DigitalDilemma

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • You could do it for free. Take the guts out of your old PC, leave the HDD’s in there and the existing PSU. Extend the sata cables through to your MiniPC.

    If the PSU won’t fire up, then there’s a couple of pins in the main block you can jumper - or fit a momentary switch to - to act as a switch.

    The old PSU will still be reasonable efficient, since power is not wasted except as heat, and it shouldn’t get hot running just the hdd’s. 3.5 hdd’s use around 8-20watt each, depending on spindle speed, so at most it’s 100w at startup, but probably settle down to ~40 for the drives.

    Or - yes, those things you linked will work too, but they’re basically doing the same job as the above.



  • Before this year, the thought of an entirely arbitrary block to things like American cloud services by America to its European allies would have seemed extremely unlikely. It would make no sense, the damage to America and it’s GDP would far outweigh any any political benefit.

    All of those reasons still hold true, but I absolutely assure you, European governments and companies all over have that possibility firmly in their risk portfolio now. America tells microsoft to immediately not only stop selling products in Europe, but disable those already in use? Ditto Google. Ditto Apple. Ditto all the hundreds of IT hardware producers that are American. Want to cripple a foreign government that uses MS Office? Remotely disable it. job done. Sure, it would be illegal, but America’s government has no respect for law.

    (Even before this, several European governments were using open source (Germany, France, Austria, Portugal - there’s a list but this is less about idealism and more about protecting themselves from the unpredictable as well as not trusting America with their data any more. Every thing like this can only be seen as non Americans distancing themselves from America every way they can, and with good reason.)


  • Other have answered the runtime and load question very well already.

    I have three other points.

    1. Batteries degrade over time. Over-speccing your UPS means more likelyhood that things will hold up in three years time as the capacity given is for new ones. Plus, not running your UPS at 100% capacity reduces its stress. Again, more reliable.

    2. You can get a much better quality UPS by buying a second hand one without batteries off ebay and replacing them yourself, typically for a fraction of the cost of buying new. Plus you know you have new batteries. UPS is something where quality genuinely matters. I’ve had to carry a cheap and badly made UPS out of an office whilst it was on fire, so now I spec more carefully. (And ensure they’re metal bodied!)

    3. Consider what you NEED to power. What sort of power cuts are you expecting? Does it matter if something goes down?

    I UPS my servers and my main desktop, but not my routers, nor my wifi or IOT things. My internet provider also goes out when there’s a cut (I’m on a mesh system so rely on neighbours, who will typically also be down) and I can’t do much without power anyway, but it keeps the disks spinning. We typically get very short automated outages here of less than 10s (yesterday was a bad day, we had 9 within 2 hours)






  • Fuck this project, but… their source code can be free and open source even if they distribute binaries which aren’t.

    An example of how this didn’t work for one project. (From memory, and it was a long time ago - 2005/2008 ish)

    Xchat was once the best IRC client for Windows (after Mirc). It was free software, but the developer started charging for the Windows builds of it. Linux binaries were still free, but he claimed that it was time consuming to build on Windows and etc etc (A bit rich considering it was mostly his code - and there were suspicions he made it deliberately so)

    Some people were pretty pissed off about this, especially as it used some other code that was foss and it was felt against the spirit.

    Anyway, it was cloned into Hexchat which is fully free on all platforms and apparently not so difficult to build binaries after all.

    15 years later to today, Hexchat is thriving and Xchat has been completely dead for 15 years.


  • I was curious so I took a closer look at Sheltermanager and, honestly, I’m very impressed. They have a free demo on their site so you can show it off to people and see if there’s any interest.

    And agree, self-hosting doesn’t sound like it would suit them or you, but you asked in an opensource thread and that is nearly always self-hosted. SM looks quite fairly priced for a hosted solution.




  • I don’t think it’s blind devotion - most of us would acknowledge the guy can be a bit of a dick sometimes.

    But we’re also grateful. Without his silly idea in the 90s, linux wouldn’t exist. Computing today would be massively different - big, commercial, massively expensive unixes like Sco and Solaris dominating the industry. My main hobby for 20 years would be very different. My career for six years wouldn’t exist.

    That Linus has stayed an actively contributing member whilst not selling out in any way at all for 34 years is… wow. Could you do it? I’m certain i couldn’t. I have neither the ethical strength nor moral compass to do it. And I’m certain if he dropped out, some of the massive egos that satellite around Linux, or the monetizing businesses would seek to take over and twist it to their needs.

    And, y’know, on the matter of technical detail like this. He’s nearly always right. Seriously, look it up. He’s not polite, he’s not diplomatic, but he’s nearly always right. And when he’s not, he’ll admit it. Again, not your normal human.

    So yeah, that’s why we respect him and, when he talks, we listen. Even if it’s not something we’re involved with, it’s usually an interesting ride.



  • How we’ve done it recently:

    1. Put domain on cloudflare or another registrar that supports an API. Generate a token with the right privs.
    2. Use certbot with the cloudflare plugin, and that token, and generate whatever certs you need within that domain using the DNS01 method.

    No need to have port 80 open to the world, no need for a reverse proxy, no need for NAT rules to point it to the right machine, no need to even have DNS set up for the hostname. All of that BS is removed.

    The token proves your authentication and LetsEncrypt will generate the certs.





  • Just wood screws. You don’t need inserts unless you’re looking to make it more complicated. Pilot-hole first, then screw. You don’t need to worry about earthing the board.

    I’ve been running motherboards on plywood for over a decade. (Actually, much longer. I built a plywood case back in the 90s) Okay, more horizontal than this and less aesthetically pleasing, but that’s because I put them in a noiseproofed cupboard. The only real tricky bit is supporting a heavy GPU if you have one. Otherwise it is simply a case of fixing them to a piece of wood so they can’t move around.

    Oh, and keep cats away.


  • Why would I care enough to try and discredit you on any grounds than you’ve written here? I don’t know you, I don’t care about you other than what I’ve read in this thread where you come across as arrogant and the aggressor. Not quite the innocent party you’re trying to project.

    Don’t worry about replying, I’m going to use Lemmy’s block user system. Not used it before, but I think it’s the best way to deal with someone I have a disagreement with and don’t want to talk with any further, rather than wasting others time with vexatious development requests.