RAID is more likely to fail than a single disk. You have the chance of single-disk failure, multiplied by the number of disks, plus the chance of controller failure.

RAID 1 and RAID 5 protect against that by sharing data across multiple disks, so you can re-create a failed drive, but failure of the controller may be unrecoverable, depending on availability of new, exact-same controller. With failure of 1 disk in RAID 1, you should be able to use the array ‘degraded,’ as long as your controller still works. Depending on how the controller works, that disk may or may not be recognizable to another system without the controller.

RAID 1 disks are not just 2 copies of normal disks. Example: I use software RAID 1, and if I take one of the drives to another system, that system recognizes it as a RAID disk and creates a single-disk, degraded RAID array with it. I can mount the array, but if I try to mount the single disk directly, I get filesystem errors.

You can’t melt through snow or ice by spinning your tires.

I really enjoy lying in a warm, comfortable bed, especially a little groggy from sleep. I’m happy to wake up an hour or so ahead of my alarm so I can have that experience. That said, if my mind is really racing with anticipation of the day’s concerns, it kind of wrecks the lie-in. I’ll get up an hour or two early, have an extra special breakfast, start chores or some other thing I didn’t think I had time for.

And X-windows. There’s a few server tasks that I just find easier with gui, and they feel kind of laggy over 1G. Not to mention an old Windows program running in WINE over Xwin. All kind of things you can do, internally, to eat up bandwidth.

Wow. I thought I lived in a pretty walkable part of Atlanta. I really only use my car for the grocery or a ‘big’ shopping trip.

• Convenience store 2 km
• Chain supermarket 1.5 km
• Bus stop 1.3 km
• Park 300m
• Big supermarket 2.5 km
• Library 2.7 km
• Train (subway) station 1.3 km
• Downtown Atlanta 13 km

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.

It kind of sounds like OP morphed from hobbyist to investor, then lost interest when his investment lost value.

There’s a lot of hobbies that offer a path to professional, and I’ve watched friends go down that path. It’s rarely a good experience - there’s all kind of things you have to do as a professional to make a living that you can blow off as a hobbyist/volunteer. There’s a lot more stress when success or failure is tied to whether you eat or not. You lose a lot of freedom to tell dickheads to fuck off.

Never been into collectibles, myself, but the investment pressure seems insidious. Like, it’s one thing to trade cards among friends because you got doubles of something your buddy’s missing, but buying a rare card because it’s “underpriced” to hold until its price recovers is very different. The money is pressure to change from looking at your collection as good, fun, or complete and to looking at its presumptive cash value. Then you’ve stopped being a collector and started being a businessman.

Typical cat just knocking things off shelves - the library is an inexhaustible playground.

It’s like a bear-sized Matchbox car. And when they take it away, he starts eating the fluff, like a 2-ton toddler.

2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.

I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it’s cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.

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.

I have isc-bind running behind pihole so network clients can register their own hostnames, and as near as I can tell, that’s outside the scope of pihole’s DHCP and dnsmasq. Pihole alone is probably fine if you only want to name static hosts, but (I understand) Unbound doesn’t support ddns, either.

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.

If you email to people on gmail or outlook, won’t Google and Microsoft still end up with copies of most of your mail?

Ditto on hardware raid. Adding a hardware controller just inserts a potentially catastrophic point of failure. With software raid and raid-likes, you can probably recover/rebuild, and it’s not like the overhead is the big burden it was back in the 90s.

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.

I just don’t like my logs filling up with scripted login attempts. Even with fail2ban, for a while there I was getting 100+ login attempts every day, and it upset my sense of order.

This is an old post about ipv6, but it inspired me to go looking, and I wanted to share my findings.

1. for globally routeable IPv6 addresses, probably do let it happen automatically, either direct from the ISP, through the router by prefix delegation, or your own implementation of prefix delegation.

2. for devices you want to access, internally, create a ULA within the fd00::/8 space, and assign numbers (and names) however you like. Translate all your 192.168.x.y IPv4 addresses to fd00::x:y and go. Only limitation is you won’t be able to access those devices, using the ULA, from outside your network.

3. you can do both of these on the same subnet, and devices pick up both addresses then use the global address for internet and the ULA for intranet.

That means you can do dhcp, dynamic DNS, private domains, and all the stuff you know about IPv4 for IPv6, and still do all the stateless autoconfig that “they” want. Some devices, like my android phone, never played well with dhcpd6, but immediately preferred IPv6 as soon as I let them SLAAC.

If the prefix assigned by the ISP doesn’t change, then device SLAAC address shouldn’t change, either, because they’re calculated from MAC, so if you need to access some internal devices from the internet, you have to mark that address, but (IMO) marking the full address is not that much worse than marking the prefix and remembering the device number.

I do ssh because I’m more comfortable with it: it’s ubiquitous and as close to bulletproof as any security. Put it on a nonstandard port, restrict authentication to public keys, and I have no qualms.

Heh. House I rented was built before ubiquitous electricity. At some point, someone slapped a fuse box on the outside of the back wall and drilled a bunch of 1" holes in said wall to pass wiring. House was built on piers, so they just dragged wires around to places where they wanted outlets, which were mostly planted in the floor. Not a ground wire on site. I have no idea how they got away with renting that out, but it’s not like I called code enforcement, either.