2161

Technology & Information / Re: Coin (not to be confused with bitcoin)

« on: March 22, 2014, 04:29:16 PM »

The homepage contains no actual information about what it is, so I lost interest and closed the tab.

2162

Technology & Information / Re: Razer's Project Christine — easily swappable computer parts (and other stuff!)

« on: March 21, 2014, 12:12:48 PM »

What if the next computers all run ARM chips so as to be compatible with phone and tablet software?

You really don't understand how software works, do you?

2163

Science & Alternative Science / Re: Anthropogenic Climate Change

« on: March 20, 2014, 03:45:23 PM »

Wasn't it just a few decades ago that scientists knew conclusively that we were heading towards another ice age?

We should probably finish up the current one first.

2164

Announcements / Re: Forum should now be accessible from all IPv6 clients

« on: March 14, 2014, 05:56:01 PM »

I've just realised that the upgrade script from 2.0.6 to 2.0.7 re-broke this at the start of February.

I've reported the bug with SMF:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=519794

I fully expect them to completely ignore it, but we'll see.

2165

Announcements / Re: Forum should now be accessible from all IPv6 clients

« on: March 14, 2014, 01:25:26 PM »

I've just realised that the upgrade script from 2.0.6 to 2.0.7 re-broke this at the start of February. Sadly, this means some IPv6 clients would have been unable to browse FES as guests for the past month and a half. I've fixed the problem now.

On the bright side, our new backup strategy will make it easier to spot such problems early on.

2166

Technology & Information / Re: New home network hardware

« on: March 14, 2014, 12:49:30 PM »

bdr1.home.sjm.la (border router)

Intel Atom D945GCLF2 board (given to me for free, 45 W)
2 GB of DDR2 RAM (also given to me for free)
Antec ISK110 case ($99.00, incl. 90 W power supply)
Kingston V300 60 GB SSD ($69.00, 2 W)
OpenBSD 5.4 ($0.00)

Subtotal: $168.00, 47 W


dsl1.home.sjm.la

ADSL2+ modem (TBC)


dist1.home.sjm.la (distribution switch)

D-Link DGS-1100-08P Gigabit PoE switch ($159.00, 8 W)


wifi1.home.sjm.la (WiFi access point)

TP-Link TL-WA901ND Access Point ($49.00, 3 W)


Total so far: $376.00, 58 W

I've just placed an initial order for this stuff. I'll be buying more hardware for the storage cluster later.

2167

Announcements / Re: New backup system

« on: March 14, 2014, 11:56:50 AM »

Yeah, this is something that isn't specific to FES (in fact, unlike providers such as Google, we have no interest in mining your data). If you're concerned about privacy, don't treat the web as a private messaging platform.

2168

Announcements / Re: New backup system

« on: March 14, 2014, 11:41:16 AM »

How much, exactly, can you see? Excuse the paranoid-sounding Snupes, but are you able to see people's PMs and stuff since you can look through all that?

Yes; myself and pizaaplanet have always been able to see PMs as we've had full access to the database. Just as, on the old site, Daniel and John Davis were able to see that information. We don't make a habit of snooping around in other people's business, though.

The only information we can't see is passwords, since they're hashed in the database. If we really wanted to, it would be pretty trivial to have the forum software keep a record of everyone's passwords, but we aren't dicks.

2169

Announcements / New backup system

« on: March 14, 2014, 04:53:39 AM »

Today I got bored and felt like improving FES's backups, so we now have the database backups being committed into a git repository instead of being dumped out to an ordinary file. (Don't worry, it's not a public git repo; your PMs haven't just been opened up to the world.)

One benefit of this is that we now have 1-minute increments on backups. git's excellent delta compression algorithm means that we can effectively take backups as frequently as we like without significant diskspace penalty, whereas before we only had 2-hour increments due to the enormous amount of diskspace needed to store lots of database dumps.

Another benefit is that we have persistent history; previously, we were expiring old backups after about three months. I've imported all our old backups into git, so we will always be able to restore the forum as far back as 7 December, 2013 if the need arises.

The final benefit, and the one that really tickles my fancy, is that we can now easily see exactly what changes were made to the database, and when. git makes it very easy to get diffs between commits, and since we're doing a backup every minute, we can get down-to-the-minute information on when someone's signature changed, or (perhaps more usefully) when SMF did something stupid with the database that we want to fix (and exactly what it did).

I'm leaving the old backup mechanism in place for the time being, just in case we find some problem with the new one, but it seems to be working well so far.

2170

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Supes' Must-Listen-To List (Recommend me albums!)

« on: March 11, 2014, 08:54:31 AM »

If you can ever listen to it, a much better album - their best, really - is Who's Next.  Eight songs, and every one a classic.

Alternatively, you can get everything that's good on Who's Next by listening to the first minute.

2171

Status Notices / Re: Scheduled maintenance, 2014-03-10

« on: March 10, 2014, 09:30:21 AM »

And we didn't even lose 6 weeks of posts in the process.

Sorry about that.

2172

Status Notices / Re: Scheduled maintenance, 2014-03-10

« on: March 10, 2014, 08:04:19 AM »

And we're back after successful updates! Thanks for your patience and cooperation, everyone.

2173

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Supes' Must-Listen-To List (Recommend me albums!)

« on: March 10, 2014, 06:19:58 AM »

Frank Zappa songs I liked most were "Dumb All Over"

In that case, I formally recommend You Are What You Is.

2174

Technology & Information / Re: New home network hardware

« on: March 10, 2014, 01:03:48 AM »

Seems like an awful lot of power for what is essentially a home network. 
And your storage is going a bit too far.  Yes, it'll last a long time but I suspect your drives will die before you run out of space.  It would be better, I think, if you got enough to handle the next 2 years then upgrade the drives as you go.  In 2 years those 4TB are going to be much cheaper and whatever the highest level drive is going to cost what the 4 TB costs now.

In essence, you get more storage space for the same price, when you need it.

That's essentially what I'm doing. As I said, I'm not going to be buying all of this equipment upfront. This is more of an eventual goal.

Also, the 4 TB drives are already cheaper per GB than the 2 TBs, and almost on par with the 3 TB.

2175

Technology & Information / Re: New home network hardware

« on: March 09, 2014, 06:47:44 PM »

When I worked at Airbus we designed an entire aircraft including all those cad drawings on less than 3TB.

Congratulations.

What the hell are you planning to put on 20TB of storage?

Initially, the 1.2 TB I'm using right now on my 2 TB hard drive. When I got this computer less than years ago (as I'm sure you'll recall vividly, having tried to push me towards buying various things I didn't want), I only had 200 GB. That's 1 TB of growth in under two years, on top of which I want to get back into recording music again which takes up its fair share of space.

On top of that, Ceph provides an Amazon S3-like interface for general-purpose object storage, which I'm considering opening up to the Internet to share files with people. This will be yet another data source on top of what I'm already using (which is growing at more than 1 TB every two years).

A single 4 TB hard drive is only going to last me another couple of years at this rate. A properly built Ceph cluster will last me much longer than that, as well as providing seamless upgradability thanks to Ceph's distributed and highly available nature.

If it makes you feel any better, I'm going to be building the first incarnation of this cluster on 10x 1 TB drives I'm getting for free. That's only 5 TB of storage until I start buying bigger drives.

2176

Technology & Information / Re: New home network hardware

« on: March 09, 2014, 06:38:19 PM »

$4,300AUD? Really? And what on earth do you need 4TB of hard drive space for? You can't possibly have that much porn.

Look again. I'm buying 10 of those drives, and Ceph will replicate data between my two storage nodes automatically, giving me a total usable storage capacity of 20 TB.

Also, this is probably going to end up costing less than the current total, due to the fact that I won't be buying it all upfront. Most of the cost is in the 10x 4 TB hard drives, and I'm going to stagger those purchases (likely over a couple of years), over which time their price will come down.

2177

Technology & Information / Re: New home network hardware

« on: March 09, 2014, 04:52:26 PM »

Storage cluster (not including network cabling; I'll work out how to wire all this together later):


stor1.ceph1.home.sjm.la, stor2.ceph1.home.sjm.la (identical storage nodes running Ceph OSDs and mons)

Intel Core i3 4130T CPU ($159.00, 35 W)
ASUS H87I-PLUS Motherboard ($135.00)
G.Skill Ripjaws 8 GB DDR3 RAM ($109.00)
Corsair Force GS 128 GB SSD for booting, mon data and journaling ($155.00, 5 W)
5x Western Digital WD Red 4 TB hard drive for storage data ($249.00 each, 5 W each)
SilverStone DS380 8-bay NAS chassis ($179.00)
Antec EA-550 Platinum Power Supply ($129.00)

Subtotal: $2111.00, 65 W per node


mon1.ceph1.home.sjm.la (third Ceph mon node to maintain quorum when one of the storage nodes is down)

Raspberry Pi Model B ($52.28 USD, 5 W)


edge1.home.sjm.la (edge switch for storage network traffic)

D-Link DGS-1100-16 16-port Gigabit EasySmart Switch ($109.00, 12 W)


Total: $4383.28, 147 W

2178

Technology & Information / Re: New home network hardware

« on: March 09, 2014, 03:12:58 PM »

Intel Atom? That doesn't sound very open source.

Where the hell are the Raspberry Pies?

The Raspberry Pi would suck as a router. Just wait until I post my storage cluster plans.

2179

Technology & Information / New home network hardware

« on: March 09, 2014, 03:06:16 PM »

So, it's about time I spruced up my home network a little. This is going to be done piecemeal, as the amount of equipment I want to buy is plentiful enough that I won't be able to afford it all in one go. I need some place to track my current plans, and a thread seems like as good a place as any.

My infrastructure domain is sjm.la and my public-facing service domain is sjm.so, which is a bit of a pun on the way shared libraries work in Linux. All infrastructure hosts on my home network will therefore have names under home.sjm.la.


bdr1.home.sjm.la (border router)

Intel Atom D945GCLF2 board (given to me for free, 45 W)
2 GB of DDR2 RAM (also given to me for free)
Antec ISK110 case ($99.00, incl. 90 W power supply)
Kingston V300 60 GB SSD ($69.00, 2 W)
OpenBSD 5.4 ($0.00)

Subtotal: $168.00, 47 W


dsl1.home.sjm.la

ADSL2+ modem (TBC)


dist1.home.sjm.la (distribution switch)

D-Link DGS-1100-08P Gigabit PoE switch ($159.00, 8 W)


wifi1.home.sjm.la (WiFi access point)

TP-Link TL-WA901ND Access Point ($49.00, 3 W)


Total so far: $376.00, 58 W


That will suffice for now. I'm going to add some more detail on my planned storage cluster later, but this is the minimum necessary to reproduce my current functionality with the flexibility of a real UNIX-like router OS.

2180

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: On the notion of ban triggers but on not triggering bans

« on: March 09, 2014, 07:30:51 AM »

OK, let's try and put together the suggestions here and create some sort of consensus.

I also would like to add that we not punish someone for making an account so they can despute their ban.  I always thought the whole "you're banned for circumventing your ban in an attempt to appeal your ban" was silly.  So long as they don't post outside of S&C or PMs.

Agreed.

But now that I think about it, my mind drifts to EJ.  Banning him doesn't help yet he spent a lot of time venting in AR.  I wonder if banning is actually worth it.  Why not simply restrict them to AR as a first offense?  They can vent and get whatever issues they have out of their system while having the community there for reflection rather than being totally shunned.

Kind of like purgatory on the old site, really. I don't mind this idea, but EJ has calmed down recently, so let's save it until we have a guinea pig to use it on.

How about allowing a user to still be able to read the boards while banned, even though they can't post?  At the very least they should be able to keep up with conversations so they're caught up when they come back.  It's better than them coming back with the last memorable conversation in their mind being the one they got banned in.

I agree with this, certainly. Giving them a chance to see how threads progress without the disruptive behaviour they were banned for is a good idea.

Name ban + enforcing a more strict alt policy on banned users seems like a good combination to me.

I think that, within reason, alts should be treated separately. I mean, if they're operating under the radar and not breaking the rules we've won. That said, I wouldn't mind a clause about the rules being broader for users identified as alts. Basically so that users can't try to taunt us by skimming the rules and just generally being New Earth or TKwith their alts. Once you've been banned once it should be easier to get banned a second time.

Agreed on both counts. If the alts are behaving themselves, I see no reason to ban them just because their main was disruptive; in fact, not banning them sends the message that they are welcome here provided they are constructive. However, if an alt is engaging in the same behaviour that the main was banned for, there should be an immediate ban rather than a warning, as the main would already have been warned.

Speaking of New Earth, I should point out here that during my short, abortive time as a mod my one real success was in calming him down and I did so by being afraid to wield my bamhammer. Mediation is frequently a better tool than bamming and our official policy should reflect that.

I completely agree; banning should only be a last resort when all other attempts at correcting errant behaviour have failed.

I had no idea about of any of the issues you mentioned in this thread.  In light of this information, why would an IP ban even be on the table?

It seems like it's not anymore.

To summarise:

• Alts created for the purpose of disputing bans are acceptable, provided they are not used for general posting.
• Purgatory (restricting users to the spam forums) may be preferable to outright bans for repeat offenders.
• Bans should only restrict posting, not viewing.
• Alts should not be banned at the same time as their main, if they are not engaging in the same troublesome behaviour.
• Alts may be banned immediately following their main, if they are engaging in the same troublesome behaviour.
• Bans should generally be avoided in favour of other corrective measures.
• IP address bans should almost never be used; only in cases where a particular IP address is causing trouble using multiple accounts.

Does anyone disagree with those points, or have anything else to add?