[HN Gopher] I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
___________________________________________________________________
I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
Author : LarryPage
Score : 184 points
Date : 2022-07-15 17:29 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net)
| h2odragon wrote:
| turn off the error reporting so you get whats read rather than an
| error interrupt and watch the bitrot. Never did that in linux but
| it wouldn't surprise me if its a driver option.
| random_savv wrote:
| Interesting user name
| anaganisk wrote:
| Imagine a floppy disk based old server surviving "Hug of deaths"
| while the latest react based static website hosted on Kubernetes
| for infinite scalability on baremetal dies in like 5 sec.
| fny wrote:
| Imagine indeed. This has been suffocated already it seems.
| Images can't even finish loading.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| Images do not fully load but here I am 35 minutes after you
| and the website still responds. That's already better than
| many.
| anaganisk wrote:
| It stayed alive as long it could start going black carbon,
| much longer than others I think.
| [deleted]
| murukesh_s wrote:
| The blame would be on baremetal server. They would move to AWS
| with multi region EKS clusters and RDS with cross-region
| disaster recovery. And a multi-cloud strategy is also in
| place..
| anaganisk wrote:
| And edge caching on cloudflare or cloudfront.
| turdnagel wrote:
| Well, edge caching would almost certainly be enough with a
| decently high TTL. You don't need all that other junk :)
| UberFly wrote:
| I'm guessing the floppies are melting right about now.
| emiliog07 wrote:
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'd expect the vast majority of IO requests to be served from the
| kernel's IO cache (we're talking 30 * 1.44MBs here so just under
| 50MB, trivial for even an old computer to hold in RAM), thus I
| wouldn't be surprised for it to be very fast and reliable as long
| as he sticks to read-only workloads - those would never actually
| touch the floppies beyond the initial read.
| LarryPage wrote:
| I did watch -n 1 'sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' to
| try and get around it. I think it's working, because boy is it
| noisy lol
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'm used to referring to lots of IO as "noisy" or "chatty",
| but then I imagine sitting next to 30 floppy drives and that
| brings it to another level.
| voxadam wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCCXRerqaJI
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| This is the greatest thing that anyone has done with any
| computer hardware anywhere, ever. This is more impressive
| to me than the moon landing. :-)
| voxadam wrote:
| Make sure you check out his other videos including other
| compositions he's done.
|
| Star Wars theme: https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY
|
| I Wat to Break Free: https://youtu.be/lbd06i9B2wU
| tacker2000 wrote:
| The scanners!! This is incredible!
| reustle wrote:
| If we hit a lot of random sub folder URLs (that should all
| 404), would that trigger the webserver to check the drive to
| see if the file exists and skip the cache?
| jewel wrote:
| No. The cache is at the block layer, not the file/directory
| layer. So the filesystem will look up the directory
| structure, which will be cached.
| asveikau wrote:
| On top of the block layer cache there's also the namei
| cache for filename to inode lookups, I'm not sure if that
| covers a file not found case or just a success path, but it
| may apply here too.
| Vogtinator wrote:
| Yep, that's called a "negative dentry".
| bch wrote:
| Still backed by block layer cache for (hopefully) quick
| response regardless of outcome
| danachow wrote:
| What block layer cache?
| koverstreet wrote:
| Actually, no. There is no general block layer cache - the
| closest thing is the page cache, which is at the file
| level.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Would it be more fun to run a live cd webserver only? piece
| together an old computer, with an old live linux installation,
| and either run it unupdated or patched and carrying updates it
| can only apply w/o reboot?
| _joel wrote:
| A Knoppix 4 CTF doesn't sound too challenging, tbf mate
|
| edit: thinking about it, there's some good educational value,
| but maybe via vm than plopped on the interwebs :D
| bee_rider wrote:
| Do people do cyberpunk or sci-fi LARPs? An extravagantly
| unpatched server running on a raspberry pi or something
| like that would be a kind of fun prop.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| They do! http://cyberpunk.jackalope-larp.com/ is run both
| in-person and online at the same time and apparently has
| a pretty high production value.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| I (briefly) ran an IRC server on a Sega Dreamcast based on
| the same ideas
| lizardactivist wrote:
| I can't even imagine what defragmenting that file-system would
| sound like.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| The parcel tape holding bits together is just _chefs kiss_
| iasay wrote:
| I can hear that dying from here.
|
| Anyone want to try RAID0 on QIC tapes?
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| The main jpeg seems dead already, not Rendering on Firefox
| mobile.
| h2odragon wrote:
| gonna take some kernel hacking to stretch timeouts or a
| restricted access pattern to avoid seeking, I think.
| dpedu wrote:
| How much power do the floppy drives draw? I can't decide if it
| would be more or less than 30 period hard drives.
| fsiefken wrote:
| i'd be also interested in hosting a website on 1 floppy drive,
| including OS. https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-
| a-single-...
| la64710 wrote:
| 5.1/4 inch or 3.5 inch ones?
| Zachsa999 wrote:
| Site seems to be really slow currently.
| [deleted]
| tablespoon wrote:
| This looks like it's a page about a related project, and has a
| video of the RAID in action: https://hackaday.com/2022/06/30/its-
| raid-with-floppy-drives/
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| This is _awesome_. I already have some suggestions:
|
| - Put a bird^H^H ZFS on it
|
| - Switch to RAID10 (a stripe of mirrors), and go 2/3 floppys wide
| so you can have some redundancy in each mirror gropu
|
| - Get some Pis (or other SBCs) and hook those up and run Ceph...
| if this keeps going we'll have a SAN soon enough.
|
| - ZIP disks?[0]
|
| Also, I don't think I ever want to hear of the "hug of death" for
| any site ever again -- I don't think this site hosted on 30
| floppies was hugged to death.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
| tolstoshev wrote:
| The song's not bad!
| dcambie wrote:
| Interesting stats at http://totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net/server-
| status
| eimrine wrote:
| So fast website, is it possible to shrink it to one floppy for
| seeing some slowingness?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's RAID0. If the OP shrank it to one floppy, it would become
| faster and more reliable.
| eimrine wrote:
| RAID0 adds both speed and capacity.
| AnnikaL wrote:
| See also: his video about RAIDs of floppy drives
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8).
| dylan604 wrote:
| Were the "power my car" and "shingle my roof" bits funny? Is
| this the level of YT videos to get likes?
| LarryPage wrote:
| I just do whatever I want
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's fine, but being a social platform, I assume everyone
| is a caricature of themselves. Other creators have
| discussed here the near moronic poster/thumb images getting
| more clicks vs less overly dramatic versions. So at this
| point, I assume that the closer to a program that would fit
| in Idiocracy television programming is the ultimate goal to
| get those precious likes.
| LarryPage wrote:
| I know it's fine, because they're my videos and I can do
| whatever I want in them lol
| dylan604 wrote:
| okay, so you're not a caricature of yourself and it's
| really you
| LarryPage wrote:
| yes, correct!
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| project is awesome.
|
| Also-
|
| Tell me you're into Chiodos without telling me you're into
| Chiodos.
|
| Big ol dose of nostalgia listening to your old metalcore tracks.
| ISL wrote:
| This is amazing. Website exceeded the high expectations set by
| the title.
| hk1337 wrote:
| That has to be one noisy room.
| iasay wrote:
| Probably quieter than the DL360 I bought a few months ago and
| put on eBay after two hours :)
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Oh god, flashbacks to an early 2000s machine room absolutely
| full of the bastards.
|
| Thankfully, all entrance doors had an earplug dispenser...
| kstrauser wrote:
| Oh, is that the one with like 10 1" fans spinning at 8,000
| RPM, so that it sounds like a Harrier jet coming in for a
| landing?
| iasay wrote:
| That's a very accurate description!
| aldrich wrote:
| Haha, the good old DL360. That fan noise was loud. Let alone
| the spinning, whining 15k SCSI disks..
| aliqot wrote:
| pause on the audio doesnt work.
| deelowe wrote:
| Not anymore!
| mmh0000 wrote:
| I've corrected the title: "I was hosting a website on a RAID0 of
| 30 floppy drives -- now my house is on fire"
| [deleted]
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Yes, exactly. I am trying to get to the store for a few min
| already (from France) and I lost hope.
| throwaway742 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220715175852if_/http://totally...
| fny wrote:
| Also https://archive.ph/OzYfT
| Pakdef wrote:
| LoL is all I can think of
| MikeAshley178 wrote:
| Wonder how long until I can ruin it with Python and Requests.
|
| P.S I am not going to and I am drunk.
| game-of-throws wrote:
| You're playing with fire using RAID0. If I had data on 30 floppy
| drives, I'd want at least 20 of them to be parity drives.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Seems like the bitrot is kicking in already. The main JPEG
| appears to have bitflip errors:
| http://totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net/megafloppy.jpg
|
| This is what I get, when I download the full image and convert
| to PNG: https://i.imgur.com/JF4wtMg.png
|
| During the conversion (with imagemagick), I get these errors:
| convert: Corrupt JPEG data: premature end of data segment
| `megafloppy.jpg' @ warning/jpeg.c/JPEGWarningHandler/403.
| convert: Corrupt JPEG data: found marker 0x74 instead of RST1
| `megafloppy.jpg' @ warning/jpeg.c/JPEGWarningHandler/403.
| convert: Corrupt JPEG data: 206 extraneous bytes before marker
| 0xfb `megafloppy.jpg' @ warning/jpeg.c/JPEGWarningHandler/403.
| convert: Corrupt JPEG data: found marker 0xfb instead of RST2
| `megafloppy.jpg' @ warning/jpeg.c/JPEGWarningHandler/403.
| convert: Unsupported marker type 0xfb `megafloppy.jpg' @
| warning/jpeg.c/JPEGErrorHandler/345.
|
| Looking closer, all bytes between offset 0x115C00 and 0x11F800
| have been set to 0xf6, and all bytes from there until 0x11FC00
| have been set to 0.
|
| Bytes from 0x2EFC00 to 0x2F5C00 have been set to 0, followed by
| 0xf6's all the way until 0x2FFC00.
|
| I'd be curious to know what failure mode(s) conjured the 0xf6's
| into existence.
|
| Edit: Original version is here
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220715175852if_/http://totally...
| kop316 wrote:
| heh, that's even worse than when I saw it:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/Z2HwkwY.jpeg
| game-of-throws wrote:
| I managed to grab a (hopefully) uncorrupted version somehow.
| I'm putting it somewhere other than imgur so they don't
| recompress the image. MD5 d30fcc384a8e2de4fab3056bde42b00b.
| [EDIT: Removed dead link, use archive.org instead]
|
| > I'd be curious to know what failure mode(s) conjured the
| 0xf6's into existence.
|
| Today's fun fact: The MS-DOS `format` command fills the disk
| with 0xf6, not 0x00. Though this is linux running on Mac
| hardware, reading a disk that should have actual data, so
| maybe that isn't the reason.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Perhaps the read head seeked (sought?) to the wrong offset,
| causing empty blocks to be read.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| The link you gave is deleted.
| game-of-throws wrote:
| Thanks, edited. I guess they didn't like all the traffic.
| Luckily archive.org has a copy too.
| q1w2 wrote:
| hmm... is it possible to correct those errors? I have some
| old images with errors, and I've always wondered if it were
| possible to fix the individual corrupted bytes to restore at
| least the remainder of the photos.
| upwardbound wrote:
| Yes it's possible, the SpaceX subreddit community did that
| to recover imagery from one of the early rocket landings
| which was corrupted due to poor antenna alignment between
| the transmitter on the landing barge and the remote
| receiver.
| _joel wrote:
| Just quickly remove some drives and set the write protect
| slider on them, problem solved, no data loss
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Oh that write protect could prevent wear and tear!
| wahern wrote:
| A few years ago I finally bought a USB drive to read an old
| 3.5" floppy from the late '90s on which I had archived my
| e-mail messages before moving away to college. I completely
| forgot about write protection (as well as atime write-backs).
| I managed to read a surprising amount of data off of the
| disk, but I think less than if I had remembered to write-
| protect the disk before inserting it into the drive. The
| files were in mbox format, probably from Eudora, but possibly
| Pine. As is my habit, I first poked around with ls and less
| before copying the files over, and I'm pretty sure I ended up
| with more corruption than what I first saw with less.
|
| Oh well. The irony is that to this day I have a tick of idly
| running `sync` at the command prompt, which I developed
| dealing with floppy and hard disk corruption running early
| versions of Linux. A crash or (IIRC) even a simple reboot
| sometimes resulted in disk corruption preventing Linux from
| booting. Reinstalling Slackware from floppy disks took quite
| awhile on its own, especially if installing the X11 disk
| sets, but half the time at least one of the disks would be
| corrupted, requiring me to download a fresh copy (using
| Windows--I was dual booting) over my 2400 baud modem, and
| then restarting the install from scratch. I probably went
| through this procedure at least a half dozen times, or at
| least enough to develop the tick. It was the best of times,
| it was the worst of times.... =)
| kjellsbells wrote:
| So rare to see ppl writing about sync.
|
| sync;sync;halt was once a legit way to shut down ;)
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Don't forget to park the hard drive heads!
| aldrich wrote:
| Or maybe three times sync;sync;sync just to make sure :)
| znpy wrote:
| I know of a company whose sysadmins still put
| sync;sync;sync in the scripts they deploy on customers'
| machines... just because "you never know".
| muhammadusman wrote:
| that's the point, RAID0 is for speed only
| Maursault wrote:
| > RAID0 is for speed only
|
| In this case, the theoretical maximum bandwidth is 24M _Bit_
| /s.
|
| The problem is the old, slow usb bottleneck. I'm not sure how
| much faster, probably hundreds of bps rather than under 24,
| but a faster RAID0 rig would be to instead have 30x Mac G4
| Digital Audios connected via gigabit switch, and share then
| RAID0 the internal floppies. It would also have whatever
| advantage running an XGrid PPC cluster on Tiger might
| provide. These boxes also ran PPC Ubuntu; no doubt Linux
| would eek out a dozen or so more bps, plus beowulf.
| VLM wrote:
| I don't know about that BW claim. Back when mp3 was new and
| computers usually had floppy drives I did the obvious and
| mp3 bitrates above 64K or so tended to stutter and
| significantly below 64K did not stutter.
|
| Something like voice encoded at 32K sounded at least as
| good as a phone and played back off a 1.44 floppy and IIRC
| that was about the best that could be done.
|
| You will probably be surprised how long an audio recording
| can be, if its voice at a low rate on one floppy. If you go
| variable bit rate and silence detection I subjectively
| remember "ten minutes" was quite reasonable on a 1.44 disk.
|
| Extrapolating from historical experience, thirty or so in
| parallel should push over half a meg/sec quite reliably.
|
| If you record speech onto a floppy drive off a cheap mic
| you'll record the sound of the floppy in the recording,
| which is funny to me.
|
| I wish I still had those files. Useless, of course, but
| would be funny.
| ryanmarr wrote:
| I've got a Power Mac G5 sitting right beside me if someone else
| wants to buy it and get into this G5 floppy website business.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Me too. We could start a webring! I just need about 27 more USB
| floppy drives.
| millzlane wrote:
| But where will you put are the Warez?
| lostlogin wrote:
| That's more the Zip drive era isn't it?
| anaganisk wrote:
| Yo, are you serious about that? This feels so interesting.
| layer8 wrote:
| Let's coordinate our web accesses so that it sounds like
| Floppotron playing the Imperial March.
| shortformblog wrote:
| Sean rules and this may be his craziest experiment yet. That's
| all.
| mikedelago wrote:
| There's an accompanying video as well:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8
| rovr138 wrote:
| I want to see this hosted from them
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| For my next trick, a website hosted on a RAID0 Array of 60 RAM
| Disks.
| zepearl wrote:
| We need details - what about ECC yes/no + un/buffered + raid
| tech (mdadm/zfs/hardware X/...)?
|
| Nothing is simple :D
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-15 23:00 UTC)