56 here, I discovered and was blasting through first season last Summer when I realized that was the only season so far so I started pacing myself… and then all the crap came down about it being cancelled and I was flabbergasted. I mean yeah it’s an animated series, that doesn’t mean it’s ONLY for children. Hell look at how many animated shows Star Wars has and I would never expect something “Bad Batch” to be marketed as a kids show. Prodigy feels more like DS9 to me, showing the really dark side of the Federation and things that slip through the cracks, it’s not the typical show where everything gets wrapped up in the last five minutes and you move on to the next episode, and I really love that. Hopefully it will get picked up for more seasons but meanwhile I’m taking my time going through the episodes.

I haven’t used the NOOBS install for some time, but if it’s anything like the normal raspbian image then you would have a standard VFAT partition for the initial boot, plus an EXT partition for the linux filesystem – and Windows is probably choking on that partition. You should be able to drop the SD card into either your linux or mac machine and reformat it from either of those (or at least delete all the partitions and then format it on Windows).

Did you format the card under linux (perhaps as ext4)? Last I knew, Windows couldn’t handle any filesystems other than its own even if you just wanted to blow away an existing partition.

Nothing wrong with used servers, that’s the only thing I’ve ever run. Ebay has provided a ton of equipment to me.

I’ve never used TrueNAS, but my experience with ZFS is that it could care less what order the drives are detected by the operating system. You could always shut down the machine, swap two drives around, boot back up, and see if the pool comes back online. If it fails, shut it back down and put the drives in their original locations.

If you are moving your data to new (larger) drives, before anything else you should take the opportunity to play with the new drives and find the ZFS settings that work well. I think recordsize is autodetected these days, but maybe for your use things like dedup, atime, and relatime can be turned off, and do you need xattr? If you’re using 4096 block sizes did you partition the drives starting at sector 2048? Did you turn off compression if you don’t need it? Also consider your hardware, like if you have multiple connection ports, can you get a speed increase by spreading out the drives so you don’t saturate any particular channel?

Newer hardware by itself can make a huge difference too. My last upgrade took me from PCIe x4 to x16 slots, allowing me to upgrade to SAS3 cards, and overall went from around 70MB/s to 460MB/s transfer speeds with enough hardware to manage up to 40 drives. Turns out the new configuration also uses much less power, so a big win all around.

The Intel floating-point math error strikes again.

Normally yes, but if an exception was found then that too would fundamentally change what we think we know. I doubt it will come down to anything quite that simple, but on the other hand gravity is one of those forces that we still don’t completely understand and when dealing with things on a galactic scale perhaps this new observation will start to crack open that particular mystery. It’s easy to speculate at this point, but really my hope is that this will lead to a better understanding of something huge. I think the most boring outcome of this would be something like “oops we made a mistake in our math.”

I predict bubbles warping time but not space, thus distorting the apparent speeds of objects we see through them. Star Trek taught me that anything is possible. 😆

And just imagine the new fields of math such a discovery would create…

SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments in Season 5, Episode 1 of “Star Trek: Discovery,” now streaming on Paramount+.

Guess I won’t be reading this until after I get a chance to watch the episode.

Good point, POE might be the only choice then. Although these cameras do provide x264 and x265 compression so that would save quite a lot.

You got me thinking, so I did a search and ran across this page: https://www.hanssonit.se/nextcloud-vm/ I’m not sure how old these releases are, but at the very least it might provide some hints for building your own? I’m going to keep looking to see if I can find an image built on Debian, but at least now I know some options are out there.

[Edit] I also ran across across this page which builds a VM for you using an Ubuntu machine, so I’m guessing I could probably adjust it to a Debian setup fairly easily. https://github.com/nextcloud/vm

I was considering POE as an option, and this camera does have an ethernet port (although I can’t tell yet if that’s only for configuration or if the video will also stream over it directly). I don’t really need a constant stream and this camera also provides motion options so maybe it would only send video as needed (although during a heavy storm all of the cameras would probably fire at once).

I played with Zoneminder years ago but would like to get something set up for home security. I have a full internal network plus servers and about 60TB of free storage space so there’s really no limitations to what I could set up. Ideally I’d like to just hit a local IP from a cell phone to check the cameras (and remote access isn’t really needed), so that’s where I was trying to go with my previous questions.

The software side seems easy enough, but finding compatible IP cameras has been stumping me. I see the Reolink 4K TrackMix wifi cameras on Amazon for $130, and other than a few hiccups it looks likely that this piece of hardware would work, unless anyone knows of any “gotchas” that I’ve missed? Otherwise I’ll do a bit more research and then order one of the cameras to see how far I can get with it.

Ah gotcha, so you’re not trying to to live-view the feed on them. Thanks for the camera suggestion anyway, the brand still seems to be decent enough even if they don’t support Linux.

I looked up this camera and the reviews for the outdoor model with night vision seem pretty promising. Can I ask how you are using your camera(s)? Like do you have a local server to record the data? Can you access them with a cell phone without using any special apps?

A lot of it will depend on what age of hardware you are looking for, especially the price. Last year I upgraded all my machines to Poweredge R620 servers. These are old enough that you can find a lot of options for CPUs and memory dirt cheap, and you can find them with either 2.5" or 3.5" internal hot-swap bays. The 6xx series is 1U and the 7xx series is 2U chassis. If power is a concern, I run some VM servers with around 10 VMs in use, 64GB of memory, and a pair of 12-core Xeon E5-2630L v2 processors (2.4GHz, low power) at around 84W, but there’s plenty of options to customize to your needs unless you need current-generation horsepower. The PERC controller in them can be flashed to IT mode for full control, and I run ZFS through it for some of my machines. I built these machines for around $150-200 each and picked them up from ebay (there’s a US seller I can recommend if you’re interested in going that route).

Keep in mind the R* series are rack servers, but Dell also has tower versions of the same machines available – I think those are labeled as M620?

I’m curious what you’ve heard, this is the first recommendation I’ve seen against filezilla? You certainly have to get the server side set up right for it to work, and plain FTP is a security risk, but otherwise am I missing something?

If you can work from the command line (and assuming you have a linux server) then SSH is simple – really all it does is give you a secure connection to the command line. You should get familiar with it because if something goes wrong with your server that may be the only way you can connect to it.

Next you need tools to transfer files to the server. While wget is useful for grabbing stuff from other web servers, while something like scp can get you to any host that also accepts ssh. I use this all the time to transfer files between home and work. Or you might set up an sFTP service to accept a GUI connection from a client like FileZilla.

As for what you can put on your web server… Well if you install php then you can run any php code. If you write javascript code then the web browser interprets that, so nothing to add to your server, but NodeJS code would require some installation. You also want to take some time to learn about security practices. For example if you have pages that use a database, an attacker can write a URL to gain access to your server if the code simply accepts any random input. There’s not really any limit to what can be run, but some things (like the php example) require you to install more components on your server.

Alternatively, there are also functional services you can run that have nothing to do with web pages. For example, a caldav service would allow you to host your own calendar that can be shared between multiple people or locations. Or maybe you want to start up a chat server like IRC or Matrix? Maybe you want to start a Mosquitto server for your personal IoT content? Think of it this way – literally anything and everything that makes the internet run is something you can host yourself.

FYI the alert they sent out earlier today expires at 0600 UTC, and the current predictions along with the dropping values this afternoon indicate that the worst of it has already passed us. The Kp index did get up to 8.0 around 4 hours ago though, which is fairly high (not quite enough to see aurora in Boulder though).

There was no such thing as a default firewall, but even now when I set up a new Debian machine there are no firewall rules, just the base iptables installed so you CAN add rules. Back then we also had insecure things like telnet installed by default and exposed to the world, so there’s really no telling exactly how they managed to get into my machine. It’s still good to learn about network security up front rather than relying on any default settings if someone is planning on self-hosting.