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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Then the correct answer is ‘the one you won’t screw up’, honestly.

    I’m a KISS proponent with security for most things, and uh, the more complicated it gets the more likely you are to either screw up unintentionally, or get annoyed at it, and do something dumb on purpose, even though you totally were going to fix it later.

    Pick the one that makes sense, is easy for you to deploy and maintain, and won’t end up being so much of a hinderance you start making edge-case exceptions because those are the things that will 100% bite you in the ass later.

    Seen so many people turn off a firewall or enable port forwarding or set a weak password or change permissions to something too permissive and just end up getting owned that have otherwise sane, if maybe over-complicated, security designs and do actually know what they’re doing, but just getting burned by wandering off from standards because what they implemented originally ends up being a pain to deal with in day-to-day use.

    So yeah, figure out your concerns, figure out what you’re willing to tolerate in terms of inconvenience and maintenance, and then make sure you don’t ever deviate from there without stopping and taking a good look at what you’re doing, what could happen if you do it, and coming up with a worst-case scenario first.


  • What’s your concern here?

    Like who are you envisioning trying to hack you, and why?

    Because frankly, properly configured and permissioned (that is, stop using root for everything you run) container isolation is probably good enough for anything that’s not a nation state (barring some sort of issue with your container platform and it having an escape), and if it is a nation state you’re fucked anyways.

    But more to your direct question: I actually use dns scopes and nginx acls to seperate public from private. I have a *.public and a *.private cname which points to either my external or internal IP, and ACLs in the nginx site configuration to scope where access is allowed.

    You can’t access a *.private host outside the network, but can access either from inside it, and so (again, barring nginx having an oopsie somewhere) it’s reasonably secure and not accessible, and leaves a very clear set of logs (and I’m pulling those logs in and parsing them for anything suspicious and doing automated alerting if I find anything I would not otherwise expect) so I’m happy enough with the level of security that this is, when paired with the services built-in authentication options.




  • There was a recent video from everyone’s favorite youtube Canadians that tested how many USB devices you can jam onto a single controller.

    The takeaway they had was that modern AMD doesn’t seem to give a shit and will actually let you exceed the spec until it all crashes and dies, and Intel restricts it to where it’s guaranteed to work.

    Different design philosophies, but as long as ‘might explode and die for no clear reason at some point once you have enough stuff connected’ is an acceptable outcome, AMD is the way to go.


  • Quicksync

    Yeah, it doesn’t sound like you’re transcoding in a way that’ll show any particular benefit from Quicksync over AMF or anything else. My ‘it’s better’ use case would be something like streaming to a cell phone at 3-5mbps, and not something local or just making a file to save on your device.

    DDR4 and no ECC

    That’s what my build is: 128gb of Corsair whatever on a 10850k. I’m sure there’s been some silent corruption somewhere in some video file or whatever, but, honestly, I don’t care about the data enough to even bother with RAID, let alone ECC.

    I will say, though, if you’re going to delve into something like ZFS, you should probably consider ECC since there are a lot more ‘well shits’ that can happen than what I’m doing (mergerfs + snapraid).

    power consumption

    A $30 or whatever they are kill-a-watt plus something like s-tui running on the NAS itself to watch what the CPU is doing in terms of power states and usage. I’ve got a 8-drive i9-10850k under 60w at “idle” which is not super low power, but it’s low enough that the cost of hardware to improve on it even a little bit (and it’d be a very little bit) has a ROI period of longer than I’d expect the hardware to last.


  • If you’re going to be doing transcoding for remote users at lower bitrates, quicksync is still better than AMF, so I’d vote Team Intel.

    If you’re not, then buy whatever meets your power envelope desires and price point.

    For Intel, anything 8th gen or newer should be able to natively do anything you need in Quicksync, so you don’t need to head to Amazon and buy something new, unless you really want to.

    Also, I’d consider hardware that has enough SATA ports for the number of drives you want so that you can avoid dealing with a HBA card: they inflate the power envelope of the system (if power usage is something you’re concerned with), and even in IT mode, I’ve found them to be annoyingly goofy at times and am MUCH happier just using integrated SATA stuff.




  • New (7000 and 9000) ryzen CPUs have an iGPU that can transcode via AMF, so the ‘equivalent’ would just be buy a modern AMD CPU.

    AMF isn’t quite as good as Quicksync, but it’s probably fine for most use cases for most people, though I can notice the image quality losses when you’re doing something like transcoding to 1080p low(ish) bitrate for remote streaming, and so have a very big bias in favor of nvenc or quicksync.

    Also, I’m in the more-ram-is-better camp, so buy as much as you want and/or the platform supports.




  • big fan of mini PC’s

    Same, but just be careful if you venture outside of the “reputable” vendors.

    I bought one recently from Aliexpress, and while it’s perfectly functional, it’s using an ethernet chipset that doesn’t have in-kernel drivers so I have to keep compiling new drivers for it every time the kernel upgrades.

    Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that I could do without, and not something a slightly more expensive version of what I got would have.


  • Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place,

    They’re also subject to interpretation, regulatory capture, as well as just plain being ignored when it’s sufficiently convenient for the regulators to do so.

    “There ought to be a law!” is nice, but it’s not a solution when there’s a good couple of centuries of modern regulatory frameworks having had existed, and a couple centuries of endless examples of where absolutely none of it matters when sufficient money and power is in play.

    Like, for example, the GDPR: it made a lot of shit illegal under penalty of company-breaking penalties.

    So uh, nobody in the EU has had their personal data misused since it was passed? And all the big data brokers that are violating it have been fined out of business?

    And this is, of course, ignoring the itty bitty little fact that you have to be aware of the misuse of the data: if some dude does some shady shit quietly, then well, nobody knows it happened to even bring action?