When I built my latest Plex server, I chose to put ECC RAM into it. But it was a pain getting all the hardware, due to the silly rules AMD has for ECC support and iGPU support in its chips.
ECC RAM is only necessary for people doing financial-related work.
If a video has a bitflip that is not corrected in software, ooooo 1 pixel will be a slightly different shade or hue or one subtitle letter will be wrong worst case.
Billing, payment processing, virtual currency storage, a flipped bit could be thousands of dollars, but those systems will have multiple verifiable redundancies in place, unlike the 90s when people like to quote that ECC RAM is essential.
Also 100% uptime servers like enterprise storage servers where customer data integrity is high priority.
I have yet to see a single shred of evidence that a memory bit flipping has caused any problems past 2008 or so. Maybe another person has found some case where it has, but when I was researching for my own server, I couldn’t find a single one.
Nearly every problem (1 million times more likely) is caused by software instability and bugs, with some being due to hard drive bit rot or hardware failures which ECC won’t fix anyway.
I have yet to see a single shred of evidence that a memory bit flipping has caused any problems past 2008 or so. Maybe another person has found some case where it has, but when I was researching for my own server, I couldn’t find a single one.
Not server-related, but an instance where an inexplicable bit flip caused a stir is Super Mario 64 speedrunning. There is a level that is notoriously slow to navigate and during a playthrough a community member “discovered” a skip that warps you about halfway through the level. There is a video of it happening on live stream, but to this day someone has yet to reproduce the skip. Fiddling around with the game’s memory showed that the behavior happens when a single bit is flipped. All in all, it was likely a one-off error on the hardware that happened at exactly the right time in exactly the right place. The incident is known as the “TTC upwarp” and there is a $1000 bounty to claim if you can provide a working set of instructions to reproduce it on real hardware.
I mean, that was actually pretty cool to read about! Speedrunning community always does the most crazy things as far as hardware memory dumping and analyzing to drop time in a speed run. 😅 that is passion.
It did happen on a device from 1996 though where in the time, programming and error checking was so barebones and efficient that a single bit could really mess a lot of things up.
That’s why I specified a time period 😉. Originally bug were called bugs because literal bugs would get in the holes of punchcards and make programs not run. Not a problem anymore! In the same way, systems have implemented checksums and error checking such that it really isn’t a big deal for the vast majority of applications.
To be completely honest, I kinda did an oopsie because it completely slipped my mind that although it happened in 2020, the technology involved is indeed pre-millenium.
What does that 50TB look like? I’m pushing up against 25 at this point but it’s shamefully all usb hdds plugged into a usb strip in a mini pc, and it’s less than ideal.
I love it. That works fine but if you want a weekend project consider doing something like this:
Buy a Fractal Define 7XL.
Shuck all those HDDs and put them in the case. Buy one more disk, as large or larger than the largest disk.
Buy 8GB RAM, cheap mobo, cheap Pentium gold CPU, and reasonably reliable power supply. Also buy either a SATA or HBA PCI adapter.
Install unRAID and Plex. Use that extra drive for parity. Now your data is protected if a drive fails. They also won’t get so hot, and speed will be much better. You also have lots of capacity for more drives.
Add 4 drives to it of equal size. One drive’s worth of space will be sacrificed for redundancy and they’ll all be combined into a single storage drive.
I have 4x 18TB drives giving me just under 50TB of usable storage. Any single drive can fail with no data loss, and I just replace it and keep going.
I’m using a mini PC for the transcode so the proc in the nas doesn’t matter, it’s just storage. The mini pcs on Amazon are way more powerful than anything you’ll find in a standalone
Edit: for those who don’t want to use YouTube anymore. If a is the long side and b is the short side of a rectangle. Halving the rectangle will make the long side b and the short side 1/2 a. If the ratio is preserved when halving, we get:
Honestly it’s not that much worse than being forwarded off to India where someone’s getting paid $0.10 an hour to read off a flow chart to me. If your 24-hour service line doesn’t have an actual engineer available after the flow chart It’s not meaningfully different than the AI.
Yep. I hate having to phone support lines to be told to run basic troubleshooting like turning something off and on again when that’s the first thing that I’ll try.
Keep in mind that the service lines also deal with customers who can’t distinguish a CPU from a modem from a monitor. Hence the basic troubleshooting in the beginning.
Yeah, I know they have to follow their script, so I just play along. And honestly, it’s not as if I’ve never made a stupid mistake before, like accidentally leaving something unplugged.
I always start off by telling them “I know what I’m talking about, I work in IT, let’s skip the basics, I’ve tried it all already.” but they sometimes still don’t listen.
Years back, I bought an Asus workstation motherboard with IPMI, the stupid BMC would reliably crash every 12 hours rendering the IPMI absolutely useless since it would hang upon login. I emailed support and told them that the BMC sucked and asked if they had an internal build I could try… They directed me to the downloads page and told me to download the UEFI firmware 🤦♂️ It took about SIX back and forth emails over the course of a week or so to get them to understand that I was talking about the BMC and not motherboard itself. Their tier one and two support had ZERO clue what a BMC or IPMI was. After begging them to forward me to an engineer who actually knew what I was talking about, they agreed and that engineer sent me an updated build…which still crashes every 12 hours 🤦♂️. In the end my solution was to set a cron job (I run Linux) to execute every 11 hours that logged into the IPMI from the running OS and did a cold reset on the BMC. That worked like a charm as long as Linux was running.
I always start off by telling them “I know what I’m talking about, I work in IT, let’s skip the basics, I’ve tried it all already.” but they sometimes still don’t listen.
They don’t listen because, unfortunately, for every one person telling the truth, there’s probably at least three people who don’t have an iota of a clue about their system but lie about it because they think claiming they’re an expert is a cheat code to getting better support. Ruins it for the rest of us.
Since when is “let’s skip the basics” asshole vibes? It’s a waste of time for them and myself to cover all the basics, which I’ve already gone through.
“did you check the power cord?”, " did you reboot it?", “Is it actually on?”
Yes, I’m not tech illiterate. We don’t need 5 back and forth emails over the course of a few days to get down to something helpful. Give me the helpful stuff up front. Sometimes this stuff is time sensitive and these support people are costing companies a lot of money due to unnecessary downtime. I used to work for Disney+ and we had servers that died all the time, we’d email Dell or SuperMicro and tell them what the issue was, and then we would spend days or weeks of back and forth doing things we already tried, or things we know wouldn’t fix the issue before they finally decide “ok let’s replace it”. A few times their suggestions even bricked our servers and made the problem worse! We’d say that there was a CPU issue on a server that started crashing and the IPMI logs and Linux itself would point to a faulty CPU or RAM. They told us to flash a new EFI, we would do so, and great now the server doesn’t power on at all instead of just crashing occasionally.
I also think it comes off as a bit snotty. Nobody’s perfect and asking through the basics is the tech covering themselves, too. And who says that your basics and their basics are identical?
I usually start by giving a detailed description of the problem and of what I already tried in particular.
Obviously it depends on the specific kind of support and the hotline I am calling, but if it’s a complex issue, and the support hotline is a national toll free number that’s clearly outsourced to whatever crummy T1 support call center, I don’t even bother with details. It just confuses them, and I know they have a script that management will fillet them over not following even if they know what to do. Just mash A through the script and save the effort for T2 and higher.
Who knows. Sometimes that T1 script catches things you missed. It’s designed to weed out the simple stuff, after all. When you directly leapt to more advanced troubleshooting, sometimes you leave an obvious step behind.
My time is just as important as theirs. I have a busted product that I paid good money for, but now, in order to get useful support I have to slog through the basics which is frustrating and useless since 99% of the time I’ve already tried everything that they’re suggesting.
I worked for Disney+ as a System Administrator and later an Engineer, we’d have servers die all the time (with thousands of servers, we’d easily have 10-20 support tickets open at a time) that would need to be replaced. We pay for top tier support and get stupid suggestions from them like “did you try and clear the CMOS?”, “Try and flash this new firmware” even though nothing changed hardware wise in years and it was working fine for years, “try this and send us logs”, etc… This type of shit costs businesses a lot of money in downtime. It’s a disservice to the customer to not support them at the level that they require. In the end the product would just end up being RMA’d after a week or two of back and forth.
If you went to a doctor for a problem and they suggested all the things you already tried, and then sent you home, would you be happy?
So do I, but that becomes very difficult and frustrating when they have zero clue what you’re talking about, like in my above example of the IPMI and BMC. It sounds like you’re talking about the Dingle Arm and Reticulated Splines on your Rockford Retro Encabulator.
tbf, customers have a near-infinite number of different issues and problems. those 'flow charts' and scripts are designed to start at a baseline and work up from there and they start with the most common ones. you'd be paying more for whatever it is you're calling in about if they hired only fully-qualified persons that can 'think on their feet' without the flow charts and scripts wrt whatever issue it is you have, troubleshooting it, and coming up with the specific solution for you... a hell of a lot more. and yes, the first thing you should usually try with tech items is a power cycle. ::insert itcrowd-turnitoffandonagain.jpg::
No one is asking for a gaggle of full-time engineers.
The flowchart is designed to fix the vast majority of problems top down. If 90% of the problems are solved by rebooting you’re going to reboot. It doesn’t matter if the ONT shows your fiber line is not connected. Wow that sucks I understand and don’t have a problem with that. But most support these days can’t even connect you with an actual engineer once you break the flow chart.
You spend 30 minutes on the phone having them check off check boxes when they get down to the point where there’s actually a level two problem, there’s no one there to talk to you. Here let us take down your information and we’ll get back to you within the next 24 hours.
A couple of decades ago this really wasn’t a problem. Level 1 technicians would run their flowcharts if you broke out to a level two technician you wait on the line for 10 to 15 minutes and you’d end up with a level two technician, It almost always solve the problem if it was solvable. Honestly the products I call for support on haven’t really gone down in price with the lack of support provided these days. They used to be able to provide me multi-tier support live on the phone with just their existing margins. It’s the same thing screwing over pharmacies and retail. They found they can get by with giving less support and having less people work the lines so that’s what they’re doing.
“I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.”
At least keep it on topic. Make it a sexy Spiderman thread who wanted to fight crime using Rumblr but accidentally downloaded Grindr and is now wanted for hate crime!
That’s why photovoltaics need much more R&D. They are the only true advancement in electricity production since the inception of broadly adopted electrification.
No perl either. Much like python you find a relevant library (in cpan), but unlike python there will be seven different implementations, and any four perl devs will come up with at least ten solutions, nine of which will successfully rescue the princess
Everything will seem to be be going great, but to actually gain access to the castle you’ll have to compare your situation to successful rescues to find the undocumented drawbridge control
“In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.”
Because your race consists of scamming and lying “people” who have no concept of hygiene. You smell like poop and look utterly repulsive. The world would be better if india is nuked.
Indians are present in big numbers on reddit and other websites due to how populated India is, how english is popular there and that they aren’t contained in national platforms like their chinese neighbors. It makes them noticeable for bigots to single them out and target. Just because they want someone to hate and laugh at to up their self-esteem.
riiiight it’s not like they use their population to push lies, distort the truth and not push their extreme caste hatred elsewhere.
It makes them noticeable for bigots to single them out and target.
it’s actually the opposite. one indian guy pushes a lie that puts india in a better light and almost every indian votes the post or comment to the top. anyone pointing out the truth is buried by the nationalistic brigade.
Racism is bad, using the ignorant populace to push lies is bad too.
Do you think the government itself is involved here, or is it just volunteers? Did it occur to fediverse? I think here you are talking about reddit, right?
I’m not Indian and all I’ve seen lately are news about how bad their ecological and ethnic situations under Modi are. I’ve heard of something named like r/chodi, but mostly from drama write-ups. What’s the scale of brigading we are talking about?
I think it’s due to the stereotypes and the bad experiences, I’ve had pretty bad experiences with indians in gaming (racist, annoying, begging) and work (incompetent, corrupt, etc), but I’ve also seen that from other people with different backgrounds, more importantly though is that I’ve also seen some amazing tutorials in YouTube from Indian peeps and I’ve also found some great repos from Indian devs as well.
I’m an instance admin and see heaps of the same stuff being posted. Pretty sure it’s one lonely troll not lots of people. Even in this thread, it’s all one user account not lots of different people, but we see the same stuff posted across lots of brand new accounts in a very similar way.
Makes sense. Even then a lot of the troll’s comments are upvoted by a few people. There are definitely a few people here who share the troll’s extreme opinions. Thanks for doing your part in removing all these bullshit. I wish lemmy had a way to block account creation by IP addresses. That might stop trolls from making dozens of alt accounts.
The problem is that would also ban anyone else who might be on the same IP. VPN, Tor exit node, public WiFi etc. Nothing beats a well staffed moderation team and other users willing to report abuse IMO.
We very often see the same username created across many instances, it’s very easy to do and Lemmy has no protections against it. Plus, there are no protections against creating multiple accounts to upvote your own posts (don’t get any ideas 😆). IP blocks wouldn’t work as instances are entirely independent, so there is no sharing of IP info across different instances.
Currently there is at least some level of coordination across instances, though, such as Lemmy.world’s Defense HQ, where instance admins can share info about spammers/trolls so we don’t have to wait for a report from one of our own users. There’s also Fediseer, but this protects against spam instances not spam accounts on mainstream instances.
there are no protections against creating multiple accounts to upvote your own posts
They don’t even have to be real accounts. Lemmy uses the ActivityPub protocol, and nothing’s stopping someone from creating an ActivityPub server that federates with a Lemmy instance and spams upvotes from randomly-generated usernames. The server could just pretend that every username is a valid one.
Of course, I think something like that would be defederated pretty quickly.
Yes, there’s fediseer that can help with that sort of thing. However, I think if it wasn’t spam, it may not get noticed as quick as you’d think. Create a lemmy.world account, post a meme, and use your special server to throw 50 or 100 upvotes at it, and probably no one would realise.
We very often see the same username created across many instances
Guilty as charged. I’ll say though, there are several legitimate reasons why one might want to do this. I personally use it as a substitute for Reddit’s multireddit feature, by grouping community subscriptions across different instances by theme. As long as users use the same username across instances I don’t think this practice should be automatically regarded as an attempt to sockpuppet. It that was the goal, the accounts would definitely not be using the same username across all the instances.
Personally I have accounts on multiple instances because I wanted to make communities in different languages and some instances focus a lot more on one language than others and also because the SFW instances defederated the NSFW ones. I do not really interact with the same posts though.
That’s what I used to love so much about reddit. NSFW and regular content on the same platform. No judgment.
Though the quality has really gone downhill since the people that really did it for exhibitionism reasons got overshadowed by the enormous wave of people trying to spam their onlyfans :(
Monetisation kills everything, not just on the platform side but also the content-generator side.
I didn’t intend to imply that by using the same username across instances you were breaking some sort of rule. Different instances have different moderation policies, different federation policies, and different intents. Having multiple accounts in good faith should not be an issue and was not what I was trying to imply.
Rather, the intention was to show that we know bad actors do this with nefarious intent. Here’s an example (they show zero comments as they have been banned with content removed - also I think these ones only had posts not comments anyway):
These are racist people that want to stereotype and put down India merely for having top 2 IT industry workers in the world, and getting the job vacancies they feel entitled to. These assholes will tell you how India is responsible for 95% of all IT scam calls, but will never tell you how its never India but almost always Western countries (easily above 85% of global) developing ransomware and locking up people’s data for $300-500 per victim.
I vote for him pissing his pants, slipping in a pool of his own piss, and then falling and smashing his head against that sink he was carrying in that picture back when he bought Twitter.
Well that’s confusing because the meme is complaint text with Hulk saying that he sees this as an absolute win and you titled the post “I don’t” which means you don’t see this as absolute win and therefore agree with complaint text in the image.
Killing is overly dramatic, but it’s putting a burden on certain projects if they want to convert to it and not all have the resources to tank it. I don’t see Window Maker porting their toolkit to Wayland, for instance.
But XWayland exists so I don’t see what’s the fuss.
Removing downvoting feels intuitively wrong to me (eg, I believe that dissent is a really important part of a healthy democracy). If all those mega-corp platforms are removing downvoting, then I’m pretty confident my intuition on this matter is correct
The voting will stay but your homepage will be a for you page that selects posts based on your usage data and whatever is trending instead of the votes, in an attempt to bring engagement to a maximum. Just like what’s been happening to Instagram for years.
And it happened right when it became apparent that we were living in the Disinformation Age and every bit of power to flag bullshit content became that much more important.
This makes alot of sense I’ll imagine the folk using Linux aren’t using it out of choice but out of necessity due to linux being kinder to older hardware
Uhm what’s re they using for this report… I would have assumed they would have gone with just taking the User Agent and similar which I guess that wouldn’t matter on the modifications you say.
The biggest spikes look like the correspond to new year. So my guess is that the spikes are vacations and show the difference between home PC and office PC usage.
You can see the same spikes on e.g. Googles IPv6 chart - when people are away from work IPv6 penetration goes up, when people are at work it goes down.
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