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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • A story I heard was that it was the poor indigenous farmers who were forced to cultivate coffee for the Dutch. They weren’t allowed any of the beans they grew, but were able to collect it from the dung of civets that prowled around near the plantation. Of course, once the colonizers learned that it tasted “good”, it was commoditized too.

    Might be apocryphal.






  • As someone who has owned enterprise servers for self-hosting, I agree with the previous comment that you should avoid owning one if you can. They might be cheap, but your longterm ownership costs are going to be higher. That’s because as the server breaks down, you’ll be competing with other people for a dwindling supply of compatible parts. Unlike consumer PCs, server hardware is incredibly vendor locked. Hell, my last Proliant would keep the fans ramped at 100% because I installed a HDD that the BIOS didn’t like. This was after I spent weeks tracking down a disk that would at least be recognized, and the only drives I could find were already heavily used.

    My latest server is built with consumer parts fit into a 2U rack case, and I sleep so much easier knowing I can replace any of the parts myself with brand new alternatives.

    Plus as others have said, a 1U can be really loud. I don’t care about the sound of my gaming computer, but that poweredge was so obnoxious that despite being in the basement, I had to smother it with blankets just so the fans didn’t annoy me when I was watching TV upstairs. I still have a 1U Dell Poweredge, but I specifically sought out the generation that still let you hack the fan speeds in IPMI. From all my research, no such hack exists for the Proliant line.





  • I’d recommend BTRFS in RAID1 over hardware or mdadm raid. You get FS snapshotting as a feature, which would be nice before running a system update.

    For disk drives, I’d recommend new if you can afford them. You should look into shucking: It’s where you buy an external drive and then remove (shuck) the HDD from inside. You can get enterprise grade disks for cheaper than buying that same disk on its own. The website https://shucks.top tracks the price of various disk drives, letting you know when there are good deals.






  • For backup, maybe a blu-ray drive? I think you would want something that can withstand the salty environment, and maybe resist water. Thing is, even with BDXL discs, you only get a capacity of 100GiB each, so that’s a lot of disks.

    What about an offsite backup? Your media library could live ashore (in a server at a friend’s house). You issue commands from your boat to download media, and then sync those files to your boat when it’s done. If you really need to recover from the backup, have your friend clone a disk and mail it to you.

    Do you even need a backup? Would data redundancy be enough? Sure if your boat catches fire and sinks, your movies are gone, but that’s probably the least of your problems. If you just want to make sure that the salt and water doesn’t destroy your data, how about:

    1. A multi-disk filesystem which can tolerate at least 1 failure
    2. Regular utilities scanning for failure. BTRFS scrubs, for example.
    3. Backup fresh disks kept in a salt and water resistant container (original sealed packaging), to swap any failing disk, and replicate data from any good drives remaining.
    4. Documentation/practice to perform the aforementioned disk replacement, so you’re not googling manpages at sea.

    This would probably be cheapest and have the least complexity.





  • You’ve laid out one potential development cycle: FOSS from the get-go, and open collaboration welcome.

    However, that’s not the only way that a FOSS game might be developed. The code could be freely licensed, but the upstream developers refuse to accept outside patches. In that case, there’s one “original” and then if you don’t like it, build your fork.

    Alternatively, a game could be developed entirely in-house under proprietary licenses, and then only made FOSS upon commercial release. Contributor patches could improve the project, but conception of the game would be entirely the domain of its original developers.