Right at this moment, I’m rebuilding my homelab after a double HDD failure earlier this year.

The previous build had a RAID 5 array of three 1TB Seagate Barracudas that I picked out of the scrap pile at work. I knew what I was getting into and only kept replaceable files on it. When one of the drives started doing the death rattle, I decided to yank some harder-to-acquire files to my 3TB desktop HDD before trying to resilver the entire array. Guess which device was the next to fail. I could mount and read it, but every operation took 2-5 minutes. SMART showed a reallocation count in the thousands. That drive contained some important files that I couldn’t replace, which were backed up to the (now dead) server. Fortunately ddrescue managed to recover damn near everything and I only lost 80 kilobytes out of the entire disk. That was a very expensive lesson that I’ve learned very cheaply.

The new setup has a RAIDz1 pool of 3x 4TB Ironwolf disks (constrained by the available SATA sockets on the motherboard), plus a new SSD for the OS and 16GB RAM (upgraded from literally the first SSD I ever bought and 10GB mis-matched DDR3).

Mounting it was a bit of a dilemma. The previous array was simply mounted to the filesystem from fstab and bind-mounted to the containers. I definitely wanted the storage to be managed from Proxmox’s web UI and to be able to create VDs and LXC volumes on it. Some community members helped me choose ZFS over LVM-on-RAID5. Setting up the correct permissions wasn’t as much of a headache as last time. I’ve just managed to get a Samba+NFS+HTTP file server and Jellyfin running and talking to each other. Forgejo and Nextcloud will be next.

me and the boys swearing fealty to King Chisel and Queen Hammer

alias consent='chmod u+x'

If you have a freeze dryer, you can take it one step further by making dehydrated instant water: carefully transfer the boiling water into the trays, then run the freeze dryer until all of the water has evaporated. Whatever is left is compact and easy to store, with a practically infinite shelf life. To turn it back into water, simply add water and stir thoroughly.

It says a lot about the times that the incomprehensible alien language was actually just a bunch of Russian words.

You are about to release so many evil swamp spirits.

I know this doesn’t help you, but someone might find it useful: Steam’s two-hour refund limit only applies to automatic, unconditional refunds. If a refund is justified (e.g. the game is a broken disaster, or the publisher lied about its nature), it may be granted beyond the two-hour window, like it was after Activision lied about AI usage in Black Ops 7.

About fucking time. I’m proud to say that I’ve contributed to this outcome.

I’m gonna go dance in the street now.

Looks like the ejector switch. Imagine trying to scratch your balls mid-mission and immediately shooting out of the plane pulling break-your-fucking-spine Gs.

Just install linux bro, it’s not that difficult. You’ll have to compile the F-35 drivers from source, but that’s just the cost of having a reliable system.

ZFS uses the RAM intensively for caching operations. Way more than traditional filesystems. The recommended cache size is 2 GB plus 1 GB per terabyte of capacity. For my server, that would be three quarters of the RAM dedicated entirely to the filesystem.

The entire server room is on a single UPS. The rack itself had to be powered down and disconnected to extend its PDUs with C19 sockets.

It’s not a very good setup, but (like always) properly fixing it is not worth the cost and the downtime.

At least you know it’s never been used to dispose of a body.

NilePink: Making my own estradiol from dairy products

(According to one random comment under hbomberguy’s soy diet video, milk is full of mammalian sex hormones. I’m certain Nigel would be able to separate them, if that is true.)

Read my comment again, it has the answer. Most VPN services do not provide end-to-end tunnelling. If the exit node is located outside Russia, then what enters the Russian internet will be simple HTTPS traffic.

Been running it from Russia where stock WireGuard stopped working mid-2025.

Sounds like the issue is ISPs within Russia blocking outgoing Wireguard traffic from customers.

If the traffic exits the tunnel without hitting a Russian ISP (e.g. a Mullvad exit node in Sweden that routes the unencrypted traffic to the destination), you won’t be affected. If the exit node is behind a Russian ISP, it might get filtered by DPI depending on which direction is subject to the filter.

The baryonoun asymmetry is one of the last unsolved mysteries of the field of linguistics: why are there so many pronouns, but no antinouns?

I saw a PT Cruiser once and immediately adopted the same opinion.