[Rant] Minor Rant III: For a Few Hollers More

Squidleybits

Squidleybits

jwhouk said:
Wait - what kind of soap do you use?
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Me? Aveeno baby wash for sensitive skin. My doctor originally thought it might be my soap.

I had my infusion yesterday and starting about half an hour after the IV was in, my face started doing the same thing it does after I shower. It looked like I had a really bad sun burn or something. The nurse brought me over an ice pack for my face.
 
jwhouk

jwhouk

Have your water tested. It might be the well, or it might even be the plumbing itself. Do you have any metallic allergies, like nickel or copper or such?
 
Squidleybits

Squidleybits

Not that I know of. I had pretty comprehensive allergy testing done recently. I have another autoimmune condition that causes hives randomly but the ones on my arms and legs after I shower are different. Most of my allergies are related to medication.

I'm going in to have the challenge testing done which tries to prove if it's any type of water or something else. I hadn't thought of metals though so I'll ask about that.

I've never had the reaction happen during an infusion though. There was no itching but otherwise it was similar with how my face looked and how I felt.

Now this is going to sound whiny but I would have been totally ok dealing with one or two bizarre/serious medical issues. This many is embarrassing and discouraging.
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

I lost about half a day, between now and Friday, debugging an issue caused by a minute difference in our production and testing environments, causing a code path that was not predictable, expected, or reproducible. Several hundred dollars of dev time because of 1 char in a field, and 1 bool flag that was set wrong by someone else. Nnnngh.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Denbrought said:
I lost about half a day, between now and Friday, debugging an issue caused by a minute difference in our production and testing environments, causing a code path that was not predictable, expected, or reproducible. Several hundred dollars of dev time because of 1 char in a field, and 1 bool flag that was set wrong by someone else. Nnnngh.
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...but you found it!
Reminds me of someone who tracked down that his networking problems were due to the fact that two of the computers on his LAN somehow had the same hardware MAC address. Yes I know that shouldn't be possible.

--Patrick
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

PatrThom said:
...but you found it!
Reminds me of someone who tracked down that his networking problems were due to the fact that two of the computers on his LAN somehow had the same hardware MAC address. Yes I know that shouldn't be possible.

--Patrick
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I got a lifetime of MAC address dickery worth back at my old IT job, uggggh.

Does remind me of this fun Raymond Chen story: Sure, we do that
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Uh oh. I fucked up.



I was in one of our routers, trying to figure out if a bottleneck in one of our gateways was coming from external throttling or if somebody on my network was just eating up all the bandwidth. I noticed one connection coming from MY computer to an IP I wasn't familiar with, and tracing it down went to a canadian hosting company that caters to First Nation communities? It was going at a constant connection with a low speed, and I couldn't for the life of me tell what it was.

So, smart guy that I am, I think "well, I should just block that IP address and see what stops working on my computer."

Well you know what stopped working? My ability to connect to the router.

Oh boy. I'm not sure why connecting to this router requires a connection to a canadian native hosting company, but my guess is it's something to do with winbox dynamically downloading modules from the cloud the same way some steam games download mods from the workshop on the fly.

At any rate, now I can't connect to that router >_< the router is continuing to FUNCTION otherwise, but boy, if I ever need to get into it to make changes, I'm hosed.

My only recourse at this point might be to do a factory reset >_< uuughghh which would basically take a whole day to get back the way we need it to work.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Been there when trying to get home routers to play nice with one another, setting up subnets. Whoops, activated the second subnet too early, now I can't route to it, gotta reset and start over, bleah.

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
PatrThom said:
Been there when trying to get home routers to play nice with one another, setting up subnets. Whoops, activated the second subnet too early, now I can't route to it, gotta reset and start over, bleah.

--Patrick
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Just yet another time I'm thanking my lucky stars we have two gateways.
 
Squidleybits

Squidleybits

My sister and I both had medical appointments today and the results suggest that we did not win the genetic lottery.

We are now Franken-sisters. It would have been nice to have had the genes for real blonde hair thrown in there though.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

So I'm feeling like we have enough people here that we should probably have a safe place to put all our stuff. So I'm trying to spec out a machine that'll just sit in the basement on the network, humming away and keeping all our data safe (assuming NAS4Free is all it's cracked up to be, that is). I think I've made some really good choices here, but the price...the price is gonna be > $2000, and more than half of that is the cost of the drives themselves. Sooooo for now we just have to be really careful with our data.

--Patrick
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

PatrThom said:
So I'm feeling like we have enough people here that we should probably have a safe place to put all our stuff. So I'm trying to spec out a machine that'll just sit in the basement on the network, humming away and keeping all our data safe (assuming NAS4Free is all it's cracked up to be, that is). I think I've made some really good choices here, but the price...the price is gonna be > $2000, and more than half of that is the cost of the drives themselves. Sooooo for now we just have to be really careful with our data.

--Patrick
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I take a very zen approach to data. If it's gone, it's gone. I have some important documents backed up, but they could be replaced if needed. I have articles I've written and other hobby stuff backed up online, but if it vanished it'd be no huge loss. It all feels very freeing.

Though, I'm also a bit weird in that I never take pictures and don't own a photo album. It's just not something important to me.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Yeah, I'm talking about putting together a place big enough for a family of 5 to keep all the stuff they don't want on their internal drives, and keep in mind that everyone in this family (except our son) has at least 2 active computers each.

--Patrick
 
strawman

strawman

PatrThom said:
So I'm feeling like we have enough people here that we should probably have a safe place to put all our stuff. So I'm trying to spec out a machine that'll just sit in the basement on the network, humming away and keeping all our data safe (assuming NAS4Free is all it's cracked up to be, that is). I think I've made some really good choices here, but the price...the price is gonna be > $2000, and more than half of that is the cost of the drives themselves. Sooooo for now we just have to be really careful with our data.

--Patrick
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I know you like to tinker and "own" every part of each system you put in your network, but if cost is excessive, you might want to scale back on performance or go with an off the shelf system simply to get it done. If it does what you need, then you don't have to touch it again. If it has some drawbacks, it'll probably meet your major needs until it fills up and you can then look forward to building your own system having saved up for it for several years while the cheaper system does its job.

For instance, a Synology DS416 four disk station is $366, and four 4TB 5400rpm drives will run you $600, for about 12TB of usable (after reasonable RAID) space, shipped to your door for under $1,000.

It won't tick all the boxes, but it'll hit your major needs, and it'll be set up much more quickly. If I recall, you also have a time limitation that, even if you could afford it, spending a day setting up your DIY solution might be as difficult for you to manage as spending $2k on it.

Performance won't be ideal, but unless you're spending hours a day editing 4k videos I doubt anyone in your house but you will notice, and it will rarely be an issue for you. You can still stream an HD stream for each user to/from the station simultaneously without hiccups.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

stienman said:
a Synology DS416 four disk station is $366, and four 4TB 5400rpm drives will run you $600, for about 12TB of usable (after reasonable RAID) space, shipped to your door for under $1,000. It won't tick all the boxes, but it'll hit your major needs, and it'll be set up much more quickly. If I recall, you also have a time limitation that, even if you could afford it, spending a day setting up your DIY solution might be as difficult for you to manage as spending $2k on it.
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I've considered many off-the-shelf solutions, but my primary goal is one of creating a secure shared storage pool that is armored against bit rot, and that means going with something based on ZFS or btrfs. And since btrfs isn't officially released yet, that means ZFS. I have already constructed two external RAID1 boxes we pass around that are each 2x2TB, one for Mac and one for Windows, and those serve adequately for offline backup, but they are a) normally offline/inaccessible/inconvenient and b) RAID1 is still susceptible to bit rot. Hence my longing for a large, server-grade NAS.
As for the time limitation, my situation is more one of not having contiguous time. Assembling a computer is not something that has to be done all in one go, and I have built many computers one piece at a time as time and wallet permit, so that is nothing new. Also, if I can finally shed my house soon, a project such as this may actually become plausible.

--Patrick
 
strawman

strawman

PatrThom said:
I've considered many off-the-shelf solutions, but my primary goal is one of creating a secure shared storage pool that is armored against bit rot, and that means going with something based on ZFS or btrfs. And since btrfs isn't officially released yet, that means ZFS. I have already constructed two external RAID1 boxes we pass around that are each 2x2TB, one for Mac and one for Windows, and those serve adequately for offline backup, but they are a) normally offline/inaccessible/inconvenient and b) RAID1 is still susceptible to bit rot. Hence my longing for a large, server-grade NAS.
As for the time limitation, my situation is more one of not having contiguous time. Assembling a computer is not something that has to be done all in one go, and I have built many computers one piece at a time as time and wallet permit, so that is nothing new. Also, if I can finally shed my house soon, a project such as this may actually become plausible.

--Patrick
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Well, bitrot, even for consumer drives, is still very, very low probability, but you doubtless already know that and want a bulletproof setup.

At any rate, select Synology products running DSM 6.0 and up (they're on 6.1 right now) support btrfs, so it may actually be the better direction if that's your primary concern.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/Btrfs <-- Scroll down for the list of models that support btrfs

The DS416Play, for instance, is under $420 and supports btrfs as well as four bays of storage (and you can always attach external storage if you don't want to go to their 7 bay or larger solutions).
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

stienman said:
Well, bitrot, even for consumer drives, is still very, very low probability, but you doubtless already know that and want a bulletproof setup.
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I want a data vault, a place where I can put things I literally will never be able to replace if my copy goes bad, and I mean things other than just pictures/movies/"family memories"/etc., and I want that vault to potentially last for decades, plural.

I do prefer the flexibility of btrfs over ZFS, so perhaps something like Rockstor might even be an option. My attraction to self-built (aside from getting to choose the hardware) was also that if the server ever irrevocably fails, I can build a new one, mount the drives, and carry on as if nothing happened. With something like a Synology, there's always the worry that the company will go under, tweak their setup, or encumber it with proprietary metadata/file tables/fixtures, etc. forcing me to start over. I did not know their hardware supported btrfs now, so if it formats the drives in some sort of standard format, that may be a tempting option.

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
PatrThom said:
I want a data vault, a place where I can put things I literally will never be able to replace if my copy goes bad, and I mean things other than just pictures/movies/"family memories"/etc., and I want that vault to potentially last for decades, plural.

I do prefer the flexibility of btrfs over ZFS, so perhaps something like Rockstor might even be an option. My attraction to self-built (aside from getting to choose the hardware) was also that if the server ever irrevocably fails, I can build a new one, mount the drives, and carry on as if nothing happened. With something like a Synology, there's always the worry that the company will go under, tweak their setup, or encumber it with proprietary metadata/file tables/fixtures, etc. forcing me to start over. I did not know their hardware supported btrfs now, so if it formats the drives in some sort of standard format, that may be a tempting option.

--Patrick
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Heh, you are the exact polar opposite of a buddhist. Not only do you want something to last forever unchanged in your possession, you want something to last forever that isn't even material :p

You need some zen in your life. All things fade, everything will be lost. Accept your transitory nature and the inevitability of data corruption /ommmm
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

GasBandit said:
Heh, you are the exact polar opposite of a buddhist. Not only do you want something to last forever unchanged in your possession, you want something to last forever that isn't even material :p
You need some zen in your life. All things fade, everything will be lost. Accept your transitory nature and the inevitability of data corruption /ommmm
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There will be plenty of time for my data to fade after I am dead.

--Patrick
 
strawman

strawman

PatrThom said:
I want a data vault ... to potentially last for decades, plural.
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See, that's the impossible requirement.

If you don't plan on transferring your data at least once every five years, or maybe stretch it to ten, then you're going to lose it no matter what the file system is. Even solid state drives follow the bathtub curve.

If you change this requirement to a more reasonable 5-10 years then the number of solutions becomes much larger and cheaper.

I don't think your $2k solution meets this requirement. It'll be the ship of Theseus, but rather than building a new machine once every five years you'll be doing constant small upgrades and fighting with incompatibilities all along the way, spending the same or more money just more frequently and in smaller amounts individually, in addition to spending a lot more time.

Say synology goes out of business next year. Your system will still work. Plan on upgrading to a different manufacturer's product in a few years time. Keep up on your offsite backups.

It's just a different strategy, I understand, but if that's your hard requirement then you're right, your strategy is the only one that can possibly get you close, even though it still won't actually meet the requirement.

My guess is ultimately you'd still end up doing complete transfers once every several years anyway even with your solution. Chasing that sixth nine just seems expensive and a poor return on investment.
 
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Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

PatrThom said:
I want a data vault, a place where I can put things I literally will never be able to replace if my copy goes bad, and I mean things other than just pictures/movies/"family memories"/etc., and I want that vault to potentially last for decades, plural.

I do prefer the flexibility of btrfs over ZFS, so perhaps something like Rockstor might even be an option. My attraction to self-built (aside from getting to choose the hardware) was also that if the server ever irrevocably fails, I can build a new one, mount the drives, and carry on as if nothing happened. With something like a Synology, there's always the worry that the company will go under, tweak their setup, or encumber it with proprietary metadata/file tables/fixtures, etc. forcing me to start over. I did not know their hardware supported btrfs now, so if it formats the drives in some sort of standard format, that may be a tempting option.

--Patrick
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Wait a minute, I know this plot... are you copying your consciousness over there? You never go full lawnmower man.
 
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