Yes.

Awesome, thanks! It didn’t occur to me that IKEA could be an option!

Personal system but I work in technology, so learning solutions used in industry is always handy.

I want spinning disks as they have shorter life but a wider mean time between failure, which should be better for the RAID I want to configure.

Since SSDs have a definitive number of writes in their lifetime, as I recall it can be kind of dangerous to install several new ones at the same time in something like a raid 1 configuration.

As far back as I can recall, there have been at least two types of internet forums.

There are ones where dumb people go to pretend to be smart, and there are ones where smart people go to pretend to be dumb.

The problem with the ones where smart people pretend to be dumb is that eventually it attracts actual dumb people. Then the forum dies.

That’s great to know, all four of my other machines are running Debian right now so I should have a pretty good idea of what’s up!

That probably is what I will do for some time, leaning it gently and securely against a wall somehow, but in the future rack would be nice - especially if I find some enterprise firewall for sale or something.

Also really happy to hear ebay might have iLO licenses - I have grabbed a couple one-time licences off there for windows machines before, but I didn’t know they sometimes had stuff like this too.

Thanks!

Thanks for the tips and the link, that’s super useful!

Unsure about the iLO, but I do recall powering on one of these remotely in school using it. I’ll have to wait until I find some power cable to take a look I believe, but I do see a sticker with the default user name and password for it on the side, so here’s hoping haha.

I have a PLA 3d Printer, but I fear PLA has too low of a melting point to use for server components. It would be neat if there were a caddie model out there I could test with though - will have to look around.

Thanks for the insight on the rack as well, that will be good to know in the future I am certain.

Yea, finding new stuff can still be tricky. I usually learn about new stuff through word of mouth, but I agree external services are useful for that.

I threw spotify in the trash 5 or more years ago and never looked back. Every day since I’ve been so so happy that I moved back to having everything local/available through personal networking.

Cisco makes the devices and the network management software Meraki. If you have service from Spectrum, you could probably run the service through to those devices, and then to keep track of what they are for an administrator probably altered the ESSID’s via Meraki to reflect it and this is why they are named as such.

It is a bit strange there is that many if they are serving some service from Spectrum, but this warrants further investigation to the immediate physical area. Does the grocery store or a nearby business have a lot of TV’s or some such? It’s hard to say what the devices actually are for, but my best guess as to where I might see something like this is a place like a sports bar where there are many multiple TV’s with their own boxes so that they can show multiple sports broadcasts simultaneously.

It’s like math. You have to understand addition before you can understand multiplication, and have to understand multiplication before you can understand powers.

If you don’t understand, it is probably because you are missing underlying knowledge, which takes a lot of time and effort to obtain.

As others have said - start out by learning simpler stuff that is related, for example for networking related knowledge, the TCP/IP suite, subnet masking, the OSI model, IPv4 versus IPV6, TCP and UDP, 802.1q VLAN tagging, CSMA/CA and CSMA/CD, 802.11 wireless a/b/g/n, WPA2-PSK, Common protocols like DHCP, DNS, ARP, OSPF, BGP.

Learn a little bit of scripting in good starter language like Python and write a lot of garbage code for anything and everything to practice and learn it until you can build bigger things. Get familiar with its standard library, some third party modules, concepts like procedural programming versus functional programming versus object oriented programming.

Learn about tooling to investigate what is going on with various technologies. Wireshark, nmap, whois, a debugger like gdb, ping, traceroute, ssh, telnet, and whatever else catches your eye - making sure to look up how the tool works as much as what the tool is looking at.

Learn about basic operating system architectures, the difference between 64 bit and 32 bit processing, what registers are, what assembly is and how it works at a basic level, different processor queuing algorithms like FIFO, FILO, Round Robin, what a kernel is, what a dll is, how a process looks in memory including areas such as the stack, text, the heap, etc. Learn about emulation versus virtualization, learn the different kinds such as a bare-metal hypervisor versus a piece of software like QEMU/KVM.

The list goes on and on and on, you just have to start somewhere and begin reading. If you read something you don’t understand, you look that up and go read about it till you understand it, recursively, until you understand the original thing you looked up.

Once you have this general knowledge about computer systems, networking, scripting, and hardware - then begin reading up on how these things are exploited. If for example you understand how a process functions in memory, and that the assembly will push ret to the top of the stack when it enters a function call, and you know that memory is allocated from low to high address but written to from high to low - then you can understand how a stack buffer overflow attack works in basic theory.

This does take years, but that is the cost of knowledge.

Meraki devices are super common - tonnes of small businesses use it for the management of their networks and WAP’s.

Six screens? I’d love to see a picture of that setup to see how it works. What’s your system hardware as well, you would need some hell of a graphics card I imagine depending on resolution!

I like how their whole excuse to that was “WE DIDN’T SEED ANY OF IT BACK THOUGH” which arguably makes it even worse lol.

Yea and at that, if you do want touch capability, Plasma is also pretty good for that as I understand it as well haha.

I would probably look at a few interesting years I am aware of, but after a while I figure it would devolve into “I dunno man, what the fuck was going on in 1111?”

Ah yes, I also had to leave Voicemeeter behind when I switched. I’m aware that there are some softwares available that purportedly fill that gap (JACK Audio Server was one if I recall correctly), however I don’t think I could figure them out. Voicemeeter was really quite good as far as simplicity went.

When I first installed it I was a little worried because I thought it broke my games, but then I quickly realized that Valve had updated their Proton release so all I had to do was roll back 1 version and everything started working again.

I started watching live stream on twitch of a specific category that interested me. The people who stream this category collaborate with one another and each have their own community of people who follow.

I watched some really small streams and chatted with people. I do mean small as well, probably originally most of these streams had something like 6 viewers. Over a long period of time you come to know people in a stream group - and then because of the collaboration you come to know more people. There is usually a discord server or some such where these people talk when there is no stream as well.

Now, 5 or more years later, I’m probably in something like 18 discord groups where I talk to a lot of people regularly, or DM with quite a lot. By proximity and a loose shared interest, we all now know quite intimate details of each others lives and talk about all kinds of anything and everything.

Friendship is not really a fast process, but you just have to find places to plant seeds and see what grows.