Plus, if you end up accidentally locking yourself out of your own system: boot access means root access (Secure your IPMI/iDRAC, folks!)

I started hosting stuff before containers were common, so I got used to doing it the old fashioned way and making sure everything played nice with each other.

Beyond that, it’s mostly that I’m not very used to containers.

They can be. Some motherboards come with one built in. But in most cases it refers to its own PCIe card, such as one of the many models from LSI Megaraid.

The advantage of this is that it can have a small capacitor bank (or a proper battery) to provide emergency power so that if something stupid happens such as motherboard failure, the raid controller will use this power to cleanly write to the disks.

EDIT: I just remembered one such stupid situation at work where a motherboard died and then the entire system blacked out, including power to the drives. I spoke with my vendor since data loss and corruption carries a hefty price tag in my field. They told me not to worry - The data could sit in the buffer for ages, as the capacitor bank was there to handle things like this. Turned out that upon restoring power, once the array was online again, the write buffer will be written to disk. No CPU or motherboard required - the controller took care of it. This was especially handy since it took a little longer to find a replacement board.

Ooh, I did this a while back, except it was hardware Raid5 to Raid6. Turns out one of the servers in a cluster were, for some reason, set up with 11 disks in raid5 + hot spare, except for raid 6 on all raids on all servers. Took me embarrassingly long to realize why storage space was as expected despite one disk being reported as not in an array.

Storcli and a nice raid controller makes thinks like this easy, as long as you grab enough coffee and read the storcli syntax while taking notes to build the full command string.

bash setup/config/PS1 is your friend here. I frequently find myself with a myriad of terminals between a bunch of usernames and servers at work, and setting up a proper prompt is key to help you keep track.

My bashrc makes my prompt look like this:

username@hostname:/absolute/path
$ inputgoeshere

… with color coding, of course. Yes, I use a multiline prompt. I somehow never saw that before using ParrotSec despite being a bash user for 25 years. I modified the ParrotSec default to suit my needs better, and I like it:

• Obvious which user I am.
• Obvious which host I’m on.
• Obvious which path I’m in.
• It’s easy to copy and paste a complete source/destination for pasting into, for example, an rsync comman

I pasted my PS1 config here: https://pastebin.com/ZcYwabfB

Stick that line near the bottom of your ~/.bashrc file if you want to try it out.

Thank you. I help where I can.

I was considering something similar for my Volvo 940 about around 2010. The idea was that I’d install a touch screen as an infotainment system where I could see stuff like OBD2 data and navigation.

While not having a functioning speedometer for a little bit (later fixed), I used my phone to see the GPS speed with the screen flipped so I could get the speed on the windshield like a HUD in some modern cars. The plan was to do something similar integrated with the home brewed infotainment.

It annoys me that I never went through with it, because so much stuff of what I’d drawn up became standard for “fancy” cars later.

Pssst, take these: .,

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Anything that does the job is good enough. At its core a server is just a regular PC with a dedicated purpose and software. Sure, there are specialized hardware better suitable and purpose built, but it’s not a requirement.

I for one prefer 19" rackmount stuff with disk bays in the front, but that’s more of a convenience than anything.

UPS is nice, but it’ll work without it.

I’ve had to deal with the Brazilian computer market and how it’s ridiculously overpriced due to import fees, so in your situation I’d just get any hand-me-down computer. Servers generally don’t require much unless you’re doing something special or intensive.

Get your hands on whatever you can find for free or dirt cheap (laptop or desktop doesn’tmatter), install linux, and you have a basic setup that you can work with. If your use case requires more, then that’s something you can accommodate in the next iteration of your server.

To anyone in my jury: I just got back from the store and realized I had forgotten something. I’ll live without it.

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Yes. China’s great firewall mostly handles content filtering and deals with low hanging fruit. Getting around it is fairly simple, and the censorship is mostly focused on stuff that would otherwise be easily accessible by the broader population.

VPN is your obvious choice here. CCP blocks most public VPN providers, so you’d have to roll your own.

You can set up a VPN concentrator somewhere in the world, and you would be able to reach it. As far as I’ve noticed, they don’t block VPN as a whole, and default port should work fine - the reason for this is probably that VPN has many commercial uses that they don’t want to harm.

Source: I run a (work-related) VPN accessible from inside china.

Any way of having this study an existing database (or dump thereof) and build the graph? I have an oracle database that nobody understands, built by someone else, and I thought something like this could help…

Any way of having this study an existing database (or dump thereof) and build the graph?

I use fail2ban and a non-standard SSH port. 99% of this junk disappears if you run sshd on port 9.

Also, disable password for login - Only use keys.

I choose to believe that the * means everything… but what does the 8,1 signify?

I might as well go first. A friend read this to me once over the phone in 1997 or thereabouts, and it stuck:
Cracked
09B9085A

…Sadly, winzip stopped accepting that as a valid reg key some time in the 2000’s.

I bought a winrar license for my friend as a 2023 birthday gift.

This raises more questions than it answers.