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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • It’s all about where the packages and services are installed

    No. Your packages and services could be on a network share on the other side of the world, but where they are run is what matters here. Processes are always loaded into, and run from main memory.

    “Running on bare metal” refers to whether the CPU the process is being run on is emulated/virtualized (ex. via Intel VT-x) or not.

    A VM uses virtualization to run an OS, and the processes are running within that OS, thus neither is running on bare metal. But the purpose of containers is to run them wherever your host OS is running. So if your host is on bare metal, then the container is too. You are not emulating or virtualizing any hardware.

    Here’s an article explaining the difference in more detail if needed.


  • As the other person said, I don’t think the SSD knows about partitions or makes any assumptions based on partitioning, it just knows if you’ve written data to a certain location, and it could be smart enough to know how often you’re writing data to that location. So if you keep writing data to a single location, it could decide to logically remap that location in logical memory to different physical memory so that you don’t wear it out.

    I say “could” because it really depends on the vendor. This is where one brand could be smart and spend the time writing smart software to extend the life of their drive, while another could cheap out and skip straight to selling you a drive that will die sooner.

    It’s also worth noting that drives have an unreported space of “spare sectors” that it can use if it detects one has gone bad. I don’t know if you can see the total remaining spare sectors, but it typically scales with the size of a drive. You can at least see how many bad sectors have been reallocated using S.M.A.R.T.



  • Afaik, the wear and tear on SSDs these days is handled under the hood by the firmware.

    Concepts like Files and FATs and Copy-on-Write are format-specific. I believe that even if a filesystem were to deliberately write to the same location repeatedly to intentionally degrade an SSD, the firmware will intelligently shift its block mapping around under the hood so as to spread out the wear. If the SSD detects a block is producing errors (bad parity bits), it will mark it as bad and map in a new block. To the filesystem, there’s still perfectly good storage at that address, albeit with a potential one-off read error.

    The larger sizes SSD just gives the firmware more extra blocks to pull from.


  • Assume your hard drives will fail. Any time I get a new NAS drive, I do a burn-in test (using a simple badblocks run, can take a few days depending on the size of the drive, but you can run multiple drives in parallel) to get them past the first ledge of the bathtub curve, and then I put them in a RaidZ2 pool and assume it will fail one day.

    Therefore, it’s not about buying the best drives so they never fail, because they will fail. It’s about buying the most cost effective drive for your purpose (price vs avg lifespan vs size). For this part, definitely refer to the Backblaze report someone else linked.


  • I’ve been using TrueNas with a nightly sync to Backblaze for years and I like it.

    It used to be called FreeNas and used FreeBSD. Now the BSD version is called TrueNas Core, and a new Linux based version is called TrueNas Scale.

    I would go with TrueNas Scale if I were starting a new one today. You probably won’t use the “jail” functionality immediately, but they’re super handy, and down the line if you start playing with them, you’ll run into fewer compatibility issues running Linux vs BSD.






  • I need everything to be fully but securely accessible from outside the network

    I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. Who is going to need to access it from outside the network? Is it good enough for you to set up a VPN?

    The more stuff visible on the internet, the more you have to play IT to keep it safe. Personally, I don’t have time for that. The safest and easiest system to maintain a system is one where possible connections are minimized.




  • This looks neat, though sounds like only the grayjay/futo app can cast to it, and I doubt any official streaming app would natively adopt it. Assuming it’s not just casting a video feed from your phone, my guess as to how it works is, it just copies the relevant cookies over to the fcast device where it can just pretend to be your phone as far as the server is concerned.

    This would be fine if it supports all the apps I use, and I’m the only one ever casting, but I don’t want to force guests to install and configure another middleware app to just to cast stuff. My hope is that Matter will somehow solve these, but I probably shouldn’t get my hopes up.

    I should try setting up fcast either way though, see how it goes. Thanks.



  • I don’t know the specifics of Miracast, but my impression was that it is specifically used to cast a video stream from one device to another device. That is sometimes useful, but not what I typically use my Chromecast for.

    The most useful feature of my Chromecast is the ability to be logged into Plex/Netflix/HBO/Spotify/YouTube/etc on my (or my guest’s) mobile device, and effectively send a link and a (probably ephemeral) token to the Chromecast so that it can stream directly from the server to the Chromecast without my mobile device spending battery power and bandwidth being a middle-man.

    And I assume the difficult part here is down to copyright reasons. Most of those streaming sites already limit the number of devices you can permit to stream content (which sucks, but is besides the point), so my impression is that they need to have some kind of under-the-table agreement with the Chromecast/Roku/Firestick/Apple TV/etc. folks to ensure that the device will correctly validate the credentials, not save any of the content, and properly dispose of everything when it’s done. And I assume Google has similar talks about when a device on the network is allowed to be listed as a casting device to apps.

    Does Miracast already handle this?



  • Backblaze supports encryption and lives in “the cloud”. Seems like if they don’t currently have a “beneficiary” option, they should add it. Your beneficiary could make a free account, and you add their account as your beneficiary. Until you die, they can’t access anything. But if you do, it is all accessible by them and only them.