What kind of crops are you going to grow at 125°? That’s still within OP’s specification of triple digits and with temps getting hotter we’re likely to see a lot more of this happening within our lifetime.

Yes! One of my most favorite Johnny Depp roles.

They don’t want to admit they’ve been screwing us over even though we all know it’s happening. All these companies could have rolled out suitable internet speeds a decade earlier but they would rather limit everyone to the lowest common denominator so they don’t have to admit just how terrible their equipment is in most locations.

I’ve gotta say, having city-owned fiber is great, folks here don’t have to wait weeks for Comcast to send out a tech who conveniently never shows up on the scheduled day, and customer service actually has a clue what they’re talking about. This is how a public service should operate.

I would say cable TV coax has quite a lot more capacity than what the providers let on. In my city they offered up to 50mbps at over $100/month. Then they lost their lawsuit trying to prevent the city from installing its own fiber network and suddenly the cable company decided they could offer 150mbps for around $75/month (with no equipment changes). Once the fiber network started becoming operational (offering 1gbps bidirectional for$50/month) the cable company decided they’re better also offer gigabit connection speeds, but once again they simply flipped a switch to increase your bandwidth. This capability has been in place for quite some time, they just didn’t want to offer it and their illegal “monopoly” gave them no incentive to provide competitive speeds.

• I say “monopoly” even though we technically also have DSL available in town. However when I asked one of the techs why DSL couldn’t give me more than 896kps upload speed, I was told that the cable company had an arrangement with them which prevented the DSL from providing the speeds needed by businesses. After the lawsuit that broke up the state-wide bans on other providers, this practice was exposed and also broken up, so now the telco is able to max out their DSL speeds.

You might check if a simple CPU upgrade would get you there. I previously ran some 2005 Poweredge servers that came with a Pentium D processor, and it cost me something like $8 from ebay to upgrade to a Xeon and start running KVM.

Keep an eye out for people trashing perfectly good desktop machines because Windows 10 is being retired.

If you want a server that “does it all” then you would need to get the most decked-out top of the line server available… Obviously that is unrealistic, so as others have mentioned, knowing WHAT you want to run is required to even begin to make a guess at what you will need.

Meanwhile here’s what I suggest – Grab any desktop machine you can find to get yourself started. Load up an OS, and start adding services. Maybe you want to run a personal web server, a file server, or something more extensive like Nextcloud? Get those things installed, and see how it runs. At some point you will start seeing performance issues, and this tells you when it’s time to upgrade to something with more capability. You may simply need more memory or a better CPU, in which case you can get the parts, or you may need to really step up to something with dual-CPU or internal RAID. You might also consider splitting services between multiple desktop machines, for instance having one dedicated NAS and another running Nextcloud. Your personal setup will dictate what works best for you, but the best way to learn these things is to just dive in with whatever hardware you can get ahold of (especially when it’s free), and use that as your baseline for any upgrades.

Crepuscular rays: shafts of light which are seen just after the sun has set and which extend over the western sky radiating from the position of the sun below the horizon. They form only when the sun has set behind an irregularly shaped cloud or mountain which lets the rays of the sun pass through a cloud in bands.

In this case, I think the light is making it look like the cloud is dark bands, when in fact the entire cloud is probably all dark but being lit up by the rays. (And yes, this affect can be seen both at sunrise and sunset.)

Since I’m 57 and have paid some attention to how I’ve changed over the years, perhaps I can add a little insight? Quite frankly, you get tired. I’ve been on the scene since the home computer revolution took off and I’ve seen so many things come and go. It’s not that we can’t learn new forms of communication, etc., but rather that after awhile you start asking yourself why bother when the “next big thing” is going to be another forgotten memory in 5-10 years. It’s not you who are being criticized for wasting items, it’s all the people like you over the years who have collectively wasted so much. Our brains remember all those things and they add up, causing us to fixate on the wrong info (although this last bit isn’t really something that comes with age).

Last night I re-watched The Fifth Element. Afterwards I was thinking about when it first came out in 1997. My god, that’s 28 years ago. I remember things from the 90’s. I remember things from the 80’s and from the 70’s. I remember that after 9/11 the 00’s were boring as fuck. But when you put all of that together, and start thinking about how much you’ve experience… holy hell that’s quite a lot to face squarely. And if I tell you something inappropriate about a co-worker… what? HR will pull me away from the monotony and have a talk with me? Experience tells us what we can get away with, and sometimes it’s fun just to see what people’s reactions are.

So yeah, I’ve observed these things, but I refuse to be pulled down into misery and monotony. Keep yourself busy doing things that you enjoy. Never be afraid to go down the rabbit hole and learn crazy new things. I’m working on assembling a couple swords from parts, looking into bluing some steel pieces I made. And just this week I learned about “rust bluing” which is a crazy concept but is easy to do at home. I learned something new and fun, and I refuse to ever stop learning. I may not care about Instagram or Facebook, but I installed Signal on my phone and I love being able to create my own 3D models and printing them out.

The future is always amazing. Age doesn’t make us care less about it, it just makes us more choosy in what parts are worth investing in. If you don’t want to become a listless old geezer, then don’t… all you need to do is keep enjoying the wonders of the world.

But why doesn’t it ever empty the swap space? I’ve been using vm.swappiness=10 and I’ve tried vm.vfs_cache_pressure at 100 and 50. Checking ps I’m not seeing any services that would be idling in the background, so I’m not sure why the system thought it needed to put anything in swap. (And FWIW, I run two servers with identical services that I load balance to, but the other machine has barely used any swap space – which adds to my confusion about the differences).

Why would I want to reduce the amount of memory in the server? Isn’t all that cache memory being used to help things run smoother and reduce drive I/O?

And how does cache space figure in to this? I have a server with 64GB of RAM, of which 46GB is being used by system cache, but I only have 450MB of free memory and 140MB of free swap. The only ‘volatile’ service I have running is slapd which can run in bursts of activity, otherwise the only thing of consequence running is webmin and some VMs which collectively can use up to 24GB (though they actually use about half that) but there’s no reason those should hit swap space. I just don’t get why the swap space is being run dry here.

This right here is the main reason why Trump might succeed… The media has been beaten into submission and refuses to report the actual events that are occurring which make Trump look bad.

If your card has an x4 pinout, then it probably needs the additional bandwidth. Plugging it into an x1 slot (if it was possible) would slow down the network traffic. Get a better motherboard with an x4 slot on it so you can use the hardware you want. or find something else that will fit your computer.

Honestly even the 1Gb quad port card I have requires an x4 slot, although I saw some dual-port 2.5Gb x1 cards on ebay. Maybe you could just use two of those?

We don’t know right from wrong because we don’t fear retribution from an almighty.

Just for some real-world comparison, I set up a new NAS earlier this year using a rackserver, SAS cards, and eight 18TB HDDs configured like RAID6 (actually using zfs-z2). I played with a few different configurations but ultimately my write speeds reached around 480MB/s because of the parallel access to so many drives. Single drive access was of course quite a bit slower. Because of this testing I knew I could use cheap SATA2 backplanes without affecting the performance.

So basically, do a lot of testing with your planned hardware to get the best throughput, but a single HDD is going to be your single biggest bottleneck in anything you set up.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.

OTOH, fuck all the advertisers who use shady tactics to make sales, and especially fuck all the people who pray on the naivety of others to steal their money. I was just showing a customer an email I got the other day stating her domain hosting was past due and required immediate payment, and she asked how I knew it was a scam. Uh, hello, because —I— am hosting your domain and website (and this is exactly why I share this kind of stuff with people, to make them think before they blindly write a check).