Federated Republic of Sean @freakazoid@retro.social

Due to the influx of Tumblr refugees and spambots, I will not accept follow requests from people without profiles or a posting history that is interesting enough to make it clear you're not a bot.

If I've followed you and never authorized you to follow me, that's a mistake, so please let me know if you're in that situation. Not that you'll see this.

FTR the only thing I get at all irritated about people not CWing is super long posts that require a bunch of reading for me to decide if I'm interested in reading it or not. Well, and super long posts generally, but I'll acknowledge that not auto-collapsing those is a misfeature in the various frontends.

I'll gladly CW stuff that triggers people who follow me because of past trauma or whatever. But if it's just stuff you don't want to read, this is why we get to choose whom to follow.

I made a post that I can direct people at so they're not surprised when I say stuff they don't like, just because I happened to also say some stuff they did like.

https://undergroundeconomist.com/post/178417661943

Please fill out a profile and post some stuff before trying to follow me, or send me a DM introducing yourself.

Of course, it's not like I'm saying anything non-obvious here: sneakernet has been a thing pretty much everywhere broadband isn't, especially when IP laws aren't strongly enforced. Bring your disk in to a shop and they'll fill it with pirated media at barely above the cost of labor.

This is the kind of device I'm thinking of for sneakernet: $22 and supports 2.5" and 3.5" drives. The only drawback is the need for separate AC power.

https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Docking-Station-Support/dp/B0099TX7O4/

Hard drive cases are a bit more expensive than the old floppy boxes, but given that a 6TB drive is $100, another $5 for a case isn't much percentage-wise. https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-Portable-Protective-External-Anti-Static/dp/B018VKBYWI/

My dad's house is full of NAS boxes. Not sure why he chose that approach versus just hanging USB drives off the machine he uses as a media server. I think it's because he doesn't trust the server not to die and take the storage with it or something. Or maybe it's because he can't pass up a deal at Costco and they carry full-size NAS boxes (i.e. a single 3.5" drive) but presumably only 2.5" USB drives.

Storage has been getting cheaper at a much faster rate than bandwidth, which makes now a better time than ever to self-host.

Actually, it makes now a better time than ever for *sneakernet*. Which has the added bonus that, unlike self-hosting, it's pretty intuitive for most people.

Are there good (as in easy to use for the average no-techie) apps for cataloging external storage?

I've never written an Ansible playbook, but I managed to install Ansible and make a working playbook that pushes out various maps for both my Postfix servers in about 80 minutes. Much of which was spent on trying to figure out trying to get the postmap handlers to run even though the templates weren't updated, which I finally gave up on in favor of using an ad-hoc command.

I ordered a blower, and when I take it apart to blow the dust out, I'll be removing the filter on the exhaust fan, too.

I replaced a disk in my fileserver which has been showing "offline uncorrectable (pending)" sectors for a couple years now, and I noticed the disks are all pretty hot. I also noticed there doesn't seem to be a lot of air coming out of it.

FreeNAS can't control the fans, so I'll need to see if I can adjust them in the BIOS, but the main problem appears to be... dust. For some reason this Lian Li case has filters on both the intakes *and outlets*, and every filter is clogged with dust.