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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

    Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.



  • I came to MySQL and Apache because they were the backend for other services I wanted to start,. Later, when I wanted to build my own, I already had Apache running, so why would I add nginx? I did let other services add sqlite, but have (in most cases) figured out how to switch those to MySQL.

    All of that has been running for 20 years. I’m sure it would be good for my dementia-risk to learn how to start ngnix and migrate all those services, but it’s far more attractive not to mess with what works.



  • pihole, in front of my own DNS, because it’s easier to have them to domain filtering.

    mythtv/kodi, because I’d rather buy DVDs than stream; rather stream than pirate; but still like to watch the local news.

    LAMP stack, because I like watching some local sensor data, including fitness equipment, and it’s a convenient place to keep recipes and links to things I buy regularly but rarely (like furnace filters).

    Homeassistant, because they already have interfaces to some sensors that I didn’t want to sort out, and it’s useful to have some lights on timers.

    I also host, internally, a fake version of quicken.com, because it lets me update stock quotes in Quicken2012 and has saved me having to upgrade or learn a new platform.




  • It’s even easier with digital broadcast. I finally had to give up my PCI tuner, because who puts PCI slots on a modern mobo? $25 will get you a USB TV tuner capable of getting all the OTA and cable channels. I used to get, like, 7 analog OTA channels - ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and a regional independent - but I get 30 digital. All the majors have added 3-5 channels of SD reruns or other filler. I mean, it’s mostly shit, and the only thing I actually watch is local news, but for a one-time $25 cost, it’s a great supplement to streaming.

    My biggest problem with MythTV is it doesn’t interface with streaming, so I use Kodi on the frontend to source from mythtv, netflix, hbo, or whatever.






  • Yeah, I think it really depends on use case. Like, I’m trying to imagine what aspect of my home lab could go so wrong, while I’m out of the house, that it would need fixed right away, and there’s nothing. I only leave my house for work or maybe a week of vacation, though, and I can imagine someone who’s occasionally away from home/house for 6-month deployments, or has a vacation home they only visit four weekends a year, might want more extensive remote maintenance. I’d still want to do that via ssh or vpn, but that’s me.




  • IPv6 does have private spaces. Any prefix beginning with fd is ‘private,’ and (IIRC) there’s a formula to generate the next 40 bits of prefix to minimize the chance of intersections. i.e., you can generate your own internal /48 functionally equivalent to 192.168/16 or 10/8

    Don’t know if you can use that with SLAAAC, but it works if you run a dhcpv6 and makes ipv6 feel a lot like ipv4. You have to NAT everything inside &c, but if you already have a functioning internal IPv4 network, IPv6 is just a matter of figuring out which config options need to be changed (eg, dhcp6.name-servers for option domain-name-servers)


  • Definitely agree for a single install. If OP has a bunch of these installs to do, then editing an install USB to configure networking and enable sshd might be worth the effort. Do the install over ssh and hope the machine starts up as desired, but even then, if it doesn’t just magically appear on the network, he’s going to need a monitor to see where the startup failed.

    Raspberry Pi’s disk imager will let you pre-configure networking, accounts, and ssh, so you just write the image to an SD card, plug it in, and go. That’s a great solutions for systems usually meant to be headless and removable media. If OP’s client hardware allows, he could plug in the M2 or SATA drive meant to be the server’s startup, install Deb there, and. transfer to the server hardware. That’s definitely more work that just swapping the keyboard & monitor, but it accomplishes OP’s stated goal. (Otherwise, a lot of this thread follows the linux meme of “How do I [X]?” “[X] is dumb, do [Y] instead.”)



  • With 25 GbE, even 10, I’d be tempted to PXE boot client systems. Maybe still have a local PCIe SSD for windows game files.

    Dunno how that would actually work with Windows, but it was fun when I did it for beowulf nodes. Setting RPis to netboot is a little involved, but you can create an OSMC image and give all your TVs a consistent ‘smart’ interface. You don’t even need 10GbE to be pretty functional for the Pi, but my experience is that WiFi is not fast enough.