As someone that works at a storage devices company - we do still manufacture 10K HDDs. They are faster than the 7200s of the same spec, by nature. All 2.5” drives for enterprise systems. And will actually continue selling them until ~2030. That said, they’re all but obsolete at this point, and aren’t really being developed on any more.

Carefully-calculated trace lengths and signal pathing have left the chat

As someone that works writing firmware for SAS devices… it’s happened all too many times

I’ve got 3D pipes running on my spare Win10 machine :) fills me with nostalgia every time I see it, even still

I started with C++ too, and then ended up finding a job writing firmware pretty much all in C. There really hasn’t been anything we’ve run into that’s made us consider switching to C++; being able to (and needing to) have complete control over your memory means you can do some pretty fancy stuff with the tiny amounts of memory on our ASICs.

We’ve been eyeballing switching to rust a little bit, but really only for other applications; the root of our main code base is over 25 years old at this point and a rewrite would take a Herculean effort.

Meh? I write pretty much exclusively in C and honestly I still like C++ better, and wouldn’t mind switching to Rust either

I tried fusion360 last week and it was broken; some big update they released broke it and now I just gagged to wait for it to get fixed, I guess. Will try it again in a month or so asked are if it’s fixed… but I’ve always had awful luck getting wine working. Same w/ photoshop

Honestly, kinda glad that my win10 PC “doesn’t have the specs” to run win11. Stupid, because I’m running an 18-core Xeon w/ 128 gigs of ram and a 2070 super, but of course the stupid TPM chip. But oh well, guess I won’t be able to get ads on my own product.

The bummer is I’ll likely need to install it on something because I occasionally need to go back to windows to use certain programs… maybe someday wine will work well enough to actually use reliably…

Shitty k8s cluster/space heater?

True, he is sitting at a terminal - but it appears to be connected to an IBM 5150 or similar. So maybe not so dumb!

Looking at the rest of things more carefully - very likely a 5150, if not definitely. Iconic and hugely popular PC for its era, so it would make sense for sure.

Even if you were able to make your own PCB and somehow solder everything onto it, one of the things that makes complex boards like motherboards so tough to make is signal path lengths. Ever see how some of the traces on motherboards are squiggly and take up more space than the straight ones? That isn’t just for fun - all of the traces have to be incredibly specific lengths for a whole number of reasons, including signal timing and interference with other traces.

Quick note - HGST enterprise drives are great but those fuckers are LOUD. I’ve had one in my PC for a number of years and it’s done great, pretty quick too - but I can hear it across the room.

I’ll make sure to give the firewall a shot, then - I couldn’t explain it for the life of me but for whatever reason it’s always just gone straight over my head. Not like it’s too complex or anything… just a lack of willingness to learn! But that is changing :)

And it’s a Supermicro blade - I’ve already set up IPMI LOM! One of my favorite tools. I do a decent amount of sysadmin stuff at work, and we actually use somewhat similar servers - so luckily, I know what I’m doing there. But at work, IT does all of the firewall setup and everything for us, because we’re on one huge VPN - so I don’t ever have to worry about (or learn) security. Which explains some of why I don’t know it yet.

Hmm, well that’s good to hear, about the whole Tailscale thing. I was a bit confused on how that’s actually interacting with the internet. I suppose that even though I can access the stuff from anywhere, I do need the account to actually do so.

To your point about SSH keys - could you elaborate a bit more? I am familiar with SSH in that it exists, but past that, the whole key thing is a bit of a black box (which is part of this whole thing… to learn more about it!)

3D printing is the way to go, for sure. But if you’ve got the normal SFF optiplexes, I’ve got no idea how those will fit into a 1U form factor without a complete cooling system overhaul.

That’s pretty sweet. Have always wanted one of those terminals; I feel like you could do so many things with them.

You’ve programmed Tek vector terminals, as in, you used to work for Tek? Or just on the side as a hobby or something?

RAID 1. Raid 0 stripes data between disks, meaning you get much faster I/O speeds but if one disk fails, you lose it all. RAID 1 is when you have 2 (or more) disks and the data is mirrored between both. So if one does, you’ve got a perfect copy of it on the other disk. RAID 0 = “striped”, RAID 1 = “mirrored”

I use uints every day at work. They’re very useful for cases when you’ve only got a single byte or two bytes to work with. E.g. an 8-bit int will only get you to a max of 127, but of course an unsigned 8-bit gets you to 255. Similar concept with 16/32/64s. Very useful when you’re working with small amounts of available memory, such as when writing code to go on ASICs.

If nothing else, GoDaddy is expensive as f**k. I was quoted ~$150/yr to host a site + purchase a domain. Same service on Namecheap (same SSL and HTTPS and whatnot) costs me ~$25/yr.