No idea. I’ll look into creating one.

Remind me in two months, and I’ll tell you what’s happening.

I just had a chat with my oldest (almost 13 years y.o.) asking him some theoretical questions in the hope to spark some curiosity: “When you connect to a Roblox game, what do you think you’re connecting to?”. It took him a few leaps of imagination to realize that he’s connecting to a physical machine somewhere, and now he’s curious as to how such a machine looks. So that server stack I’ll be setting up, he’s interested in tagging along.

He already knows full well that there are more to PCs than just the windows UI, as I’m a linux guy, but I don’t think they’re aware of just how much can be done with a computer once you go outside of the usual GUI app that connects to some cloud service.

So, provided that his teacher agrees (after all, I have to take him out of school for what effectively will be “alternative education” for a few days so we can fly down to the head office), he’ll end up with bragging rights of having dealt network hardware that costs more than the average computer, and computers that cost more than the average house.

I think so too. My kids are around the age I was when I first started tinkering with PCs, but they don’t have any awareness of what’s going on under the hood, (to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days).

I’m thinking of asking their teachers if I can take them out of school for a day each and bring them to work with me for educational purposes so they get some perspective in the form of networks and servers.

Sure, they’re mostly interested in gaming, but I want them to see what kind of infrastructure is needed for a multiplayer game, specifically the hardware that they never get to see.

I’m building a new server stack in a couple of months, and most of it will be used for testing, so I’d like for them to help build and connect it.

Aberdeen. It smells like piss.

Of course he does. He took money from Russia.

For the sake of his children, I think that might be for the best.

Your best friend, transport, guard, and bed, all in one fluffy wrapping. Fuck yeah.

Wrong. I for one would love to have a minibronto. Or a lap-diplodocus. Or a triceratops named Spikey.

Hell, Archaeropteryx would look great perched on the curtain rod like a small parakeet.

And if you have rodent issues in your house, just unleash the T-rex. On that note, does Latin have a diminutive form of “Rex” ?

Plus, imagine the two playful Pachycephalosauri bumping their heads together all the time, with an audible click every time they did.

Also, who wouldn’t want an aquarium or a fish pond inhabited by a Nanolodon?

Depends on your definition of “baby”. It’s been a few years, so I don’t remember exactly, but some of thee pre-made meals you can buy at the store for babies have meat in them, and I believe they’re for 12months+

Didn’t he tell advertisers leaving to go fuck themselves? I don’t expect a very long queue of returning ones.

I imagine a version of Children of Men, but the societal problems only revolve around guys named Gary. The news cycle always keeps track of Britain’s youngest Gary, and the movie takes us through a depressing story about how everything is collapsing into civil war until one woman is able to give birth to a child named Gary. Of course, there are plenty of children being born all the time, but sadly, none of them are named Gary.

I’ve been curious about the same thing. I have an RTLSDR usb that I used to have connected to a huge antenna, mainly to listen in on GMDSS DSC transmissions on the 8MHz band, so I could use that to plot ships around the world.

I’ve since moved, so I no longer have a dipole in my yard, but I need an excuse to build one.

Well, some judges have standards. Clarence has gotten used to a certain level by now. Anything below the stuff he’s been given over the years ain’t gonna cut it.

Fun fact: Buttholes are unique in the same way that fingerprints are. So resubmitting with a new picture can be used as proof of identification and thereby licensing.

Why do I know this, you wonder? Eons ago I stumbled across this anus recognition software source base. The idea was that it could one day be used for identification instead of retina scanning.

Wapo columnists and Hillary can go jump off a cliff together. Everyone’s sick of them both.

Jabra still exists yes. I’m still using Jabra, although I’m using a pair that I bought after I thought that one earbud was gone forever. I still use the older ones, which was Jabra Elite 4, but only with my PC, as its battery took a hit after those 6 months at sea. I currently main Jabra Active 7 or something like that, and I quite like them. I noticed that the cover doesn’t stay very attached after a few proper cleans, but nothing a drop of glue doesn’t fix. What I really like about the ones I currently use is that they’re supposedly built to withstand sweat while training. I don’t work out, but it would seem that those who do sweat A LOT, as I can wear mine while showering without any issues.

As for resilvering, the RAIDs are only a small fraction each of the complete storage cluster. I don’t remember their exact sizes, but each raid volume is 12 drives of 10TB each. Each machine has three of these volumes. Four machines total contributes all of its raid volumes to the storage cluster for 1.2PB of redundant storage (although I’m tempted to drop the beegfs redundancy, as we could use the extra space, and it’s usually fairly hassle free to swap in a new server and move the drives over).

EDIT: I just realized that I have this Jabra confference call speaker attached to the laptop on which I’m currently typing. I mostly use it for discord while playing project zomboid with my friends, though. I run audio output elsewhere, as the jabra is mono only.

Story time!

In this one production cluster at work (1.2PB across four machines, 36 drives per machine) everything was Raid6, except ONE single volume on one of the machines that was incorrectly set up as Raid5. It wasn’t that worrysome, as the data was also stored with redundancy across the machines in the storage cluster itself (a nice functionality of beegfs), but it annoyed the fuck out of me for the longest time.

There was some other minor deferred maintenance as well which necessitated a complete wipe, but there was no real opportunity to do this and rebuild that particular RAID volume properly until last spring before the system was shipped off to Singapore to be mobilized for a survey. I planned on getting it done before the system was shipped, so I backed up what little remained after almost clearing it all out, nuked the cluster, disassembled the raid5, and then started setting up everything from scratch. Piece of cake, right?

shit

That’s when I learned how much time it actually takes to rebuild a volume of 12 disks, 10TB each. I let it run as long as I could before it had to be packed up. After half a year of slow shipping it finally arrived on the other side of the planet, so I booked my plane ticket and showed up a week before anyone else just so I could connect power and continue the reraiding before the rest of the crew showed up. Basically, pushing a few buttons, followed by a week of sitting at various cafes drinking beer. Once the reraid was done, reclustering was done in less than an hour, and restoring the folder structure backup was a few hours on top of that. Not the worst work trip I’ve had, except from some unexpected and unrelated hardware failures, but that’s a story for another day.

Fun fact: While preparing the system for shipment here in Europe, I lost one of my Jabra bluetooth buds. I searched fucking everywhere for hours, but gave up on finding it. I found it half a year later in Singapore, on top of the server rack, surprised it hadn’t even rolled down. It really speaks to how little these huge container ships roll.

Seconding this. For starters, when tempted to go for Raid5, go for Raid6 instead. I’ve had drives fail in Raid5, and in turn have a second failure during the increased I/O associated with replacing a failed drive.

And yes, setting up RAID wipes the drives. Is the data private? If not, a friendly datahoarder might help you out with temporary storage.

Eons ago, in my twenties, some friends and I had a party. There were a lot of people there, so it was pretty crowded in the couch.

A friend of mine arrived, and he was having trouble finding a place to sit, so I sat back and told him half as a joke “You always have a seat in my lap”. He took me up on the offer.

After a while of him sitting there, both of us enjoying the spectacle around the table, one of us (I don’t remember who) said:

“This was surprisingly pleasant”
We’re both straight dudes.