I'm here to annoy telemarketers.
Do you ever get those calls where people want to sell you stuff? Or tell you about "great" investment opportunites? I heard it's quite common in the US because call termination to the US costs next to nothing - and they have a common language with a country which most of those calls originate from: India.
... or has it? Supermicro isn't sure.
I mange quite a few servers with Supermicro boards. I kind of like them because the out of band management solution on Supermicro is not the worst thing ever. I haven't found any good remote KVM solution yet, but the solution made by ATEN is at least partially usable. That is, unless you log in to the webapplication, only to be kicked out again:
Not by time, but by distance
"Diiii,diii,diiiiii,chhhhhhh,chhh,shhh ...." - remember those sounds? Those were the sounds of dial up modems when you connected to the internet. Thankfully those times are long gone now. There is no "going online" after 18:00 anymore (because it was cheaper), you're simply connected all the time. In a weird turn of events, instead of connecting to the internet via analog phone lines we're now connecting analog phone lines through the internet, but I digress ....
A story of my old 486 notebook. Is it dead or alive?
... if you use them with disks larger than 2TB
This just happened to a friend of mine. He had two 3 TB disks in a RAID-1 configuration, attached to an older Marvell RAID controller. (But the manufacturer really doesn't matter). Suddenly Windows started complaining about being unable to access folders and then the disk completely went away. Disk management just shows it as "unformatted". However both disks report as OK. What happened?
The Teres-1 is an open-hardware, open-source notebook designed by Olimex in Bulgaria.
I recently got my Olimex Teres-1 and I must say I really like this small netbook. It doesn't have the fastest CPU, the most memory or best screen, but for most purposes it's good enough. Besides, it's not meant as a high end device but a hacker toy, and one of the first devices which is (almost) completely open. You can download all schematics, all sources, blueprints, everything! This alone makes it an amazing device.
I've had the "pleasure" to work with a few HP servers over the last years. Summary: They are horrible!
A brief story about setting up an IPv6 VPN
Recently we set up a new VPN at work. The old Cisco Anyconnect VPN isn't well supported anymore, has lots of weird quirks and needs some extra steps to get going on Windows 10 ... so we are transitioning over to OpenVPN.
I was at home when I suddenly smelled burnt electronics. This is never a good sign, mostly because I was unable to pinpoint the source right away. Afraid of something slowly smoldering and catching fire I started going over to the breaker box to pull the main breaker for my whole flat - you know, just in case. On my way there I noticed my washing machine wasn't spinning anymore and all the LEDs were dark. So I investigated this first, and, surely enough, it broke :(