I have a host name whose dns points to my home IP. I use this for game servers for my buddies. Should I be worried about my home IP being easily accessible like this, and should I get a physical firewall appliance to protect myself?...
I've explicitly told people not to send me text messages. The protocols are old and shit compared to other instant messengers. I'm on Google chat, telegram, signal, discord, slack, teams.... Find another app to talk to me with. I generally don't care which one, but I actively refuse to sign up for or into any Facebook/meta/Zuckerberg properties. If you use something I don't that isn't owned by the zuck, I'll probably sign up so we can keep touch, but for the love of God, not SMS.
Look, SMS was great when phones didn't have internet on them. It was a quick and easy way to send updates and chat while away from your cable/DSL/dialup (whatever you had at the time). Now that data is the primary use for a mobile phone plan, just use a more robust IM app.
I also have about six or seven phone numbers, which I give out to different groups of people for different reasons, plus a phone number on my mobile which nearly nobody knows. All my other lines (all VoIP lines) ring my cellphone number. Texting from my VoIP line is not fun, but it does work. Multimedia messages generally get lost and RCS is just encouraging the use of something that should have been killed off.
I'm partial to Telegram and signal since they mainly operate by phone numbers, but I can make "voice" and video calls over data rather than having to use my cellphone directly; which allows me to call from my computer, laptop, phone, tablet.... Literally any device that can run the program. So if my phone is lost/damaged/stolen/whatever (unavailable for any reason), I can still send messages to you and call if needed.
If everything is tied to your cellphone number, and that number becomes unavailable for any reason, well... Get fucked I guess. Your SIM stops working, your phone dies/breaks/gets stolen, your provider decides to fuck your account up or charge you a fortune for no good reason and cuts you off, your provider has a major malfunction and stops servicing clients in your area.... Literally anything goes wrong with the one system you use and all your SMS bullshit goes away. Stop. Using. SMS.
But you can also polish a turd, and that's also improvement. It's still a turd. Taking 1990's tech and overlaying rich text services onto it, is just polish for the same 90's tech that should have been left behind.
IMO, it's still worlds away from what you can get with a purely digital instant messaging system.
Also, it seems idiotic to me that nearly all of your communications can go up in smoke by accidentally dropping your phone into a wood chipper, and you'll be SOL until you replace it because everything is hairpinned through your cellphones SMS capability. Battery dead? Out of your providers service area? Ha ha, get fucked.
The banks are borderline criminally negligent because they exclusively use SMS for 2FA.
Simply, it is insufficient.
I get that they want the SMS information on file, and that's understandable, but give people another option at least, Holy hell. It gives my inner IT secops brain an aneurysm.
I agree. ICE vehicles usually have more range, fuel is basically available everywhere, they take minutes to fill, and generally have a cheaper initial cost.
In addition to that, ICE cars, though needing more maintenance, have repair shops in just about every village, town, city.... often several of them.
I feel like EVs are a bit of a glass cannon when it comes to anything that might go wrong with them. Whatever goes wrong is very likely to cause the vehicle to stop operation entirely. Most ICE cars will either just keep working when something is wrong, or at worst go into a limp mode, allowing you to get to a repair shop to have the vehicle repaired.
I understand why EVs are the way they are, high voltage electricity is no joke, but then you need a tow truck to get to the service center that's likely much further away.
EVs are great, don't get me wrong, but if you're planning for the worst case and/or failure cases, ICE vehicles just fail more gradually, frequently giving you some leeway to take care of the problem well before the vehicle completely stops working.
They're still working on this. I've more or less been holding my breath on the battery tech.
I want to see, either easily recycled materials that are common (sodium cells seem to fit here), or batteries that last the useful life of the vehicle and beyond (solid state batteries are a good example here). I don't really care which.
Cheap sodium based batteries, with adequate recycling technology would be a fine solution. Alternatively, even fairly "expensive" (in terms of rare metals) solid state batteries, would also be fine, since a single set of batteries may survive over several vehicles, depending on what solid state batteries can do when they finally hit the mass market.
I just don't want to have to replace the battery at nearly the cost of a whole ass new EV, well short of the useful life of the rest of the vehicle. Either the battery cost and environmental impact comes down, or we remove the need to replace the batteries with a version that lasts as long or longer than the rest of the vehicle.
I like EVs. I want an EV. I don't want to buy the current EVs on the market.
Also, if any vehicle designers are reading this, can we cut the shit where anything hybrid or EV looks ridiculous? IMO, a big reason why Tesla was so successful, is that they made it into a car. The model S, though unique in design, isn't a significant departure from pretty much every other sedan, in terms of design. Compare with something like the Prius, which is generally only a funny looking hatchback, or the Volt.... Which also looks pretty dumb IMO. Just give me a regular car.
... Okay, the Prius and Volt probably aren't the best examples. I'll put a better one here.... The BMW i3. Just.... What the hell.
It pays for me to push it off. I own my car and I'm not really using it. So I pay very little in fuel and maintenance because the vehicle sits in my driveway most days.
I can afford to wait.
When the day comes that my vehicle is no longer viable, then I'll consider my options. For now, I'm happy to sit on my hands.
I work from home, and the only time I get in the car is for rare site visits for work or occasional leisure activities, like grocery shopping or running other errands.
When that time comes, I'll have to consider if I even still need a vehicle or if my SO and I should just share one.
All concerns for the future. I'm excited to see what happens with sodium and solid state over the next decade, and I have no problem waiting to see before I make any decisions about my needs. Hopefully we get some progress before I have to make that decision. I spend so little time in the car right now that it would be a shame to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a newer vehicle for it to sit in my driveway.
Bluntly, I wouldn't want to have some lady I've never met, trapped in the forest with me either. Not because I'm a bad person, far from it.
I feel like I'd be rather handy if I was lost in a forest, but she wouldn't know that.
Fact is, any lady weighing in on the discussion doesn't have any reasonable guarantee or even a reasonable probability of getting someone half as helpful as me, and a nontrivial chance of getting a date rapist, so I get it. The worst that a bear would do is kill and eat them, and if they're lucky, it'll happen in that order. There are fates worse than death.
I don't take any offense at someone answering "bear". At all. It's an age old question, of the devil that you know, versus the devil that you don't. Sure, there's a non-zero chance you'll end up in the woods with bear grylls (or someone with a similar skillset), or Mr. Rogers (or similarly kind person), but the far more likely scenario is not that.
It's not a statement against me personally as a male, it's a statement about the average man. If that offends you, there's a good chance that you're part of the problem.
I'm not here to judge. So I'll let you decide for yourself.
The fact is, unknown men is basically a gamble most aren't willing to make. What can we do about it? Probably somewhere between Jack and squat. Unless we can "fix" the socially inept and creepy men, as well as the rapists, would-be (opportunistic) rapists, date rapists, and just all around shitty men, pretty much all at once, this stereotype isn't going anywhere. Just be the change you want to see in the world, and try to encourage your brothers to be better.
I didn't have to read far into the documentation of pi alert to find your issue. Scans and detection is done using ARP scans. ARP or address resolution protocol operates on layer 2. VLANs span layer 3 boundaries, so: layer 2 traffic does not traverse VLANs.
Additional scanning (by pi alert) is complimentary to the ARP scan. Which to me reads like ARP scans always need to work.
The easy solution is to use a trunk port into the system, and set up multiple VLAN sub interfaces on the NIC in the OS to handle each VLAN. Alternatively, give the VM multiple NICs, one for each VLAN you wish to scan.
The bottom line is that the pi alert system needs to have a direct network link into each network that it is trying to monitor.
I run a Windows 11 VM on xcp-ng to do testing and Windows specific graphic and video work. I use an old R9 390 in passthrough mode right now but it’s running out of steam....
At the risk of resurrecting a zombie post. I'll respond.
I'm not sure on the specifics of xcp-ng, since I haven't run it myself, but, I know proxmox and VMware can both do PCIe pass thru to VMs. Recently L1 techs have done videos on the Intel flex GPUs and their potential with vdi for video rendering (basically for a virtual GPU), which worked excellently. I'm not sure if there's a large feature gap between the a380 and the flex series, but I suspect not. Given the cost of an A380 it's probably worth the risk to try it. With all the recent updates for the Intel GPUs which have been increasing performance and stability, the a380 is a solid buy, even if it's "only" able to be passed through to the VM ...
Indeed it does. I'm looking forward to the flex series (I'm specifically waiting on the 140 because I have systems with a low profile requirement), to try to put together some GPU acceleration on my homelab cluster. I need it for transcoding in the short term but in the long term I'm hoping to put up one of those open source, self hosted "cloud" gaming services.
We still do LAN parties and if I can pick up some cheap thin clients, and connect them to a GPU accelerated VDI or something, people wouldn't have to cart their PC's over when we have a LAN.
I'd go for something more modest like the A380, since sparkle has a low profile version of it, but the 6G of dedicated video memory gives me pause, since I'd basically have to dedicate one whole GPU per virtual desktop, which isn't as scalable as I would need. Even putting two users on a single GPU with 6G of memory is kind of a non-starter for me. I've used GPUs with 3G of memory, as recently as 2 years ago, and bluntly, it's not a good experience. So anything less than 4-6G per user is basically rejected right out of the gate. I might pick one up just to test with a single VM in a VDI situation, but long term that's not going to work.
That's pretty exciting, for sure. Given that you can get single slot coolers for the half height variant makes it incredibly versatile. Hopefully that trend continues.
The majority of my homelab consists of two servers: A Proxmox hypervisor and a TrueNAS file server. The bulk of my LAN traffic is between these two servers. At the moment, both servers are on my “main” VLAN. I have separate VLANs for guests and IoT devices, but everything else lives on VLAN2....
I do it because I don’t want to run short of IP space.
I’ve worked on networks that are reaching the limit of how many systems they can hold, and I don’t want that to happen, so I intentionally oversize basically every subnet and usually over segregate the traffic. I use a lot of subnets.
They’re not all VLANs, some are on independent switches. What I did for storage in one case is gave a single NIC to the management Network for administration, and the rest connected to a storage subnet with fully dedicated links. I was using the same switch so they were vlanned but it easily could have been done on another switch. The connections from the storage to the compute systems was all done with dedicated links on dedicated NICs, so 100% of the bandwidth was available for the storage connections.
I’m very sensitive to bottlenecks in my layer 2 networks and I don’t want to share bandwidth between a production interface and a storage interface. NICs are cheap. My patience is not.
I mean, this is a constant problem with legislation. This, and enforcement.
You make it illegal to do something because we need to protect the children and only those willing to break the rules will be able to deliver on the thing that people want.
This already happened recently to smoking, specifically vaping, and I’m all too familiar with the arguments. But if I can take an example from vaping… They wanted to outlaw flavors, and largely failed. Bluntly, there’s already laws, which lack any semblance of effective enforcement, which prohibits people who are underage from buying, owning and using any tobacco products… More or less, depending on your specific country/state/province/region/county/whatever. But history has shown that tobacco products end up in the hands of underage people regardless of this. Whether because the cashier at the local smoke/vape/whatever shop or convenience store or gas station or whatever, didn’t give enough of a flying fuck to deny someone because they “did not have their ID with them” or didn’t even care enough to bother asking for it. I can’t blame them, pissing off a passing customer who might be armed, could be violent, may have anger, violence, or homicidal issues, just because some fat fuck behind a desk says no, risking the rare chance that the person could be participating in an investigation which will result in a “hefty” (though not hefty) fine at worst, one which they won’t have to pay, doesn’t really give the best motivation for giving any shits about the law.
But upstanding law abiding organizations trying to do their best to comply with the laws are punished by trying to make these fuckers happy. It’s not worth the trouble.
In the case of vaping, black market/street vapes have no regulation to protect the users. I followed almost every case of “vaping caused x respiratory problem for this person”, and in every instance that I could track beyond the initial report, it was discovered that the individuals were buying their shit from illegal operations, who put God knows what additives into the shit they sell, and frequently, if I could get enough information on it, the result was that some bullshit illegal additive caused the problem, not the legit ingredients that are supposed to be in a vape, as governed by law. Those additives have no place being inhaled, and for good reason, they damage your lungs. But mass media’s one-and-done style of reporting, never, ever, fucking follows up and the public who don’t bother doing any goddamned research of their own start to think all vaping products are bad because reasons.
To bring it back on point. Sites like porn hub, have benign ads. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the bullshit ads at one point or another that seem to rip you out from where you’re browsing and they take over your screen with some crap like “you have a virus, call our (scam) center to fix it”… On legitimate websites (pornhub included) these ads don’t exist. If you spend as much time on shady websites as I do, you would know that such browser hijacks still exist. The only thing this law will do is make it extremely difficult to use any legitimate website, pushing people to use less reputable sources for their porn, and leading them right into the waiting arms of scammers and con-artists. This kind of idiotic policy erodes public safety.
IMO, this shit is happening and keeps happening because the law makers are ignorant of how this shit actually works, they don’t understand behavioral patterns, and the media reinforces their fears and the fears of their constituents with their one-and-done sensationalist news stories that never get any kind of follow up.
That said, in also like pretty much all Trek. I’m not a big fan of some of the series, but I don’t hate them, nor am I going to go around saying they’re “not trek” because reasons.
I’m looking forward to seeing more from the franchise, and I feel a bit alone in my universal enjoyment of Trek. There’s so many people hating on disco or Picard or whatever… I enjoy all of it.
I also enjoy Star wars and Orville, and Stargate, and pretty much most sci-fi… The only stuff, that’s popular, that I have no opinion on is Babylon 5, mainly because I have not watched any of it. Between that, the og BSG and some of the star wars properties (like the animated shows), I’ve watched almost all of the mainstream sci-fi, and honestly, it’s all pretty damn good.
I really liked how they forced the issue about time travel in disco, where the time machine suit thing wouldn’t go unless she went back to all the points she needed to in order to bring this circumstance to happen. I thought that was spot on. I try to ignore the multitude of time paradoxes in voy, and there are many, but it’s probably my least favorite part of that specific show, too much time shit, and it’s all done very poorly.
i recently lost my job and it’s horrible being in the ‘unemployed’ class – you’re made to feel worthless, you have to take advice from people, perfectly well meaning of course, that are basically encouragement on digging your own grave - i love being in the position where i have to do some fake elizabethian courting...
I work in IT and this will frequently confuse the shit out of me.
“Join my network” is basically shorthand for: connect to the WiFi.
All this meat space crap drives me up the wall.
Also, we need to normalize giving as a method of showing comfort or condolences. Like, I lose my job and what do I get from people? “You can do it!” Etc, and other useless platitudes. I’d rather have people be like “here’s some cash to help cover your bills” or “I’ll order a pizza to be delivered to your house”.
Same thing with pretty much anything. You were injured on the job, here’s free pizza for you to eat while you’re laid up in bed, recovering. Here’s some money to help cover rent while you’re not earning an income.
Meanwhile, some Putz graduates college and lands their first “real” job, and someone buys them a car.
What the fuck man. To congratulate them on making money, you give them more?
But when grandpa dies and you’re trying to cover funeral expenses, nobody gives you shit.
The whole fucking system is backwards. When we have everything, we’re given more, when we are beat down, the whole thing only ever gets worse.
Another example, you’re diagnosed with an illness, you have to miss work for treatment, the boss reams you out for taking so much time off work, you may get fired. Meanwhile, the medical bills are stacking up and creditors are calling because they want all the money you don’t have. Your paychecks are getting cut because you’re taking so much time off work, meanwhile you feel like shit because you’re sick. A whole lot of fuck you is happening. The social norm is to “be supportive”… What good is that going to do? Nah man, here’s a couple hundred bucks. Get better soon, okay?
I don’t think anyone has defined what “upper” “middle” and “lower” classes are too me. I just take it for granted that people who are wealthy (passive income kind of people) are “upper” class, the “middle” class is people getting by adequately. Not really suffering, or fighting to “make ends meet” so to speak, maybe a bit of savings… And “lower” class are people who struggle to pay their bills, live in low cost housing, have few luxuries, etc. Basically, how much disposable income do you have and where does that income come from?
Working, with passive income sources, or not needing to work to cover expenses, is “upper”.
Working, with some disposable income, perhaps some savings, but not enough to live on to cover expenses, is “middle”
And anyone without any kind of financial safety, living paycheck to paycheck, only making enough to cover direct living expenses, are “lower”.
I have no idea if that’s right; nobody has accurately defined it for me. I’ve always considered myself kind of “lower-middle class” aka, still making enough for some luxuries, but without any significant savings or buffer for financial stability. No issues meeting living expenses… Kind of the bottom half of middle class, if you will. My father was the same; he was much better with money, mind you, and he was able to dedicate a larger percentage of his earnings to savings. He would forego luxuries and “upgrades” to save money… As long as things worked and the family was comfortable, he was fine with putting the money away. He wouldn’t hesitate to spend to replace something that’s important, like buying a car to get around when the old one was too broken to work and/or be fixed. But if the vehicle worked, he wouldn’t replace it just because it was a bit older.
IDK, I’m working. I need to work to afford to live. I’m almost never at risk of not being able to pay for something I need or want, aside from big ticket items (well into the thousands)… I’m just some guy.
Well, I certainly don’t give what “class” I am any thought day to day. Only on rare occasions like this, do I even give it any consideration at all.
I’m part of the workforce, I do my job, I collect a paycheck, I go home and spend time with my family. I’m not complicated, I don’t subscribe to “hustle” culture, and I don’t have any need to be wealthy, influential or otherwise noteworthy to anyone outside of my friends, family and coworkers. I’m just not that person. Even inside of those circles, I don’t see any one person being in charge, except for my direct manager and whatnot in a work context; everything is cooperative.
That works for me, maybe I’m strange in that respect, but I’m okay with it. I couldn’t care less if someone thinks I’m one class or another. I work to live, not the other way around.
I have clients that use internal, but they do it as a subdomain; so internal.contoso.com
Any internal only domains that I set up are probably going to go the same way. I’ve used domain.local previously, and the DNS headache I get from that is immeasurable.
With so many things going “to the cloud” or whatever, the internal.domain.tld convention tends to make more sense to me.
I manage hundreds of servers at work. They each have a BMC (remote power on/off, reset, KVM, etc) and we need to use those features frequently. I’ve been using a Google Docs spreadsheet to track their URLs, what each box is used for, specs, etc but it feels like a dynamic web app would be better for this purpose. Does anyone...
Can anyone weigh in on whether any of these can be used for a cluster?
I use VMware in my homelab via vMUG, and I’m sure that’s going to get destroyed next, so I’m looking for an alternative that can allow for running VMs across hosts using shared storage with migrations between hosts. I’d prefer FOSS, but the only hypervisor I know supports all of this right now is hyper-V. I really REALLY don’t want to use hyper-v… Most of my workloads are Linux, with a handful of Windows servers that I use for an internal domain and testing.
From the brief Google searching I’ve done it appears to be possible, though, I’m not sure if proxmox skills will help me professionally. I used VMware before because I needed to learn VMware esxi and vcenter. I know it fairly well at this point.
I want to target a hypervisor solution used in large companies, I’m not sure that’s proxmox. Currently I’m leaning towards OpenStack, since I know some cloud providers use it for VPS offerings. I know enough about hyper-V that I know I don’t want to use it, ever. At least outside the context of Azure VMs. I can’t really do Azure cloud at home (they’re is a way, I’ve looked into it, but it’s very expensive), though my current workplace uses Azure extensively.
I’m just not aware of any company using proxmox as a VM platform, whether single host or clustered.
Good to know. I’ll examine everything carefully. I’ve been debating on replacing my existing monolithic iSCSI storage configuration with Ceph, so maybe that will weigh in… Having something that can access Ceph natively is a big plus. Otherwise I need something to sit in between that can basically translate Ceph to iSCSI luns, which is just more complexity that I’d like to avoid.
A lot of things to consider. Thank you for the comments.
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My perspective on this after all my experiences over the past three years or so, working at three different jobs that service hundreds of customer sites and thousands of professional workers, is simply: forcing either work from office, work from home, or a combination of both (aka hybrid), is the wrong move. Your best talent will walk of you force them to do something that they don’t want to do. I have seen coworkers and users alike, find new jobs both when forced to WFH and RTO and even with hybrid.
The take away is, work should be flexible. It should be where the workers are most effectively able to complete their duties. If that’s the office, workers should have the ability to do that. If that’s at home, they should be able to do that. If it’s some combination of home/office, again, they should be able to do that.
If I’ve learned only one thing about work over the pandemic and this “post pandemic” hell, it’s that above all, people want to be able to make that choice for themselves. Any worker worth employing is going to be productive regardless of their location, and for short durations, workers can accept working from home or the office or whatever, even if it’s not their preference (eg, the 2020/1 lockdowns). A bad worker will be able to find ways to look busy will while not doing work regardless of if they’re working remotely or not, though, in my experience most workers just want to put in the effort, and get paid, and they do. Those that are there to do as little as possible and collect a paycheck are actually pretty rare. People want to work. Giving them the option of choosing where and when to do that is empowering and beneficial to their attitude and work ethic; not to mention, it’s also beneficial to their mental health.
Simply, forcing them into either working from home, or the office, or both via “hybrid” is going to have at least a few, wanting to walk.
We have the technology to support both styles of work and taking that choice away from workers will only serve to make those that want the opposite, disgruntled. If you value your workers, then let them choose.
Bluntly, given what I’ve seen from business owners over the same three+ year time period, they don’t care enough about workers to make them happy. It demonstrates a complete lack of shits given about what works want.
If you’re a business owner and you have any consideration for those you employ, give them the choice and you will be rewarded with more work, and better work done by those you employ. Anyone who forces the issue, one way or the other, will have some that are happy and some that are very unhappy about it. Choose wisely.
Okay, so DNS doesn’t really work like that. The client will contact the first DNS server and try for resolution (namely the Windows server) for client.b.domain.com. The windows server, not knowing who *.b.domain.com is, will return that there’s no entry by that name, the client will accept this as truth (aka an authoritative response) and stop. The second DNS resolver will not even be given the query.
The way to do this is to have a master for the zone. It doesn’t matter if this is on the windows side or linux side, it just needs to exist. the master zone (*.domain.com) then dictates NS records for the two subdomains, eg:
a.domain.com NS (ip of windows server) b.domain.com NS (ip of linux server)
The window DNS then has an authoritative zone for a.domain.com, which contains all the records relevant to the operation of that domain. linux has the same setup, but for b.domain.com, which has all the records for the operation of that domain.
What happens then, is the client queries the DNS primary server for client.b.domain.com, gets back a response that basically says the princess is in another castle, look up the NS for that subdomain (b.domain.com), and queries the provider for b.domain.com (the linux server) and gets the correct response… at least, that’s how it should work. Clients vary from OS to OS, so the DNS server may handle this request instead, forwarding the request (though this may or may not happen, depending on configuration).
IMO, the best way to do this is to have a small DNS-only system which acts as a relay/caching server that everyone points to, it has two forwarding zones, one for a.domain.com and one for b.domain.com, with the records set to forward requests to either the windows server IP or the linux server IP based on request. There should still be a master zone for domain.com which has the NS records, which bluntly can be the relay and caching server. What I like to do is have a small linux system for this, which has a global resolver set for the fall-back DNS (I usually use Google at 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4), with domain.com defined, and two NS records there for a.domain.com and b.domain.com, pointing to each server, then have forward zones for a and b respectively. I would duplicate this, and provide two DNS resolvers as relay/cache, and set the windows and linux master servers (for a.domain.com and b.domain.com respectively) as non-recursive.
Super fast: recursive resolvers basically allow you to resolve non-authoritative names. An authoritative response is when the DNS server is the root server for that domain or subdomain; aka the NS for that domain, aka, it physically holds the records for the domain, and doesn’t need to ask another server for that information.
A bit of a hacky way around this, without adding more systems, is to add a forwarding zone to the windows server for b.domain.com that points all queries to the linux server, and a forwarding zone on the linux server for a.domain.com that points to the windows server. You can keep your current primary/secondary DNS entries, and both servers will be able to resolve both sets of names. The DNS servers will simply forward request of the opposing domain to the respective authoritative server.
Doing this “correctly” needs about five DNS servers, one for the “master zone”/root of domain.com, one for each of the subdomains (both a and b) and two for caching/relay, though, each of those should be redundant, so two windows and two linux authoritative zones for the subdomains, and two root servers - at least - to get everything to be “proper”.
DNS is fascinating and complex; I see what you were trying to do with your current setup, that the clients will try the primary, and fail, then try the secondary, and get a reply, unfortunately, that’s not how DNS works. It only fails over to the secondary when the primary doesn’t respond. Having redundant DNS is a really good idea regardless. What I do, is I have a pair of Raspberry Pi units on my network (currently both model 3B’s), which have BIND installed, and forwarding zones for my internal domains plus a global forwarder for anything outside that, pointed to google, as previously mentioned. They act as relay/caching, and anytime I want to put something together, either to resolve DNS names only available over a VPN or for a new subdomain or internal domain, I just add it to those BIND servers, pointed at the authoritative name server (NS) for that domain name and it works pretty well. You don’t have to do the same, nor do you need to do something similar. There’s a lot of good ways to configure this that will work. There are also some really terrible ways to set this up that will give you nothing but problems. I set mine up the way I do because those r.pi units are PoE powered, so as soon as the network is online, they come up and work, keeping my partner happy, while I can fiddle around with DNS forwarders to get my lab stuff working. When the lab is down, the internet still works, so I don’t get flack for screwing with the internet again. My main concern is to have redundant DNS that works whether my lab is powered on and working correctly, or not. So if I lose my lab, or lose a DNS server, the internet still works and I don’t get yelled at again.
Let me know if you have any questions or follow ups, I’m happy to share the knowledge I have.
I just want to say that I don’t love the NUC for homelabs; mainly that it only has one NIC. I also don’t like USB NICs because I’ve had too many problems with them dropping out without any obvious cause, and then working again by simply unplugging them and plugging them back in. I don’t like to have to be that hands-on with my lab, I just want it to work.
If you’re okay with the limits of a single NIC, then the NUC is a great option; for my homelab, I actually run a storage network, so I generally need two NICs; one for production/front-end traffic, and one for storage/back-end traffic.
Beyond that gripe, you could do a lot worse than a NUC for your homelab. You may be able to save some money if you get an off-lease Core i5/i7 business class system, and the mini/micro systems that are available are quite good, even in the used market. If you want new, I’d probably say the NUC is going to be one of the cheaper options, even considering the tiny/mini/micro systems that are out there. I’ve used several tiny/mini/micro for small processing systems; one example of this is a DNS server; in another case, I used one for HomeAssistant. Neither system relies on external storage (no storage network requirement), so they performed quite well.
I know most people don’t run a storage network, and just use containers/VMs on local storage, so if that’s you, or you’re just starting out, any tiny/mini/micro or NUC will do quite well.
I recently stated out loud that my homelab was stable, and now my UPS is posting less than 30 minutes of estimated normal load. What’s everyone using as a UPS?...
I’m personally running an SMX2000RM from APC. I added a NMC2 to it for monitoring, because I’m crazy like that. I picked up the SMX2000 because I’m running old enterprise gear for my homelab. I have a half-loaded Dell C6100, a Dell R710, a Dell Powervault NX3200, a Dell R630, and a slew of networking devices, plus some utility systems, including a miniPC running Home Assistant, several Raspberry Pi’s (usually using PoE), a few PoE switches, two gateway/firewalls, modem, at least one Cisco ISR router, and a Synology NAS as part of my setup.
Very quickly, new house, bought the R630 for “home operations” which is running some internal to the home systems, such as a backup DNS, some game servers, and PCNS, all on top of VMware ESXi 6.5 free. I have the c6100 (two nodes), and the R710 running ESXi 6.5 from vMUG advantage, which is running my lab servers, including a windows domain (there’s a domain GC replicant server on the R630), Exchange, several Linux nodes doing multiple things, some windows server based gaming hosts, Plex, netbox, and mediawiki for documentation, as well as a LibreNMS for monitoring. Home Assistant is on it’s own Core i5 mini pc (either Dell or HP, I forget), which runs my new home automation z-wave network, another mini-pc running DNS (I just wanted a dedicated non-VM system for DNS, so I didn’t have to struggle without it while I got VMware working properly after a power loss), and the NAS is for personal backup storage, just a two-bay (8TB drives in RAID 1) for my PC and my SO’s PC.
I didn’t want all of that to go down as soon as there’s a power blip, and the APC SMX2000 was a good fit, considering we’re consuming ~11 Amps on the 20 Amp circuit I installed specifically for the UPS (~1300W). I want to get a second one, and redundant power set up for everything, including networking, on the second UPS (I’ll be buying another SMX2000 for the purpose), with one feeding the primary power port of everything (or PSU1 on the servers) and the other feeding all the backups (or PSU2 on servers), and I want to add battery expansion on all units, for a total of 6 battery packs across all units, and 4000VA of power available, each UPS will have it’s own dedicated 20A receptacle.
The main reason I chose the SMX2000 is that it has a NEMA L5-20R port on the back, which I connected a 0RU vertical PDU (managed, the APC AP7930), which has a NEMA L5-20P connection for the source, and provides 24x NEMA 5-20R ports. The plan is to have two, one for each UPS. I bought the UPS off of Ebay without a battery and picked up a battery from a local supplier (non-APC battery, but a drop-in replacement, with all the APC fittings).
Specifics:
UPS: APC SMX2000RMLV2U NMC: APC AP9630 Battery: SMX2000RMLV2U compatible pack from upsbatterycenter.com or upsbatterycenter.ca (I’m in Canada, so it was .ca for me - APC’s SKU for the battery is APC RBC117) PDU: APC AP7930
The UPS is capable of putting out ~1800W. My alternative was the SMT1500 or SMX1500 (I have several of the former laying around with dead or missing batteries), but the models I have don’t have any 20A outputs since they can only handle about 15A, I really wanted to go 20A for this, so I sprung for the 20A capable version, mainly to future-proof my power delivery for the rack, so I don’t have to worry about what I’m putting in there. Before moving, I had two SMT1500 units, one was rackmount, so the equivalent 1500VA APC rackmount version of the same, and they only had to feed a modem, switch, and the C6100/R710. I added a lot to the system when moving to this house, partly because this is our “forever home” and I wanted to kick things off right. I put the PDU on the side of a new 42RU rack I purchased specifically for the house, and rackmounted everything at the same time. A lot of thought went into which products to buy, I didn’t want anything brand new, and I didn’t want anything I would have to spend a fortune on to get working. The biggest expense through all this was the new networking hardware for the house, second biggest was the new battery pack, but thankfully UPS battery center is relatively inexpensive for that (still ~$400 for the battery alone, ouch). We have pretty cheap power here ( $0.182 per kWh on-peak, and $0.087 off-peak, in Canadian dollars), so I’m not overly concerned about energy use. I just don’t want the system to go down as soon as the power has a hiccup. unfortunately, my power provider has had several outages in the past year that lasted much longer than my battery lasted, so I’m thinking to look into solar or generator backup to keep at least my rack powered up, and maybe fridges and stuff. That’s beyond the scope of your question so I’ll just leave it at that.
The key here is: how much are you powering with this and how long do you want it to last. If you’re like me, and have a decent collection of things that need to stay on, a larger UPS like the SMX2000, plus a battery expansion may be the way to go, if you have less stuff but need extra run-time, maybe a smaller 1000 or 1500VA unit with a battery expansion is fine, or if you need protection against just small interruptions in power, maybe forego the added pack. It really depends on the power delivery in your area and how much you’re drawing. Part of the reason I picked the SMX2000 was because it had a connector for an external pack (along with the mentioned NEMA L5-20R), so I can expand the pack later. The add-on cards were a big plus for me, but I would have been happy with any network management whether integrated or not.
A big note from me, if you’re looking at (especially used) APC gear, is that you will want to make sure you apply any and all available firmware updates as soon as you can, since a lot of stuff on the used market gets deployed as soon as it’s received, and doesn’t get touched apart from that; once it is decommissioned for sale on the used market, nobody bothers to update it prior to sale, so update it as soon as you get it. This is especially true for the NMC modules, the interfaces had a complete overhaul during their useful life, especially for the NMC2, making it far more stable and far more capable of a unit for monitoring the UPS. I’m sure this is true for other vendors, but I haven’t really dealt with too much from Eaton or CyberPower to know (My employers so far have used APC almost exclusively, which is why I have a handful of SMT1500’s, all of which were destined for the junk pile after the battery went bad).
If you want to spend a bit more to buy something new, I would recommend something based on Lithium, as the majority of older UPS units use lead-acid, usually AGM. Lead-acid is great for cost, as the batteries are usually pretty cheap, but Lithium should last a lot longer, I expect to replace my Lead-Acid pack in my SMX in another 2-3 years; lithium should last 5-10 at least. Up to you though.
I’ve been avoiding reddit, but when I go visit, I’m usually on /r/homelab or /r/techsupport (or something similar); most of the other communities have rotted away, and aren’t nearly as good as they used to be.
I use Jerboa on my Android, and it’s been quite adequate for lemmy.
As for the community, bluntly, reddit is overrun with repeat questions, so if you’re a regular there, you see the same or similar stuff posted constantly by other users. So far, here, with the community being nominally smaller, repeats are generally more limited in frequency. You also see more of the same names popping up more often and you can mostly follow people’s homelab journey. That’s nice.
I don’t hate reddit, though I hate their API rules and the decisions they’ve made regarding how to handle it… I just, don’t see it as the future. There may have been a time where I did see reddit as the future of this type/style of discussion, but it’s definitely not anymore. Reddit will continue to hold a special place in my mind for what it was when it was a good platform, but I’m waiting for everyone that’s still over there to catch up to the evolution that is lemmy.
Day 2 was shorter for me, had a holiday party, but still managed to build a Tier 3 Reinforced Plate/Modular Frame factory as shown. 20/min of each for now....
It feels like there is always one more little thing that you can get done before hopping off. But then that turns into 10 other little things you can do. And the next thing you know it’s the next day and the sun is coming up.
I currently have about five projects on the go in the game. Building automation for pretty much every item that you would need to build any building, building out a nuclear waste recycling plant (precursor to building a nuclear power facility… I don’t want to irradiate my save), rebuilding a few manufacturing plants for basic components that may already be automated poorly, finishing my resource area/hub base, doing some beautification of finished plants, maxing out my biomass bins, getting more hard drives… It never stops!
Next on my list is my steel factory which has been very poorly done for a long time; then rebuilding my reinforced plate/modular frame/rotor plant. The new steel plant will hopefully also make nobelisks, and stators, then I can just grab an assembler for the final production steps of motors at the hub base where both the rotors and stators will be going into their respective bins.
I’ve been focused mostly on power, I have 12000MW of coal/fuel power right now and I’m using maybe 60% at full production; but trying to build out a nuclear recycling plant without key components being automated already is making everything a headache, so I changed my focus to the hub base which is currently being built up with all my parts storage. Once I have the vast majority of the parts automated into the new base, I’m going to go back to the nuclear build before building the final plants for the last space elevator tier.
The milestones were done pretty fast this save and I kinda miss them. Everything is unlocked in the awesome shop, so now I’m working on making all the things and scaling up.
I usually do a very not ISP sanctioned modem swap/delete.
Depending on the type of modem, you may be able to simply replace it with something else and the ISP may not have any way to really differentiate between the modems.
depends on what you mean by “do anything”. I’ve managed to shed several ms of latency by doing a modem delete.
My two favorite stories of this were for the local DSL/fiber provider here in Canada, Bell. They use vDSL2, and GPON/XGS-PON respectively. In the former case, I set up a node at my house, which was a Cisco ISR router, with a vDSL2 EHWIC card installed; after some work, I managed to get the unit dialing into the internet via PPPoE, and I managed to drop about 5-10ms of latency simply by removing the ISP provided garbage. It was also clean… a single phone cable plugged directly into the router, and out the other side was a switch, which provided all the network connections I required… my setup was a tiny bit more complicated than I’m explaining, but the other details don’t really matter (long story short, I was operating on a Bell line through a wholesale client (third party ISP using Bell’s “last mile”), and they provided me with a /29 subnet for internet routing - the Cisco handled the WAN to WAN communication, and on my /29, I had a few devices including my primary firewall, which was between me and the internet, that then broke out onto a switch for everything to connect to… a bit more than the average joe can handle, but I work in networking). The other story is about their GPON; I managed to figure out that their GPON interface is almost entirely unprotected, and worked with a G-010S-A (a fairly common design from Nokia, but has variants from other major vendors that are largely the same), so by buying or otherwise obtaining one, and programming it very specifically, you can actually plug the SFP GPON module directly into a router, and with some clever configuring, get your PPPoE to work across it without too much trouble. There’s plenty of info about it online if you want to see more.
The only sad story I have about this is that Bell started to release a new modem that has a built in fiber module (no longer using the G-010S-A), which is compatible with both the GPON and XGS-PON systems; I have yet to find an XGS-PON version of the G-010S-A that I can use for the purpose. A friend of mine, whom I did a modem delete for with the G-010S-A, was in an area that was originally served by GPON, so the solution worked. After some time though, Bell implemented XGS-PON in his area, and actually removed compatibility for the GPON, so the solution stopped working. Until I find an XGS-PON equivalent to the G-010S-A, I’m at an impasse. In the interim, my friend has put his modem back in-line, and IIRC put it into bridged mode, which is second best to a modem delete.
I’m a network technician/engineer as my dayjob, so working with this stuff is entirely in my wheel house, I can usually give useful advice for anyone wanting to walk in my shoes to delete their modem, and make it simple enough that it doesn’t require my level of skill to maintain (like in the case of my friend), and advice/strategies about how to handle the ISP.
CG-NAT is entirely in the ISP hands, I cannot touch their fancy CG-NAT engine or route around it. My best advice for anyone facing down CG-NAT, is to use IPv6, if your ISP supports it. Simply put, the best argument I’ve seen for IPv6 adoption is CG-NAT. NAT itself was bad enough, but CG-NAT is a whole new level of evil; it breaks so many things. IPv6 takes you back to the old days of globally routable addresses, end-to-end, completely eliminating the need for any kind of NAT. A large portion of the internet uses/supports IPv6 already, pretty much all the major data carriers support it and actively use it for their own gear (people like google, facebook, apple, microsoft, cloudflare, etc). IPv6 shouldn’t be feared, as an end user, the whole thing is going to behave exactly as you expect it to. The trick is: getting it up and working on your LAN, once you can work that out, you’re laughing.
It’s very situationally dependent. In many cases though, the only thing restricting you is the ISP not giving you the information to do it yourself, and sometimes, just sometimes, some kind of code or MAC address that limits what devices can operate on their network; though that’s usually set up for billing.
If you use any kind of PPPoE, the MAC address problem usually isn’t a thing; this is normally DSL/Fiber… not all fiber, just some. PPPoE needs authentication which usually means username and password login to do AAA for the client, because of this, there’s little to no security on the last mile. All these technologies are based on standards. Fiber is usually GPON, DSL has several standards, but modern DSL is usually vDSL or vDSL2, or some variant thereof, and Cable is generally DOCSIS 3 or 3.1. There are exceptions, but they’re not common.
The key is to find which specific technology the ISP is using, and find alternatives. In the case of DSL, it’s generally finding a DSL modem that uses the same profiles and annex as the provided modem; beyond that, plug it in and authenticate with PPPoE. Many PPPoE type providers use a circuit number and/or VLAN, so that generally needs to be set along-side the PPPoE credentials.
For DOCSIS, it’s a bit sticky, since I know of many cable providers who authenticate endpoints based on the MAC address of the modem; in which case, you not only need to find a modem that can support the protocols in use, and the channel widths (eg. DOCSIS 3.1 16x8), but also one that you can modify the ISP-facing MAC address on the DOCSIS interface to match the one they gave you.
For Fiber, things can be sticky, but often aren’t. The ISP can, but often doesn’t filter on all of the following: MAC, SN, SLID. All of these values are sent to the OLT (ISP side of the fiber), and it could fail on any one of them. For me, I’ve had success with the G-010S-A SFP module, and if you look around the internet, you can find a git repo that actually has all the commands to modify any/all of these values to match them to whatever the ISP provided to you. The most difficult is getting the SLID, since it’s not published on the outside of the modem. I managed to get my local GPON’s SLID from a G-010S-A module that I hijacked from a working modem; in that case it was a string of all zeros.
The information is out there if you look hard enough, and with a little bit of cleverness and ingenuity, you can usually find anything that’s missing.
I work in Networking (aka network engineering, aka a bunch of other titles), so this all comes very naturally to me; to give you some examples, one DSL modem delete I did for myself was to pick up an EHWIC-VA-DSL-M for a Cisco ISR router, after some configuration magic, which I won’t get into here, I was able to get it to connect to my ISPs DSL line, after a bit more configuration magic, the Cisco was handling all of the traffic from my network to the DSL. It was a very clean setup, only requiring a single phone line from the wall plugged into a module on the router, then on the other side of it (over ethernet) was my network. That’s a fairly advanced one, but I’m pretty proud of it. Another case was a friend on the same last-mile provider in my country, on a fiber line, where I removed the garbage modem they gave him and replaced it with a G-010S-A GPON to SFP module, and plugged that more or less directly into the router he owned. In each case, I shaved off a few ms of latency, and bandwidth was largely unaffected. It makes the internet run just that much faster than before, and puts the control in your hands.
Needless to say, the ISPs don’t want you doing this, and they don’t approve, but in general, you can do so without their involvement and for the most part, they are entirely unaware that it’s happened.
Let me know what situation you’re in and we can probably devise a solution to the garbage ISP modem issue. Frankly, the fiber modem delete is my favorite.
If you require v6 to be static, the ipv6 equivalent to a static IP is a static /64 subnet, aka, an entire LAN. Since it’s globally routable, it needs to be issued by an RIR, the same way an IPv4 address would be.
So yes, they would issue it.
If they don’t have facilities for ipv6, there are options, such as getting an ipv6 over IPv4 tunnel going with someone like he.net. such tunnels add complexity and more work to the set up and rely on you having a very flexible router, but can be a good alternative.
They’re all seemingly very strict about using their gear. They all are, they always are. They’re lying when they say that things aren’t compatible or something.
The biggest lie is that you can’t. You can, and most of the time, unless it’s creating a problem, they couldn’t give a shit less if their equipment is working correctly; as long as you pay your bill, and don’t complain, they don’t give a shit. They have your money, whether things work correctly isn’t their primary concern.
So, I just need to rant for a minute about what’s just happened. It’s made me feel fairly disposable as a worker. I work in I.T. support. I help people who can’t operate technology with highly complicated issues. I am highly skilled, well trained and I have a diverse set of understanding for technical issues....
I wouldn’t say it’s false, so much as incomplete. It’s not a complete statement. Nobody wants to work for what is being offered. That statement is true. I certainly won’t accept minimum wage for my skillset, and bluntly, minimum wage, even where I am (where it seems to be higher than most areas), is still not a living wage. The only jobs that should be under the minimum requirement of a living wage, IMO, should be part-time; in that scenario, it’s less a matter of making enough per-hour to live, and more an issue of not working enough hours to cross the line of a salary you can live off of. Even part-time workers should be paid enough that if they were working 35+ hrs a week, they could survive independent of all other factors. Any full time position, even at minimum wage, should be able to support a single individuals survival in the modern world, in the country/state/region they live in. Full stop.
When people stop at “nobody wants to work”, that incomplete sentence seems to imply that the general public doesn’t want employment, they do, they just want employment that won’t lead to poverty and destitution. That incomplete statement is gaslighting defamation and manipulation. I agree with that. The general public, IMO, doesn’t want handouts, they just want to be able to live reasonably for the labor that they provide.
I’m sure this will be news to nobody here but I’m going to rant on a bit of a tangent here for a sec… but historically, a single family (say in the mid 1900’s (20th century), eg, 1950/1960), on a single income, could afford a house, a car, several children, and some other luxuries. Now, on a single income, a family can’t even afford rent while putting food on the table. There’s more than enough evidence showing how this all happened; looking at a larger picture than most people would, it’s clear that for profits, C-level pay, and the upper-class (aka 1%) the line went up, dramatically, but for workers wages, benefits and income it either stayed flat (which is a decline when you factor in inflation), or they literally went down. Very very few have seen an appropriate increase in wage over time, keeping up with inflation. Anecdotally, my wages even in my short career, even with job hopping enough to get somewhat near reasonable raises, I haven’t been able to keep up with inflation. I started my career in 2011, my first job hop put me at a fairly reasonable $55k/yr in the early 2010’s. According to the official bank of canada inflation calculator, that wage has the current buying power of a bit over $72k/yr. at my most recent employer, I wasn’t making over $72k/yr. I cannot keep up. It’s more than a 30% increase in inflation from 2011 to 2023, just based on that alone.
I don’t want more money. If I had a job that paid me reasonably today (around $75k/yr), and only ever kept up with inflation, then I would never feel the need to change jobs for financial reasons ever again. I’m sure there are other reasons why I would change jobs, but money wouldn’t be the deciding factor. I just want to earn enough to live. This is compounded by the fact that my industry (IT support) in my country, Canada, is notoriously weak in terms of wages. Looking at the website glassdoor.ca for my job description, I see starting salaries of $57k/yr or even $41k/yr. Yet, a comparable job across the border into the USA, is similar per-year, but the US dollar is worth more, so a $41k/yr USD job is worth more like $56k/yr CAD, and $57k/yr USD is worth nearly $80k/yr CAD. The issue there is that I cannot relocate. I have constraints on where I can live and what I can do about it due to my personal situation (separate from work). I like it in Canada, it’s a wonderful country for the most part; but the wages for my specific vocation are very very lacking. If someone offered me $80k/yr on the low end, I’d be very happy with my wage - provided I could keep up with inflation.
What’s stupid to me, is that everyone relies on the work I do in my chosen profession. Everyone from C-levels to worker bees doing the paper pushing for the business and everything inbetween, almost all of whom are making more than me, in most businesses. I am the glue that keeps everything operating. My friend, who works in tech as a developer/programming analyst, was given a raise last year to over $100k/yr CAD ( ~ $72k/yr USD ); yet, if we worked together, he would rely on me to keep all of his dev servers running. If I don’t do my job, he can’t do his. It’s a leaning problem, and everything leans on IT support. Whether I’m a sysadmin, or network admin, or network engineer, or helpdesk, his work relies on me and my team to do their job for him to be able to do his. IMO, that’s really stupid to have many, very highly paid resources, relying on some of the lowest paid employees in the organization in order to do their job. What makes this even more stupid, IMO, is that the IT team is usually much smaller than other teams and under-represented by unions or other means. The organization will literally cease to function if IT doesn’t do their job and something breaks while they’re unavailable.
Businesses don’t understand the problem. It’s a matter of burn rate and the leaning problem of everyone relying on a single, unified system. I’m at the bottom of the stack, the network. That’s my focus. IMO, the network should never be in question. It should always work, and do the work it does quickly and effectively. A breakdown of the network precipitates a complete failure of the organization to do business. There’s no reason why the IT and support staff should be some of the lowest paid workers.
Okay, I’ll stop my rant for now, I just get so riled up by this. Management doesn’t understand and they probably never will.
I want to update you specifically. I have a friend who is a paralegal, whom I have been speaking to throughout this matter, and through the course of our discussions I noted that in my department there has been three people, myself and two others prior to disability, for a bit during my disability there would have been two people in the department. However, I recently had just cause to return to the office to retrieve something that cannot be out of my possession, and excluding me, there were and currently are, three people in my department, there was a new person hired during my absence.
They rightly pointed out that it appears as though I was replaced.
I will be discussing this further with an attorney. I don’t want to say any more than this until after all matters have been legally resolved. What I will say, is that to my understanding of the laws here, and the understanding that my friend has, it is not legal to dismiss an employee without appropriate compensation, while they are away on leave, whether medical, disability or otherwise.
I have taken steps to retain council on this already. Thank you for your advice. I appreciate you very much.
Profit is not wages paid to workers other than yourself, even workers performing other job functions.
I understand, and I won’t discount this. However, there are costs to my labor that are separate from me. For example: If the business is charging $100/hr for my services, I don’t expect to be paid $100/hr for work. There’s other costs associated with my time, including frictional time between tasks, which may include time between tasks while in transit or simply task switching, or breaks, which the customer is not directly paying for but must be paid to me for my time. Legally here, over the course of an 8+ hour day, I am entitled to 60 minutes worth of breaks, 2x paid 15 minute, plus one lunch break (which may or may not be paid); I also have job tasks that are not related directly to producing profit, so on a good day, when I am exclusively working on a single unified task all day, I can “bill for” at most ~ 7 hours of work (some exceptions exist, but I won’t go too far into detail on this), but on an average day, I’m usually generating 5-6 hrs of “billable” work per day.
I cannot reasonably expect $500 to $600 in earnings per day due to overhead and costs. The associated costs of my work, from floorspace to do my job, electricity for the equipment I need to use, the equipment costs themselves (desks, chairs, computer, etc), as well as the costs for other workers time to support my work, in sales, marketing, accounting, etc. all needs to be covered from that ~ $500/day I’m producing for the company. So me earning ~ $250/day ( $31.25/hr, aka, 65k/yr ), or about 50% of the revenue I generate at $100/hr at 5 hours “billed” per day, needs to include consideration for the efforts of management, accounting/finance, sales/marketing, collection and all the non-producing contributors to my workspace, including but not limited to maintenance/janitorial. What’s left is profit, which likely isn’t very much per hour, but spread across all workers is a non-trivial amount.
At least, that’s how it should work. profit, as a function of revenue, should not exceed more than ~20% is the above mentioned scenario. Of course, the realities of the situation are far more nuanced and complex than that, since most MSPs charge monthly for service, not by the hour, so worker pay for the related team needs to balance against all representative clients of the team, with enough overhead to pay for and properly compensate the efforts of sales, marketing, finance, accounting, management, etc. before profit can be extracted from the remainder. Since every MSP client has a different contract and a different amount paid per month, usually based on that organizations headcount. Profit numbers are not strictly tied to the amount I’m not paid relative to the revenue I generate per hour/day/month for the company.
The core of my issue with all this is that companies do not understand all the contributing costs associated to labor, and how the revenue that individuals generate is distributed for the business, and what each employee costs/earns over the course of a day/week/month; and definitely don’t understand how much profit they earn per employee hour. I know this because this is a factor in burn rate, and I have asked business managers about burn rate and I’m usually met with looks of confusion or mystery in the matter. Burn rate is simply all those associated costs (salary/compensation, and all associated rent/electrical, and equipment costs) for an employee separate from the revenue they generate. Burn rate is used as an indicator of costs that should be accepted for downtime, and informs how much downtime should be tolerated by the business; that financial number, when known, can quickly inform how much to spend on redundancy, which is something that information technology advisors strive for. When a system is fully redundant, or multiple levels of redundant with no single-point-of-failure (SPOF), then the operation of the production equipment can be reasonably guaranteed 24/7, resulting in no downtime, less redundant systems will require downtime to perform maintenance, upgrades and unexpected faults. So if the burn rate, multiplied by the estimated average downtime of the system, is less than the cost of making the system fully redundant, the system shouldn’t be redundant; simply, it is cheaper. However, if the burn rate is significantly more than the cost of making the system redundant, given the estimated average duration of downtime, then the system should be made to be more redundant. This is something I very strongly understand. Sometimes it is simply not financially beneficial to add redundancy to a system (whether server/network/workstation or otherwise). Things that only affect one, or a small group of employees, generally do not justify being redundant; which is why your PC at work generally only has one ethernet connection to a single switch which is probably shared with a subset of workers in the workplace (as an example). You, and the people on that same switch (SPOF for that group of workers), don’t represent enough of a burn rate to justify making those systems redundant. This is a fact that is universally true for most workers. The costs associated with employing you while you are incapable of producing profit due to a major network fault that keeps you from working, are not enough to justify the added cost of redundant network connections from your workstation to redundant network connectivity on the network side. If the switch you’re connected to fails, a replacement can usually be prepped and replaced from a cold spare in a matter of hours, so for those hours while you cannot work, you’re burning money while a technician corrects the problem.
This cost is directly extracted from what would otherwise be profit. This is where profit is converted to overhead in real-time.
Profit, or additional overhead that will often not be utilized, needs to exist, for these edge cases where things have an unrecoverable fault and employees are incapable of doing their job. Profit itself isn’t horrible to have, excessive profit is definitely a problem though. There should always be more overhead/profit for the business to function correctly, and not collapse at the first significant failure. If the profit is excessive, then that’s literally taking money out of the pockets of workers to pay the upper-class.
My point is there is a legitimate purpose to having additional overhead above and beyond the direct and indirect costs of labor. That additional overhead may, or may not be profit at the end of the day, depending on what’s happened.
I understand all this and I accept it as a worker, what I would not and will never accept is when companies are making so much profit on my labor, that goes above and beyond any burn rate or coverage of excessive costs of incidentals, that they can still extract profit from a particularly poor month for downtime. If everything is operating well, then yes, that excess revenue can definitely become profit. Looking at the big picture, this is a trade-off. Profit should be sacrificed for the continued survival of the business during times where performance is poor, or downtime affects the ability to generate revenue.
I think my business diploma is showing. I will only add this: I received just enough education in business to know I don’t want to be a part of the business/management systems. Trying to figure all this out and make intelligent decisions on these types of things, seems like a horrible thing to have to do. I suspect this is why I get such dumbfounded looks when I ask about burn rate, because people want to spend so little time thinking about this stuff that they simply don’t. While I can’t really blame them for that, simply put, it’s their job. They decided to be in that role, and that’s a part of it.
This is all separate from the fact that companies/corporations are built with the express purpose of generating profit; which is an entirely different discussion usually fraught with some very unpleasant and often unethical topics. This fact has been more or less codified. There have been court cases of shareholders vs companies where the shareholders have sued because business leaders wanted the majority of profits to be repaid to employees in the form of bonuses and raises. IMO, this has fostered a culture of bad faith practices where profit is prioritized above workers on a consistent basis.
I’m not going to apologize or explain away the greed and profiteering of companies; I understand that’s what they exist for. Whether I agree with that or not, it’s the reality of the situation. Profit is the inevitable outcome of unused overhead which should always exist. Excessive profit, above and beyond safeguarding the business from failure during “slow” times or where revenue is difficult or impossible to generate, is simply greed. Unfortunately, in a capitalist world, greed seems to be the name of the game. It seems to be the foundation of all modern business, and also the thing that both makes it terrible trying to work within the system, or for it. Unless you’re at the top (C-level, shareholder, board of directors, etc), you’re on the losing end of business greed.
Should I get a firewall appliance?
I have a host name whose dns points to my home IP. I use this for game servers for my buddies. Should I be worried about my home IP being easily accessible like this, and should I get a physical firewall appliance to protect myself?...
xkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas ( xkcd.com )
Alt text:...
About the bear...
So, I'm just assuming we've all seen the discussions about the bear....
Pi Alert VLAN issue
I recently discovered Pi Alert (and the various forks of it) and it seems like something that might be useful on my homelab....
WTF is up with switches?
cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/12597342...
Intel ARC GPU in XCPNG Passthrough
I run a Windows 11 VM on xcp-ng to do testing and Windows specific graphic and video work. I use an old R9 390 in passthrough mode right now but it’s running out of steam....
When is a storage VLAN or SAN necessary?
The majority of my homelab consists of two servers: A Proxmox hypervisor and a TrueNAS file server. The bulk of my LAN traffic is between these two servers. At the moment, both servers are on my “main” VLAN. I have separate VLANs for guests and IoT devices, but everything else lives on VLAN2....
18+ Pornhub Shuts Down For Texas ( lemmy.world )
Lame sauce. Can our elected officials just freaking decriminalize weed instead of worrying about dumb crap like this?
Discovery will be the first Star Trek show in half a century to end without a single Jonathan Frakes appearance ( startrek.website )
I love gen-Z's attitude towards corporate culture ( lemmy.world )
i recently lost my job and it’s horrible being in the ‘unemployed’ class – you’re made to feel worthless, you have to take advice from people, perfectly well meaning of course, that are basically encouragement on digging your own grave - i love being in the position where i have to do some fake elizabethian courting...
Baby manta rays aka "sea ravioli" ( lemmy.world )
Make no mistake, the owning class is actively working against your interests ( i.redd.it )
Why Won’t Men Wear Hot Pink While Hunting? - More states adopt the color alongside orange, but opinions aren’t all rosy ( www.wsj.com )
ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain ( www.theregister.com )
What do you use to track BMCs/KVMs/IPMI?
I manage hundreds of servers at work. They each have a BMC (remote power on/off, reset, KVM, etc) and we need to use those features frequently. I’ve been using a Google Docs spreadsheet to track their URLs, what each box is used for, specs, etc but it feels like a dynamic web app would be better for this purpose. Does anyone...
Leaving VMware? Consider these 5 FOSS hypervisors • The Register ( www.theregister.com )
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]
Trying to get local hostnames working with 2 domains
Hello, wonderful people!...
Recommendations on first Homelab hardware: NUC or not?
Hi,...
[Request for Recommendations] 1U-4U Uninterruptible Power Supplies
I recently stated out loud that my homelab was stable, and now my UPS is posting less than 30 minutes of estimated normal load. What’s everyone using as a UPS?...
Community Activity
I’m curious how much people are interested in using this? I see posts are fewer, especially if compared to reddit....
TheFactory: Day 3 - Tier 5 and moving to Swamp ( poptalk.scrubbles.tech )
Day 2 was shorter for me, had a holiday party, but still managed to build a Tier 3 Reinforced Plate/Modular Frame factory as shown. 20/min of each for now....
Does anyone else lose all track of time while playing this game?
It feels like there is always one more little thing that you can get done before hopping off. But then that turns into 10 other little things you can do. And the next thing you know it’s the next day and the sun is coming up.
Surely, one of you fine folks has a better solution to attach a spare fan to an ISP gateway without damaging it? ( sh.itjust.works )
Workers are not valuable
So, I just need to rant for a minute about what’s just happened. It’s made me feel fairly disposable as a worker. I work in I.T. support. I help people who can’t operate technology with highly complicated issues. I am highly skilled, well trained and I have a diverse set of understanding for technical issues....