Raspberry Pi hard-wired to the reset pins on the motherboard?
Yeah, but being fair you then get the situation where the BIOS or OS locks the thing up waiting for the right keys to be pressed. Which is why you get expensive LOM solutions (which IME also lock up, or require the exact right version of ActiveX that hasnāt been supported for ten years, orā¦)
(This was one of my first beefs against systemd: yes, I do want you to try to mount that NFS share at boot time. No, I do not want you to wait forever if itās not instantly available.)
3 Likes
You just need to spend some money, the out-of-bands in enterprise stuff are pretty good these days. I have spent the last month or so working on improving the automation around ours, and have been pleasantly surprised at how well it works. My team has a few thousand machines in a few hundred locations on six continents, I can pull health data from all of them in just a few minutes. I have a bunch of automation to do single click shutdowns/restarts of clusters, and automatic shutdowns based on sensor data, alarming based on OOB state, etc. Doesnāt do any good when someone flips the wrong breaker, or for hardware failure, but it handles expected power blips, hvac failure, etc.
1 Like
And a SRE is someone who will spend a day automating a boring task they have to do once every year, because 'all the things must be automated '!
2 Likes
Manufacturing took over simple work so that we could do the interesting stuff. Computers should be the same.
(This is why Iāve just spent some time bashing custom HTTP requests so that the ST:Ascendancy PBF can have an automatic status dump, which is (players+1) custom images dropped into a post, rather than my having to paste them into said post.)
5 Likes
Anyone got a recommendation for a USB switch? Essentially looking for a KVM without the āVā. There are an awful lot on Amazon.
To switch what devices? If all you want to do is switch input devices, any should work fine. (but some devices donāt deal with it well.)
If youāre wanting to switch disks or something, good luckā¦
If the devices are on the same network, you could use a āvirtual KVMā. Iāve used similar things in the past, but havenāt in a while. And currently itās not an option for me between my personal computer and my work laptop, as my work laptop has a direct VPN connection that blocks LAN traffic (which is just fine, anyway, since I connect my work laptop to my guest network anyway).
Searching your favorite search engine should reveal some āvirtual KVMā optionsā¦ Iām somewhat wary of them these days due to the likelihood of them just being outright keyloggersā¦
Just a wired K and M. Looking at some of the Amazon reviews it seems that some of the switches do dubious things with the power rails and I see people also asking questions about keyloggersā¦
I previously owned this but I lost it in a move at some point and no longer need the V ports anyhow. I do like the idea of being able to secret the box under my desk and route a button to somewhere convenient.
This is something I used to do, but one of these devices is a work laptop and Iām not even sure at this point whether the security stuff will even let me plug in an un-recognised KVMā¦
1 Like
Basically middleware that sits between your music collection and some sort of audio output device. Particularly useful because it has a very open interface and itās easy to write software which will talk to it. (For example, Iāve put together a shim to link to melodice and a playlist manager for parties.) There are also mobile clients, so when I have people over they can queue music out of my collection with their phones and whatnot.
1 Like
I was aware of mpd, but I parsed that domain name as āmusic police departmentā, and was afraid to click, lest they tell me Iām too uncool to be allowed music.
5 Likes
If anyone was too uncool to be allowed music, it would be a music police department.
4 Likes
I have a new phone.
I spent quite a few hours yesterday moving stuff.
And now I am waiting on 2 paper letters to be able to access some important stuff from the new phone. Yeah!
I am carrying around tons of messenger data I noticed. I skip moving the Wire history as it is only a single chat I use wire for these days. I should probably consider asking my friend to switch over to something else. But my Signal has about 10k messages in it and my threema backup is 1GB (including photos)
I am not sure I should actually keep that many messages. They are fleeting and transient it is not like I go back more than a few weeks to look up stuff. Signal has a mode where it automatically forgets older messages. Maybe I should use that. Do any of you do this? How do you deal with all the āoldā information?
2 Likes
So far Iām letting Signal build up, but I donāt use it very heavily (only one group chat and thatās fairly sporadic). Iām an archivist packrat by nature but as long as the stuff doesnāt pile up in physical space I donāt tend to mind it.
2 Likes
I used to keep old emailsā¦ like I have old lettersā¦ but when my server crashed in 2016 and took Rās emails with it (mine survived as I started backing up with my own mails and the thing went away halfway through the panicking)ā¦ I started looking at older stuff and decided I was never going back to those things anyway. I still have a few from early on that I moved from account to account. They are like historical artifacts from my āelmā days. But except for photos and my āwritingā ā¦ old dataā¦ ah well now that I use git for some things it will obviously accumulate. But digitalization should not only help us keep data it should also make it easy to get rid of it with precision like āplease delete anything older thanā¦ā
1 Like
I was a bit sad when my Hotmail account wiped itself (because of a year of not logging in) as that was a vast chunk of my adolescence. But also that was a vast chunk of my adolescence.
Iāve been approaching the limit of my Gmail account for some time now, I expect thereās an awful lot of stuff I could get rid of. But sometimes I find it handy to dig up an order confirmation from a decade ago.
My parents mainly use Skype which doesnāt seem to keep that long a record of conversations which is a bit of a shame, but I also donāt ever really scroll back that far.
2 Likes
Not to be too techie in general chatā¦ several people I know have mentioned the term āboss codeā, which happens when the boss was a coder back in the day but isnāt really any moreā¦
4 Likes
Iām feeling empathy for those bosses right now, while I cope with a god-awful object-obfuscated nightmare of a codebase that has emerged, dripping from layer upon layer of oily abstractions, out of something that was originally understandable to humans. The part which sometimes makes me feel like a āback in the dayā coder is that apparently some people prefer this.
5 Likes
Not A Coder, here - and believe me Iāve been trying to teach myself first Java, then Python for the last 20 odd years! The abstraction continues with cloud storage. We all know that at itās base itās just āother peopleās serversā so why do they have to make up arbitrary abstractions like āblock storageā āobject storageā and ācompute unitsā? Is it just to make us old fashioned sysadmins sad and uncomfortable?
2 Likes
And confuse anyone trying to measure costs. Though to be fair I understand that theyāre trying to get away from āa server does x and yā into āa unit does x, and you donāt know or care which servers your x,000 parallel units are running onā.
1 Like