this thread, I really appreciate all the opinions and experiences everyone shared! Gave me lots of new perspectives to think about.

Yeah, this might be the way to go. OpenWRT supports hardware NAT with many of these ARM-based routers like many of the MediaTek-based ones, which gives them super high throughput at very low CPU usage. The efficiency blows x86 out of the water. The ability to migrate your OpenWRT config to new hardware (real or virtual) in the future means you kinda get the best of both worlds…

Do not use an SSD for cold storage - it will fail. SSDs need to be plugged in every once to refresh the charge in their NAND, otherwise they’ll lose the data.

This is not a theoretical thing - I’ve had a good Samsung 850 Pro drive fail while being off for 2 years.

Thanks, this is good data!

How fast is your internet?

Do a speed test and run htop… you’ll see CPU usage only on one core spiking. Not a big deal if your CPU can handle it, but the AMD GX-412TC in the APU2 I was using is too slow.

Even if the virtualized router is down, I’ll still have access to the physical server over the network until the DHCP lease expires. The switch does the work of delivering my packets on the LAN, not the router.

Thanks for the tip about the pfSense limit. After running pfSense for like 8 years, my opinion is that is flush with features but overall, it’s trash. Nobody, not even Netgate, understands how to configure limiters, queues, and QoS properly. The official documentation and all the guides on the internet are all contradictory and wrong. I did loads of testing and it worked somewhat, but never as well as it should have on paper (ie. I got ping spikes if I ran a bandwidth test simultaneously, which shouldn’t happen.) I don’t necessarily think OpenWRT is any better, but I know the Linux kernel has multithreaded PPPOE and I expect some modern basics like SQM to work properly in it.