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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • In days past some drive vendors had different sector layouts for drives and would cause issues with raid. Pretty sure most nowadays are all the same layout and you won’t run into any issues. I still look to get the same drive model anyways just to be perfectly sure that there are no issues.

    Even then you may run into weird issues like one of my 1.2 TB enterprise ssd drives was reporting 1.12 TiB rather than 1.09 TiB the other 7 drives had. TrueNas refused to build a vdev with that drive and I had to return it to get a new one.


  • Typically a Fiber ISP will run Fiber optics only to your DEMARC (or Demarcation) point. This will be usually where your main cable (before any splits) or DSL line used to come in (in the US they’ve been using Orange tubes to indicate this and it will usually run to a panel in some closet or laundry). At the DEMARC they’ll install one of two things: a basic fiber to ethernet converter which will provide you a single ethernet port and a pure tap to the internet, or a Gateway device that will convert the fiber to multiple eithernet with NAT (usually providing other capabilites like TV, Phone, etc).

    If you have the latter, you may not get much say in what you can do with your connection, and would be limited to a DMZ mode that is configured on the Gateway. What you put behind the converter or gateway is up to you.


  • I’ve got my mom setup on their PC backup service, no complaints so far (on the Backblaze side that is, she still insists that she doesn’t need continuous backups even though I’ve had to restore multiple times for her).

    I switched my backups from Crashplan to B2 as it was significantly cheaper than going to AWS. B2 is more expensive than what I was paying for Crashplan Pro Unlimited (about 8x for the amount of data I have), but I have more peace of mind with it not relying on Crashplan’s terrible Java client.

    A reminder that the only good backup is a tested backup.



  • You’ll probably have to provide the netmask info for us to review. If you’re using /24 then those all reside in the same network so I would expect them to be in the same broadcast domain.

    If you have mismatched netmasks that could be trying to route traffic to the gateway which then reflects back. Ensure your devices have the same network, netmask and broadcast ip (e.g. 192.168.1.0/24 will have broadcast ip of 192.168.1.255)





  • You seem to be misinformed on how the internet works. Nothing is “free”. ISPs have to buy equipment, pay for expensive physical connectivity (without disturbing existing infrastructure), and usually have to deal with constant, ever increasing bandwidth requirements.

    I’m all for a bit of net neutrality, but ISPs tend to get a lot of flak for policies like this, for seemingly no reason. For example, let’s say ISP A and Upstream B have a mutual bandwidth sharing policy (called Peering) where both sides benefit equally from the connectivity. ISP A determines that N is using all the bandwidth to Upstream B. ISP A has three options: N gets all the bandwidth to Upstream B (disturbing other traffic to/from that network), N has to be throttled to allow all traffic equally, or ISP A and Upstream B need to expand their network again (new equipment, new physical links) which will cost a lot of money. N doesn’t even pay ISP A or Upstream B, they just pay their ISP C. In the end, ISP A has to throttle N, and N is the one who had to expand/change their business model to deliver content to their customers. They had to go out and buy services from many upstream providers to even the load and designed a solution to install Caching boxes inside each ISP’s datacenter so their traffic could reach end users without going upstream.



  • For the disks, you may have a small issue with having multiple types of disks in a single RAID10, as those disks might have slightly different physical attributes. ZFS is an option here as you can add two vdevs for the different drive types and add them to the same zpool, which effectively creates the RAID10 you’re looking for. You would typically not use LVM on top of ZFS but if you go with RAID10 it would let you create logical partitions that can be expanded easily at a later time.

    Another ZFS option is to use RAIDZ1 with the 4 disks in a vdev. The vdev will use 1 disk of space across all disks to maintain a parity with the other disks. You will have 12TB of usable storage on your 16TB raw storage. This will allow you to lose one drive with no data loss.


  • My line of business is entirely a Microsoft shop so everything we’ve ever written has been for MSSQL.

    That being said, I can understand the benefits of having a choice in backend. For example, for our Zabbix deployment some engineer just installed mariadb+zabbix on a server and called it a day. This has caused us no end of troubles (ibdata misconfigured, undo files too small, etc). After the last time I had to rebuild it due to undo file corruption I swore that if it broke again I was switching to postgres. So far knocks on wood we haven’t had any major issues. We’re still looking into and planning for a postgres migration but we’re hoping to hold out for a little longer prep time.

    Maybe I should contribute a MSSQL engine for Zabbix so I can move it to a platform I’m more comfortable with. ;)



  • IANAL, but this is likely a legal gray area regarding software licenses, especially if you read the AGPL code prior to writing your library. Companies that do this sort of thing professionally have a/b teams that don’t speak to each other (one reads and generates design documents, the other uses those design documents to write a new library) to prevent a lawsuit for violating licensing terms. They can claim that the developers writing the library didn’t copy any code from the source library.

    As for the typedef, it’s most likely considered a public definition document. I would think it would be like a public C# interface, where it’s only the method declarations and expected parameters and the actual implementation is not included at all.

    If you’re considering publishing this or using it commercially you should definitely consult a lawyer that specializes in copyright.



  • Since we don’t know what server or VM tech you’re using the advice will be pretty generic. For self hosting, you can likely get away with your ISCSI traffic sharing the LAN interface with your usual vm traffic but if you need high throughput you will want ISCSI optimized nics and turn on jumbo frames (mtu of 9000 is the standard here). This requires a switch that supports jumbo frames as well.

    For Windows, I find the ISCSI support to be very lacking. Every time I have used it I have had sporadic loss of connectivity, failure to mount on boot, and other issues. I would avoid it.

    For ESXi you can map an ISCSI lun as a datastore and create vmdks on top. This functions the same if you use actual FC luns or NFS mounts, and have had no issues with reliability. There’s also RDM which is raw direct map which can mount the ISCSI lun as a disk of the vm. If you’re using vSphere I would advise against this as you lose the ability to vMotion or use DRS.


  • BIOS is designed to be super low level and work the best in all situations, regardless of what that is. That means the defaults are usually designed for best overall performance rather than having all PCI lanes allocated to a single slot. Different mobos have different defaults and priorities.

    Your mobo default probably makes sure that your 8 and 4x slots or nvme actually have full lanes available, where if you allocate the full lanes for the primary slot you may only have the 8x/4x slots running in 2x/1x mode.

    It’s up to you to determine if the 16x slot should have dedicated lanes. I don’t remember ever having to change this on any of my machines, but I mostly run gaming mobos which probably prioritize having a dedicated GPU with full access to PCI lanes.