I took the networking TCP/IP fundamentals class for my first MCSE in 99, and the instructor wouldn’t shut up about how IPv4 would be replaced within 5 years.

I need to get a new VPN setup. Been using OpenVPN through OPNsense for years but I’m fed up with the abysmal performance of the OpenVPN client on iOS. Open to suggestions but it has to be fully self hosted.

We use Skype.

No you don’t.

The right drugs will get you a real girlfriend.

I guess you are saying you only run Kodi? Yes it is Kodi with the jellyfin plugin talking to a jellyfin server that is the source of the few woes I have with it. Honestly it works really well, but when something is wrong I would say due to the UI it’s beyond most non-technical people to sort it out easily.

I mean, it’s free and it does work, so I won’t complain, but I wouldn’t push this on any but my most technical friends.

I use Kodi with the jellyfin plugin, but I can’t recommend that for ‘normies’ because the interface is not simple, and I still have glitches with it.

I’m also looking for a solution like yours, but wanted you to have that feedback.

Ok but what type of LAN gauge? Are you talking like an ethernet cable tester, a protocol analyzer, what? Are we dealing with fiber, ethernet, or even shudder token ring?

I have an very long blacklist of companies for this reason.

The problem with standing up for your privacy is that it massively diminishes the resources available to you. I’m down to shopping at Costco as a single adult, because I had to say fuck you to Target recently, and my local grocery store was busy doing anti-union bullshit at the same time. So I’m driving further and probably paying more in the long run.

But they aren’t principles if you don’t have to give something up to stick by them.

This is no surprise to me. I recently retired after 30 years of dealing with Microsoft’s bullshit. The last 2 years or so since they started focusing on Copilot and only Copilot, I’ve seen the quality of every other aspect of their company, from software releases to account management to tech support quality and response time to documentation, just fall off a fucking cliff. They were never great but it’s gotten REALLY bad lately. And I was working for a fortune 50 that spends many tens of millions of dollars with Microsoft every year. It’s been amazing to watch.

I wonder what the psychology of posting about being downvoted is. I’m a pretty opinionated dude and get downvoted from time to time, but I just move on with my life instead of turning it into a big production or even acknowledging it, really. Not everyone’s gonna like everything you write, and it’s not like you’re going for some high score to get into social media paradise or something. Think about where you’re spending your energy man. This ain’t a good use of anyone’s time.

That’s the one! I’m really rooting for them.

That’s a great tip for finding new restaurants! I get to waste the middleman’s resources, too! Win win.

Driverless cars will eliminate Grubhub, DoorDash, etc, because it will be cheaper for most restaurants to have their own delivery vehicles again, and you’ll probably see co-op services for smaller places.

Restaurants delivering their own food is not a foreign concept - it’s how all food delivery was done in the ‘old days’. They will jump on the chance to eliminate these gig commissions.

The jobs won’t disappear. They’ll just change. The need is obviously there.

Here in Colorado a bunch of drivers just formed a employee owned co-op, both to give the middle finger to Uber and Lyft, and so the drivers can actually earn a living. We need more of that.

Stop using it. It’s that simple.

Gig economy work is horrible for the workers, and incredibly exploitative. The workers frequently make less than minimum wage.

I refuse to order from any restaurant that doesn’t do their own delivery. If enough other people do the same, these places will curl up and die very quickly.

Gotta disagree, for home use at least. I have found it to be the opposite of a nightmare.

Moving my home routing and firewall to a VM saved me hours, and hours, and hours of time in the long run. I have a pretty complex home network and firewall setup with multiple public IPs, multiple outbound gateways, and multiple inbound and outbound VPN setups for various purposes. I’m also one of those loons that does outbound firewall with deny by default on my network, except the isolated guest VLAN. With a complex setup like that, being in a VM means it’s so easy to tweak stuff safely and roll back if you mess something up or it just doesn’t work the way you expected. Turns what would be a long outage rebuilding from scratch into a 30 second outage while you roll back the VM. And being able to snapshot your setup for backup is incredibly useful when your software doesn’t behave properly (looking at you, PFsense).

All that said, I run redundant, synced hypervisors which takes care of a lot of the risk. A person who is not well versed in hypervisor management might not be a good fit for this setup, but if you have any kind of experience with VM management (or want to), I think it’s the way to go.

I’ve been doing it for probably 8 years now without any major issues related to being a VM. In fact, that made recovery extremely easy the two times my PFsense VM shot itself in the head. Just load the backup of the VM taken the day before and off to the races. After switching to OPNsense a couple years ago I haven’t had a single issue.

These days I run two identically spec’d hypervisors that constantly sync all my VMs to each other over 10GB NICs, so even a hardware failure won’t take out my routing. That is something to consider if you don’t have redundant hypervisors. Not really any different than if your physical router died, just something to plan for.

In the last 25 years working with approximately 700 servers that used RAID 5 I saw two of them lose an entire volume. Once was due to a malfunctioning HP RAID controller, and the other was due to a second disk dying while the rebuild from the first failure was still ongoing. There turned out to be a systemic problem with that drive model’s firmware which almost certainly contributed.

So in my experience it’s rare but it definitely does happen.

It can get worse. About 20 years ago the company I was at had an EMC tech yank the wrong power supply from a Symmetrix rack, where the other supply had earlier in the day caught fire! We lost that entire rack’s data (customer’s personal email accounts) due to data corruption. It was probably around 300 10k SCSI disks in that rack, a multimillion dollar expense at the time, and we had to restore all of it from tape over many, many days. Really, really sucked.

Oh the delicious irony.