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merpkz

594 karma · joined March 7, 2022

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merpkz··on Why I love FreeBSD
Playstation is based on FreeBSD, so I would guess that Sony has some serious FreeBSD people working there who created one of the most popular a video game console - that's pretty cool
merpkz··on Starlink Mini as a failover
Man, that 500kbit/s is quite generous for that price, can easily be used to access CCTV cameras in remote areas. I currently use LTE for that and it's 10 eur for 15GB data cap per month for that use case
merpkz··on US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike
> Ukraine has been using these drones so it’s entirely possible Iran has this tech too.

Ukraine has been defending against these drones for past 4 years!

EDIT: nevermind, we are talking about sea babies, not shaheds - different kind of drones.

merpkz··on My Homelab Setup
These modern-day homelabbers will do anything to avoid DNS, looks like to them it's some kind of black magic where things will inevitably go wrong and all hell will break loose.
merpkz··on I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
> I can’t recommend libreboot enough, or even heads if libreboot isn’t your speed.

Why though? Not a single reason mentioned in post about why would it be better than whatever stock BIOS the laptop is shipped with.

merpkz··on An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review
My point was they are not guaranteed to work reliably when shoved into a NUC, with janky adaptoprs and lack of airflow
merpkz··on An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review
Not sure about the CPU performance being much more powerful for some shit-stained NUCs found on ebay, but one selling point for these minisforum machines are hassle-free dual 10G interfaces which are required for decent cluster performance - see ceph or proxmox ( with ceph ) or even kubernetes with, you guessed it - rook-ceph. Getting 10Gbit interface to work on ThinkCentre is possible, but not guaranteed to be reliable. This machine is perfect for such application and price point is not that terrible all things considered.
merpkz··on Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]
Any information what battery life these things have? Would a human be able to outrun them given the need?
merpkz··on One Server. Small Business
> you can get so much out of a single $30/month VPS

I agree with this 100%, but only wanted to note, that not all VPSes are equal. Having worked in shared hosting business in the past, I can tell from experience that performance can vary greatly depending on hosting provider and how much they have over provisioned their virtualization platform, since VPS is nothing more than a VM running on someones else's hardware and that someone can put 4 VMs on single CPU core - all fighting for same CPU time, so it's depends on certain luck what will your VM get and what neighbors are doing - idling of being hacked and mining crypto. So if requirements are serious, look out for dedicated core VPS hosting and stay away from too good to be true cheap VMs deals. Also relevant monitoring metric is CPU steal time - its percentage of time a virtual CPU waits for a physical CPU from the hypervisor while it is busy serving another VM - that is strong indication you are being ripped off CPU.

merpkz··on MinIO repository is no longer maintained
Tangentially related, since we are on the subject of Minio. Minio has or rather had an option to work as an FTP server! That is kind of neat because CCTV cameras have an option to upload a picture of motion detected to an FTP server and that being a distributed minio cluster really was a neat option, since you could then generate an event of a file uploaded, kick off a pipeline job or whatever. Currently instead of that I use vsftpd and inotify to detect file uploads but that is such a major pain in the ass operate, it would be really great to find another FTP to S3 gateway.
merpkz··on MinIO repository is no longer maintained
I just bit the bullet last week and figured we are going to migrate our self hosted minio servers to ceph instead. So far 3 server ceph cluster has been setup with cephadm and last minio server is currently mirroring its ~120TB buckets to new cluster with a whopping 420MB/s - should finish any day now. The complexity of ceph and it's cluster nature of course if a bit scary at first compared to minio - a single Go binary with minimal configuration, but after learning the basics it should be smooth sailing. What's neat is that ceph allows expanding clusters, just throw more storage servers at it, in theory at least, not sure where the ceiling is for that yet. Shame minio went that way, it had a really neat console before they cut it out. I also contemplated le garage, but it seem elasticsearch is not happy with that S3 solution for snapshots, so ceph it is.
merpkz··on You can now download Windows 7 and Vista ISO images with all the updates
Going to get this and install it on my old Asus core2duo laptop from circa 2008 - damn thing still is going strong, despite plastic becoming so brittle it has not one single panel left without cracks in it. Currently it has XP on it, but that is missing whole bunch of drivers, like touchpad not working and BIOS AHCI has to be in compatible mode otherwise it will bluescreen. It's going to be nostalgia machine where all the games I used to play back in the days are installed.
merpkz··on Nvidia Reportedly Ends GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Production, RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB Next
I just bought a 5070 Ti a week ago and can attest I have used it for maybe 3-4 hours since then. It begs the question maybe I should have rented the compute instead instead of paying 900 eur on spot - that's like 3 years worth of rent.
merpkz··on Firefox extension to redirect x.com to xcancel.com
Twitter used to have a mobile version which was almost usable compared to regular, what happened to that? Doesn't seem to be working or it's actively redirecting me back to regular.
merpkz··on AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention
it's last call to get a GPU while there is stock left, no hopes those will become any more affordable in future considering the ongoing DRAM crisis. I am going to get 5070 Ti to replace my 1080 Ti which did a great service over all these years, paid it's worth back two times over during monero mining days and still can play a lot of games on high settings - recently finished RDR2. I sometimes wonder if Nvidia will be still making GPUs useful for gamers in a year or two or just completely shift it's focus to AI accelerators regular people will have no use for. RIP affordable computing at home.
merpkz··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Lithuania?
merpkz··on Kubernetes egress control with squid proxy
None that I can remember, I was probably just testing something outside container and left it like that. Now checking there is /run/squid created by Alpine so that could be used too.
merpkz··on Kubernetes egress control with squid proxy
Don't even mention it, I have never used NetworkPolicy before, but now it seems like exactly the thing I am missing on my clusters to limit the blast radius if anything gets owned. It's quite incredible the amount of nftables firewall rules the k3s daemon just created for that example policy in your blog, now I am in rabbit hole trying to figure out how this all actually works under the hood. Thanks for this writeup!
merpkz··on Kubernetes egress control with squid proxy
You don't need a sidecar to stream logs of squid, that's anti-pattern, instead just tell squid to write logs to /dev/stdout, like this:

  logfile_rotate 0
  cache_log stdio:/dev/stdout
  access_log stdio:/dev/stdout
  cache_store_log stdio:/dev/stdout
Running squid in container is a bit tricky, since it is indeed an ancient piece of software, but I have managed to run it successfully before with squid configuration like this:

  max_filedescriptors 1048576
  pid_filename /dev/shm/squid.pid
  cache_effective_user squid
  cache_effective_group squid
and deployment has these set, - UID 31 is squid user inside of container

  securityContext:
  runAsUser: 31
  runAsGroup: 31
  fsGroup: 31
  command: ["sh","-c","squid -z && sleep 3s; squid -N"]
merpkz··on The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300
I still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes.
merpkz··on 10 Years of Let's Encrypt
As a sysadmin in 2020 - 2024 time frame I used to do that all the time at my previous job, got a strong openlssl cli game going whenever needed to generate a new csr for existing key or new key and shovel an exact amount of SANs into the CSR too. Lot of time wasted. There were also a certain set of customers for which we managed systems and they insisted for it to be done this way as something free on the internet is not to be trusted. Oh well, strange times.
merpkz··on 10 Years of Let's Encrypt
I have also heard a negative about it being somehow "cheap" and we can "afford" a proper wildcard for our website from managers back in the day, like, few years ago. Never mind the hours wasted every year changing that certificate in every system out there and always forgetting a few.

Also a valid point from security people is that you leak your internal hostnames to certificate transparency lists once you get a cert for your "internal-service.example.com" and every bot in existence will know about it and try to poke it.

I solved these problems by just not working with people like that anymore and also getting a wildcard Let's Encrypt it certificate for every little service hosted - *.example.com and not thinking about something being on the list anymore.

merpkz··on Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months
If things go the way they are, I wonder how long until buying a used Playstation 4 (8GB DDR5 RAM) at around 100USD a piece to put Linux on it and use as a server in cluster will become viable thing to do? Bring back console clusters!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

merpkz··on How to run phones while being struck by suicide drones
Can you give some examples on what are these people specifically doing with all these phones for those unfamiliar with click farms?
merpkz··on A $1k AWS mistake
> AWS charges $0.09 per GB for data transfer out to the internet from most regions, which adds up fast when you're moving terabytes of data.

How does this actually work? So you upload your data to AWS S3 and then if you wish to get it back, you pay per GB of what you stored there?

merpkz··on Steam Machine
And yet somehow steam deck has absolutely zero issues with microsd cards
merpkz··on Gluing and framing a 9000-piece jigsaw
I am currently 2/6 done with [1] this 13,2k piece Disney puzzle and this guide will be much helpful once I need to hang it as that has been bothering me a bit since the sheer proportions of the puzzle are starting to appear. That might not be soon though, as I didn't account for lack of sunlight during winter, turns out doing puzzle with artificial lightning is not easy, puzzle reflects some of it and it's strain on the eyes.

1 - https://en.clementoni.com/collections/adult-puzzle/products/...

merpkz··on Gentoo Linux might be the best desktop Linux distro for advanced Linux users
I used Gentoo since about 2012 up until 2022 then switched to Debian mainly because lot less things used to break during updates and my old CPU ( i7 4790k ) became a bit dated to compile every new version of Golang, Rust and Chromium - just hours and hours of brutal grind. Since flatpak can provide up to date versions of a lot of desktop software on Debian there is very little point switching back. Maybe one day if I get my hands on some ridiculously powerful CPU like 7800 or 9800X3D then might try it again.
merpkz··on Hollow Knight: Silksong causes server chaos on Xbox, Steam, and Nintendo
> The hype for this is remarkable and people have been counting the hours since it was announced 2 weeks ago.

There was a person /u/UrsaRyan on reddit.com/r/civ doing a Sid Meier's Civilization related meme for about two years on daily basis until next (seventh?) installment in the game was released. That one flopped though, so yea, not sure what my point is, guess something about hype for a game on reddit or something and in the end it not paying off.

merpkz··on Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds
Yeah, I am using my Deck with 512GB sdcard and could never tell it is actually running from sdcard. It does a lot of game updates and always finishes those in reasonable time, at least for me. That card is going strong with all the writes going on on steam deck
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