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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I have a dual NVMe USB3 caddy that’s smaller than most 2.5 HDD housings with currently 2 2TB drives, you can buy 4 and 8TB nvme drives these days too. I can throw that thing out a car and it won’t care.

    And the drives are easily swappable and so are the electronics in the casing.

    So no, 2.5" HDD’s still are an utterly dead end of technology.

    Especially with these and some other vendors, the USB interface is part of the drive (there’s no SATA port on them), so you can’t swap them or take them out for data recovery. They are HDD tech, which doesn’t do shocks or any other sort of roughhousing, they are slow as shit and use far more power than any NVMe drive.




  • They have a secondary motherboard that hosts the Slot CPUs, 4 single core P3 Xeons. I also have the Dell equivalent model but it has a bum mainboard.

    With those 90’s systems, to get Windows NT to use more than 1 core, you have to get the appropriate Windows version that actually supports them.

    Now you can simply upgrade from a 1 to a 32 core CPU and Windows and Linux will pick up the difference and run with it.

    In the NT 3.5 and 4 days, you actually had to either do a full reinstall or swap out several parts of the Kernel to get it to work.

    Downgrading took the same effort as a multicore windows Kernel ran really badly on a single core system.

    As for the Sun Fires, the two models I mentioned tend to be highly available on Ebay in the 100-200 range and are very different inside than an X86 system. You can go for 400 or higher series to get even more difference, but getting a complete one of those can be a challenge.

    And yes, the software used on some of these older systems was a challenge in itself, but they aren’t really special, they are pretty much like having different vendors RGB controller softwares on your system, a nuisance that you should try to get past.

    For instance, the IBM 5000 series raid cards were simply LSI cards with an IBM branded firmware.

    The first thing most people do is put the actual LSI firmware on them so they run decently.


  • Oh, I get it. But a baseline HP Proliant from that era is just an x86 system barely different from a desktop today but worse/slower/more power hungry in every respect.

    For history and “how things changed”, go for something like a Sun Fire system from the mid 2000’s (280R or V240 are relatively easy and cheap to get and are actually different) or a Proliant from the mid to late 90’s (I have a functioning Compaq Proliant 7000 which is HUGE and a puzzlebox inside).

    x86 computers haven’t changed much at all in the past 20 years and you need to go into the rarer models (like blade systems) to see an actual deviation from the basic PC alike form factor we’ve been using for the past 20 years and unique approaches to storage and performance.

    For self hosting, just use something more recent that falls within your priceclass (usually 5-6 years old becomes highly affordable). Even a Pi is going to trounce a system that old and actually has a different form factor.





  • If you plan on using something like Gentoo, building Gentoo and running it in a VM a couple times tends to be a smart play.

    I’ve been using Gentoo for ages, as I’m a stickler for stripping down everything to its bare minimum and even I tend to first have a couple runs at building and running it on new hardware, from within a VM.

    Going in knowing the intimate details of the hardware you use is always going to be a big plus.



  • All I have left to say about Google and Youtube in particular is that Youtubes ads have become so problematic, both in amount and quality (like seriously, people get banned for using innocuous words in videos targeted at adult audiences, yet completely fucked up ads are squarely targeted at children) and at this point, it’s time for YouTube to die.

    A new platform needs to come along.

    Which will be hard since Google has such a stranglehold on the datacenter and backbone level that they have an absolute advantage when it comes to bandwidth and storage costs. Which is the main cost for video platforms like YouTube.



  • Because pirated versions will be running a VLK license while there is no VLK subscription on file or run a KMS software to fake the authentication of licenses.

    Or in some cases, just run pure unlicensed and Windows will tell you on the desktop itself that the copy is unlicensed.

    If inspected, you have to prove you have the correct licenses.

    In some cases you’ll be allowed to just buy the licenses there and then, but if you’ve been running dozens of unlicensed copies or dozens of straight up illegal copies (with faked/cracked/stolen licenses), they’ll put the hammer down and you’ll be audited in detail to the point they’ll end up billing AND fining you for every piece of software you’ve used in your entire history.


  • I was once hired at a company to get them ISO compliant (8001, 27001 and various other certifications specific for data storage and handling for banks and healthcare).

    First thing I did was run inventory on all hard and software and it was quickly clear they ran 50 something unlicensed Windows and Office copies, 3 unlicensed Windows Server copies, 2 unlicensed Exchange copies, a whole bunch of unlicensed Winzip copies and on and on and on.

    The typical with small to mid sized businesses.

    You absolutely need to get your licensing in order if you want to get those certifications, especially the banking and healthcare data ones.

    I made them a list of everything we’d have to acquire to be in order with that part.

    They refused. They refused to the point of telling me “it’s not working out and we’re letting you go”.

    So, yeah, that’s how you get Microsoft to hear about a company running a couple hundred unlicensed products :)

    They never got their ISO certs and downsized considerably a year or two later.


  • When Netflix and Premium came along, I switched from pirating literally everything to finding that I had access to everything I wanted to watch between 15-30€ a month combined. Cheaper than a TV sub here costs (and a TV sub here didn’t have the shows I wanted to watch).

    Then the whole streaming market fragmented with every jackass on earth starting their own and removing a buttload of content from Netflix and YouTube.

    Resulting in that if I wanted to watch everything I want to watch, I’d be paying north of 150€ a month.

    So I pulled my wooden leg and dead parrot out of my closet and resumed pirating.

    Yarrrrr!