…just this guy, you know.

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  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2023

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  • someone genuinely interested for intellectual reasons would likely not fall for it. I would imagine that a non-trivial percentage of “antiquity enjoyers” are very light on history substance and heavy on history feelz.

    once the appropriate brain tickles have been pushed into their heads their “history substance” feed content becomes decidedly propagandized.







  • not that you shouldn’t replace the drive anyway, but…

    depending on the drive epoch (I am guessing its ide/ata not ST-506) you could try a factory format. with the right drive and phase of the moon, the on-drive controller may actually go off and do it for real instead of faking it. its usually worth a try an old drive just for funsies.


  • no worries.

    the net effect of client separation is that your device sees no other layer 2 devices on the wlan besides the gateway. this would typically be enforced at the frame level by the APs and is separate from any radio privacy cryptography.

    a properly configured wireless setup would assume every client is compromised and would also disallow local client-client via source routing or proxy ARP or any other escape options. 100% secure? probably not, but its a non trivial barrier that would have to be circumvented.

    as with e.g. broken WEP years ago, there are still options to mess with clients at ~Layer 1 but I dont believe its currently as trivial as it used to be.



  • lag bolts into shields into concrete may be secure if its done really carefully. it still leaves possible issues with the frame integrity - there are quite a few low quality frames and cabinets out there and mechanical stress on those vertical rails and all of the connection points in-between when equipment is extended on rails is no joke.

    I am used to datacentre grade mounting gear (even in my home lab), so I am a bit spoiled. however… take a look at Rack Solutions for harder-to-find quality mounts, rails and adapters. a source for excellent quality steel open racks/frames and enclosures is x-mark (now owned by belden). thats the stuff I use for myself.

    edit: as was mentioned in another comment, OEM rails are almost always your best bet, however high quality 4-post sliding shelves have saved my butt on ocassion. Rack Solutions also offers those.





  • that is some ancient hardware. 200 euro is an insanely high price. :-/

    your “internet connector” is an arcnet network card - not much use to you, but quite a cool little heirloom.

    assuming the memory is not soldered, you can swap out SIMMs (likely 30 pin), or DIPs/ZIPs (if you can even find them). you may have some fun trying to bring this PC back from the dead, but that price is insane for an ancient box in poor shape.

    is that filecard hard drive an ST-506 interface (two ribbon connectors)?

    pull all cards out except the video card and see if it boots.

    good luck.



  • thanks for the excellent reply. will check out all of your links.

    I do like built-in light weight threading, so Go is still on the to-play-with list and I am currently tracking a few Go projects to get my feet wet.

    you have given me options and impetus to get out of my decades long rut and, honestly, that is the best gift any programmer can give to another. thank you, friend.


  • thanks for the reply. C++ never really clicked for me. I started out decades ago with C and enjoyed living on the edge with older hardware and OSes - when neither the OS nor the hardware will defend itself from an application, things get real fun, real fast.

    as PC hardware matured, python filled in the safety spaces when needed and I eventually just used python with C bindings to balance speed and safety as needed for any particular project.

    I have never seriously looked at ada, but your comment piqued my interest, so I may just play with it for a bit. Go… what can I say about Go… like C++ its just feels “odd” to me. cant really explain why, perhaps it just feels too… “google”?

    I am going to be taking some time to really try groking Rust over the next 6 months… from what I have seen so far, Rust is the language that I wanted C++ to be so many years ago… fills in many more gaps and gives an expansive playground for various types of projects - many of the benefits of python-like and C-like languages in a nice, unified space.

    would love to get your thoughts on that if you have time.