He said that he’s exhausted his drive enclosures:
The desktop has no more open SATA ports or drive enclosures, so I’m not sure what the best option for adding more drives is.
So I guess he could use eSATA and some kind of external enclosure or something, but he’s gonna need more than just throwing more drives in the desktop and adding a PCI SATA controller card to get more places to plug 'em in.
I use a USB-attached drive array for some bulk, low-throughput storage. I’ve been happy with this, except for one thing that I didn’t think about prior to getting mine: a considerable number of these, including mine, do not have the option to power on after power loss. This is extremely obnoxious if you use or have any intention of using the computer remotely and would like it to come back up after power loss. For me, it was the only component that couldn’t be brought back up automatically.
I’m in the process of switching to one that does right now, but I’d mention it to you to as something to keep in mind.
I considered a NAS as well myself, but didn’t want it for a couple of reasons:
I am generally not happy about having a lot of hardware that can potentially phone home on a network. The drive array is isolated, and I control the PC (well, short of the BIOS/firmware/etc).
I had an existing machine that could perfectly reasonably serve the stuff that had adequate uptime. If you’re going to be serving content to friends, you may not want to be using, say, a desktop that you use for other things, since if you need to reboot it, you’re going to interrupt their use.
Trying to understand whether NASes have implemented things securely worries me. There are a number of cases where I’ve been unpleasantly surprised before with network transport of data (e.g. when I looked at it at one point, SMB having secure authentication but then shipping the actual data over the network in plaintext).
Also not sure how long the NAS gets security updates.
Also sometimes companies have been purchased by other companies or tried to get creative in figuring out ways to make more money from existing customers, like having routers insert ads in webpages. If the product can’t touch the network, the issue doesn’t come up.
One reason that I would consider getting a NAS over DAS is if you want the server to be physically distant from the storage array. USB isn’t really made to run long distances – you need repeaters, and there are distance limitations, though you can get, and I have, optical transceivers for longer runs. Ethernet is designed for this and works fine with it.
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EU-based
but I’m looking fore something more Cornish
I’m assuming that this isn’t “Cornish” as in “based in Cornwall in the southern UK”, but some other use of the term.
If you’re interested in home automation, I think that there’s a reasonable argument for running it on separate hardware. Not much by way of hardware requirements, but you don’t want to take it down, especially if it’s doing things like lighting control.
Same sort of idea for some data-logging systems, like weather stations or ADS-B receivers.
Other than that, though, I’d probably avoid running an extra system just because I have hardware. More power usage, heat, and maintenance.
EDIT: Maybe hook it up to a power management device, if you don’t have that set up, so that you can power-cycle your other hardware remotely.
Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…
You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.
I guess this is called a “full keyboard”?
Used to be “104-key keyboard”, or “full-sized” but I see “percent” measurements of that 104-key as being increasingly-common today.
https://www.keychron.com/blogs/news/keyboard-size-layout-buying-guide
Can be monitored with NUT over USB or Ethernet
NUT has a hardware compatibility list.
I have already looked in XMPP, but it required SSL certs and I did not have the mood to configure them.
There are definitely XMPP clients that do end-to-end encryption that do not rely on TLS for key exchange, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_record_messaging
Off-the-record Messaging (OTR) is a cryptographic protocol that provides encryption for instant messaging conversations. OTR uses a combination of AES symmetric-key algorithm with 128 bits key length, the Diffie–Hellman key exchange with 1536 bits group size, and the SHA-1 hash function. In addition to authentication and encryption, OTR provides forward secrecy and malleable encryption.
The primary motivation behind the protocol was providing deniable authentication for the conversation participants while keeping conversations confidential, like a private conversation in real life, or off the record in journalism sourcing. This is in contrast with cryptography tools that produce output which can be later used as a verifiable record of the communication event and the identities of the participants. The initial introductory paper was named “Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP”.[1]
I’ve used Pidgin with the libOTR plugin that implements that protocol.
The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn’t want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn’t expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.
Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.
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https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord
It looks like there’s software to bridge it to Matrix. I have no idea whether that violates ToS. It does look like it’s getting development, though, so I can’t imagine that Discord has been cutting people off en masse for using it.
I get that.
Honestly, though I’m still a little puzzled as to why people initially got into Discord; I never did.
I can understand why people wanted to use some systems. Twitter does massive-scale real-time indexing. That was a huge feature, really changed what one could do on the platform.
Reddit provided a good syntax (Markdown), had a low barrier to entry (no email verification at a time when that was common), and third-party client access. It solved the spam problem that was killing Usenet and permitted for more-reasonable moderation.
There were a whole host of services that aimed to lower the complexity bar to get a web page and some content online associated with someone’s identity; it was clear that lack of technical knowledge and the technical knowledge required to get stuff up was a real limiting factor for many people.
But I just didn’t really get where Discord provided much of a win over stuff like IRC. I mean, I guess maybe it bundled a couple services into one, which maybe lowered the bar to use a bit. IRC really seemed pretty fine to me. Reddit bundling image-hosting seems to have lowered the bar, been something that people wanted. Maybe Discord doing images and file-hosting made it more-accessible.
I have no idea why a number of people who liked Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead used Discord rather than Reddit; it seemed like a dramatically-worse system if one was aiming to create material for others to look back at and refer to.
kagis
It’s just modern day IRC with video.
Ahaha, thanks. This is indeed an ELI60 response, although it doesn’t really explain how Discord suddenly got so popular. But if I couple this with /u/Healthy-Car-1860’s response, I’m kind of getting the picture.
Got popular because it spread through the entire gamer/twitch community like wildfire due to actually being a more complete package and easier to use than anything prior. Online gamers have been struggling with voip software forever (Roger Wilco, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Skype, and many others).
Once it was rooted in the people who are on their computers app day every day it was bound to spread because the UX is incredibly easy compared to previous options for both chat and voip.
Maybe that’s it. I never had a lot of interest in VoIP, especially group VoIP. When I was playing online games much, people used keyboards to communicate, not mics. There was definitely a period where people needed the ability to collaborate in games and games didn’t always provide that functionality. I remember people complaining about Teamspeak and Ventrilo. I briefly poked at Mumble – nice to have an open-source option – but I just had no reason to want to do VoIP with groups of people.
But I suppose for a video game clan or something, that might be important functionality. And if it’s also a one-stop shop for some other things that you might want to do anyway, it maybe makes sense to just use that rather than multiple services.
If I need to do an emergency boot from a USB stick to repair something that can’t boot, which it sounds like is what you’re after, pretty much any Linux distro will do. I’d probably rather have a single, mainstream bootable OS than a handful.
I’d use Debian, just because that’s what I use normally, so I’m most familiar with it. But it really doesn’t matter all that much.
And honestly, while having an emergency bootable medium with a functioning system can simplify things, if you’re familiar with the boot process, you very rarely actually need emergency boot media on a Linux system. You have a pretty flexible bootloader in grub, and the Linux kernel can run and be usable enough to fix things on a pretty broken system, if you pass something like init=/bin/sh to the kernel, maybe busybox instead for a really broken system, and can remount root read-write (mount -o rw,remount /) and know how to force syncs (echo s > /proc/sysrq-trigger) and reboots (echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger).
I’ve killed ld.so and libc before and broght back systems without alternate boot media. The only time I think you’d likely really get into trouble truly requiring alternate boot media is (a) installing a new kernel that doesn’t work for some reason and removing all the old, working kernels before checking to see that your new one works, or (b) killing grub. Maybe if you hork up your partition table or root filesystem enough that grub can’t bring the kernel up, but in most of those cases, I’m not sure that you’re likely gonna be bringing things back up with rescue tools – you’re probably gonna need to reinstall your OS anyway.
EDIT: Well, okay, if you wipe the partition table, I guess that you might be able to find the beginning of a filesystem partition based on magic strings or something and either manually reconstruct the partition table or at least extract a copy of the filesystem to somewhere else.
CIFS supports leases. That is, hosts will try to ask for exclusive access to a file, so that they can assume that it hasn’t changed.
IIRC sshfs just doesn’t care much about cache coherency across hosts and just kind of assumes that things haven’t changed underfoot, uses a timer to expire the cache.
considers
Honestly, with inotify, it’d probably be possible to make a newer sshfs that does support leases.
I suspect that the Unixy thing to do is to use NFSv4 which also does cache coherency correctly.
It is easy to deploy sshfs, though, so I do appreciate why people use it; I do so myself.
kagis to see if anyone has benchmarks
https://blog.ja-ke.tech/2019/08/27/nas-performance-sshfs-nfs-smb.html
Here are some 2019 benchmarks that show NFSv4 to generally be the most-performant.
The really obnoxious thing about NFSv4, IMHO, is that ssh is pretty trivial to set up, and sshfs just requires a working ssh connection and sshfs software installed, whereas if you want secure NFSv4, you need to set up Kerberos. Setting up Kerberos is a pain. It’s great for large organizations, but for “I have three computers that I want to make talk together”, it’s just overkill.
I haven’t seen this keyboard before, but:
It looks like it uses “MCC” form factor keycaps, of which blanks can be purchased.
Most keyboards with LEDs have a way to toggle them off, and it looks like this is also true of that keyboard. You could just flip them off.
I don’t know how hd-idle stores its data, but sysstat and some other utilities will log I/O on a per-device data and there are utilities that can graph it.
My biggest concerns would be privacy regarding data scrapers .
The protocol already exposes votes, so they already have that. It’s just not currently visible in the Lemmy web UI. You can, as other people on here have pointed out, already go to any kbin/mbin instance federated with a lemmy instance and view upvotes on a post or comment on that lemmy instance. Not downvotes, but kbin/mbin don’t propagate downvotes.
Might also try !HomeAutomation@lemmy.world.