[HN Gopher] Most 16-year-olds don't have servers in their rooms
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Most 16-year-olds don't have servers in their rooms
Author : varun_ch
Score : 344 points
Date : 2023-12-20 16:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (varun.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (varun.ch)
| nullindividual wrote:
| Good for you! I get a feeling that there are fewer and fewer
| individuals learning the basics (or sometimes not-so-basic) of
| hardware and operating systems. It is invaluable knowledge, even
| when working with PaaS. For instance, having experience with IIS
| since NT4 and Apache since the 1.x days is invaluable in
| diagnosing Azure Web Sites.
| ksec wrote:
| Most dont even have a PC that they assemble themselves. They
| have very little idea of the internals. Nor do they follow and
| read enough about hardware news and articles. These PC could be
| used as Server. While not professional rack based ones, but you
| will still need config them.
|
| A lot of these basic understanding and fundamental learning
| experience is gone. We are not far from Front End developers
| that dont understanding anything about HTML and CSS but only
| React.
| mplewis wrote:
| We hear this every day on this website and it's just not
| true. Making computers accessible to people makes it _more
| likely_ that they 'll get into hardware enthusiasm and
| assembling a desktop from parts.
| al_borland wrote:
| Even people actively in the industry don't know. About 10 years
| ago I was working in a datacenter and one of the severs needed
| some hardware replaced (new ram or something). The guy who ran
| the team that used the server (who sat maybe 50 yards from the
| server room for many years), asked if he could watch me do the
| replacement. He had never seen the inside of a server before
| and was curious what it was like. This blew my mind. I didn't
| get how he could be so close to it for so long and never see
| it. He made it sound like he never even saw the inside of a
| home PC as well.
|
| At the time it wasn't like there was a lot of protocols in
| place. He could have walked up to one of a dozen people and
| asked for a tour on any given day and gotten it, no questions
| asked. Not to mention random servers sitting around the cube
| farm for whatever reason. He just never thought about it before
| that day.
| yardie wrote:
| I provision servers for a living and usually the only times
| they get physically touched are when we rack them and the 2nd
| and last time is when we unrack them. Occasionally, one will
| have a hardware replacement. But for the most part a server
| runs continuously for 3-5 years. Even a memory upgrade
| involves unbundling so much cable (power, network, storage,
| KVM) that it's easier to rack a new one with more memory.
|
| I'm not surprised your team leader, if of a certain age,
| hasn't seen the inside of a modern server. We push our
| datacenters further and further out into the countryside. My
| annual trip to our DC was a 4 hour drive and even then it was
| just to do annual inventory.
| imetatroll wrote:
| Very cool to see! I find it interesting that being young you
| didn't automatically gravitate towards Linux. It is IMHO much
| more interesting to use than windows, is free in a variety of
| ways, and gives you the power to customize as much as you desire.
| You did join the light side after all however so all's well that
| ends well :)
| qup wrote:
| gkrellm might have single handedly brought me to Linux. So much
| bling
| imetatroll wrote:
| As for taking your servers with you. You don't have to! Use
| tailscale (or wireguard). Just downgrade your hardware a bit
| beforehand perhaps in order to decrease burden.
| more_corn wrote:
| If you ask your university nicely they may provide rack space for
| you.
|
| Universities love when students take initiative and
| build/maintain servers. My university had a student apprentice
| program where students provided technical expertise to
| departments as a work study program. And my colleague in the
| program had a deal with the CS department where they hosted his
| game server for him. Since he was learning valuable server
| administration skills and working with other students they
| approved it.
|
| It's an easier sell if you ask to put it in the DMZ and if
| there's some benefit for other students.
| mattl wrote:
| Few 16 year olds are at university?
| sceadu wrote:
| He makes a comment about graduating and moving to university
| in the blog post.
| mattl wrote:
| I don't know about Switzerland but that's at least a few
| years away?
| tehbeard wrote:
| Then it just shows they've got better planning timescales
| than most clients I deal with.. (so much last minute
| bullshit right now with Christmas next week...)
| mattl wrote:
| Ugh. Tell me about it.
| varun_ch wrote:
| I'm in the graduating class of 2025, which is closer than
| it appears.
| nh2 wrote:
| If you'd like to meet some likeminded people reasonably-
| nearby, feel invited to the Zurich Nix meetup [1] or the
| largest Haskell conference [2]!
|
| [1]: https://www.meetup.com/nix-zurich/
|
| [2]: https://zfoh.ch/zurihac2024/
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In years past if you knew someone it might have been easy to
| get a server plugged in and on the network with a public IP at
| a university. Maybe in an office or lab somewhere on campus.
| Nobody would likely know, or care to ask any questions.
|
| Today, they are more and more locked down, everything is run by
| "enterprise" IT, you need to submit forms and get approvals for
| every new device with a public IP address, etc. Anything
| unknown that pops up on the network will be automatically
| blocked until they know what it is and who is responsible for
| it.
| abrookewood wrote:
| Nope, my son has them (5 in total) stashed under the stairs where
| they still manage to generate enough heat & noise to make me
| question the placement. Still, pretty chuffed that he's managed
| to do it all himself.
| chupapimunyenyo wrote:
| Nope what? What do you disagree with?
| rstat1 wrote:
| Probably referring to the title.
|
| "Nope most 16yr olds do not in fact have servers in their
| room"
|
| Or at least that's how I read it.
| jameshart wrote:
| Actually looks like a 'nope' of agreement.
|
| - Most 16 year olds don't have servers in their room
|
| - No indeed, some have them in the cupboard under the stairs
|
| Of course, some 16 year-olds, like Harry Potter, have their
| room _in_ the cupboard under the stairs, so the logic doesn
| 't follow implicitly.
| qup wrote:
| It follows, that's just a third category which agrees and
| can be prefixed with 'nope'
| patrakov wrote:
| Please note that hosting a publicly accessible server in your
| room at home is specifically prohibited by some employers in
| heavily regulated industries, and if found, this may result in a
| large fine (enough to cover the company security re-audit cost)
| and termination. They even prohibit having a public IP on the
| router, having IPv6 support, having firmware other than the
| manufacturer-supplied one, and even having access to the router
| (i.e., it's the manufacturer and the ISP who should be
| responsible for security updates, for ensuring that there is
| absolutely no way for attackers to enter the home network by
| means of routing, and for the fact that you cannot screw that
| up).
|
| Having a server for your own use from within the home network is
| fine.
| Gelob wrote:
| What are you talking about
| hooverd wrote:
| Which industries?
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Won't someone think of the employers.
| dharmab wrote:
| I work for an employer subject to ITAR and have never heard of
| this requirement.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| I don't know about the prohibited part but that's exactly how
| LinkedIn got hacked.
|
| See https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/86/ for details.
| falqun wrote:
| Could you give a hint to the employer or the industries you
| talk about? Surely if an employer wants to very very securely
| lock down the workspace they would just tell employees to come
| to office and design that like a fortress, right? I mean I know
| companies that have metal condensed onto the windows to
| prohibit mobile reception, but why regulate your home like
| that?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I've never heard of this in financial services or network
| infrastructure. It doesn't even sound sensical; if your
| employer wants a secure LAN, they need to provide a device that
| treats your home network as a WAN (sort of like a travel
| router), and your work computer should be configured to only
| connect to that device. Otherwise you're probably on a network
| with e.g. TVs, which are definitely malicious.
| patrakov wrote:
| I never said that this makes sense or that it was enforceable
| - yet this is what you get when your company is infected by
| checklist-based compliance people and if an important
| customer regularly sends these checklists as a condition of
| continuing the contract.
|
| I am not permitted to name this former employer because this
| would allow hackers to create targeted phishing emails and
| social engineering attacks against other people working
| there.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Compliance with what? I've never heard of this as part of
| FedRAMP, PCI, SOC2, or FINRA requirements. Another user
| hasn't heard of it in an ITAR restricted context. I don't
| see how you could ever pass an audit if employees' personal
| devices are in-scope. You could never check all of the
| other boxes you need.
|
| The router public IP requirement in particular is an
| impossible one. You don't control what address your ISP
| gives you. No checklist is going to have an item for some
| random unaffiliated third party. They might be stupid, but
| not that stupid.
| patrakov wrote:
| I have never asked where these requirements come from.
| Possibly, they are just the whims of that customer. To
| me, they seem to be written as a windy way to require
| connecting through a mobile hotspot managed by the
| operator.
| icedchai wrote:
| 1) I somehow doubt this is true. 2) If it was, it would not be
| possible to enforce. People are adding and removing stuff on
| their home network all the time. What if your roommate's
| machine gets compromised? 3) Wouldn't it be simpler for them to
| send out a VPN appliance and treat the home network as
| untrusted?
| danans wrote:
| Organizations should treat all physical networks, including the
| ones in their own offices, as untrusted. If they are trusting
| an internal network these days, they are doing something wrong.
| jve wrote:
| Others already expressed surprise on what you wrote and none
| has confirmed...
|
| But here is some fun fact: when I was working at poultry plant
| (well, chickens laid eggs) I had a clause within contract that
| I cannot have my own chickens... I guess because of increased
| risk to introduce diseases for the plant chickens?!
| starkparker wrote:
| I love seeing the server on an Ikea table next to a paragraph
| about how expensive racks are. Did you know about Lack Rack?
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230131031301/https://wiki.eth0...
| roeles wrote:
| So that's what it's called! Thanks!
| tehbeard wrote:
| Key point from that link; IKEA's swapped the materials round
| to use a lot more of that honeycombed hollow stuff, which
| makes it less than ideal for drilling or holding heavy
| equipment.
| varun_ch wrote:
| I do! I just haven't had the time to measure everything and
| find the right screws and table.
| igetspam wrote:
| Careful, once you go down that IKEA hacking rabbit hole, it
| can be hard to stop buying cheap furniture.
|
| https://ikeahackers.net
|
| :)
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| It's always interesting seeing people like this online. I didn't
| start programming until I was 15, and didn't know how to deploy
| anything for real users until many years later. At 13, I don't
| think I knew how to do anything useful.
| ZainRiz wrote:
| +1. At 22, working as a full time software engineer at a tech
| company, I still didn't think I knew how to do anything useful
| treesciencebot wrote:
| Something that miss is, unless you need tons of IO (in the form
| of SAS/SATA storage, or old generation PCIe cards), avoiding
| these huge, noisy and power hungry servers are a lot simpler than
| people may think. Mini/Micro form factor OEM PCs on the same
| price point generally come with much newer generation of hardware
| (instead of a 3rd gen i7, you might get a 8th gen i5) and overall
| performance is so much better. It's also so much easier to host
| and maintain (just plug it near your ISP modem, and forget about
| it).
| Dwedit wrote:
| Had an Intel Motherboard + Atom CPU combo as a File Server
| once, but eventually had to upgrade it because Atom chips
| really suck. Eventually want to a Skylake Pentium, which
| performs much better.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >and forget about it
|
| This is exactly what I didn't want when I was 16. I did have a
| server too, but in the HP ML form factor (less noise than the
| pizza boxes). Also, ECC is kind of important, and a real HW
| raid is a nice learning expierience.
| varun_ch wrote:
| Absolutely. I think that's the practical solution I'll do when
| I move out. Until then, it's definitely not nearly as fun
| though!!
| justinclift wrote:
| When you do head to uni, maybe see if there's a nearby place
| which can co-locate your servers?
|
| Stuff like this, though "near the uni" would make it easier
| to access if/when the hardware needs a bit of adjustment. :)
|
| * https://www.hetzner.com/colocation
|
| Note that co-location pricing can be all over the place (from
| low to incredibly high), so don't get discouraged too early.
|
| This website _might_ be useful too, as it seems to show data
| centers in various countries.
|
| * https://www.datacentermap.com/switzerland/
|
| Might be useful for putting together a list of places to
| investigate. :)
| NGRhodes wrote:
| I've got an old Skylake HP elite SFF machine. Without
| modification it can hold two 3.5in drives and a single 2.5in
| drive. Also with great cooling design (cowling to direct heat
| from the cou straight out of the back) and an efficient PSU (80
| plus platinum), it makes a great value always-on machine.
| mortos wrote:
| I was looking at running OpnSense for my router and almost used
| my old Skylake computer. Instead I bought a $100 fanless Intel
| N100 micro computer that sips 7w and has about the same
| performance. The electricity savings will pay for itself. And
| the i5-6600k wasn't even that power hungry.
| hcfman wrote:
| Excellent! You are off to a good start.
|
| You will likely find very few non-16 year olds doing that either.
| Locally I mean. I'm sure that at least five in this site do :-)
| ykl wrote:
| This is super cool; I wish I had this level of initiative when I
| was 16. I'm sure you have a bright career ahead of you!
| chpatrick wrote:
| If you don't want a super noisy server in your room you can rent
| one from Hetzner for cheap. (Cheapest one currently at 34 euro a
| month https://www.hetzner.com/sb)
| misnome wrote:
| What teenager has EUR400/year to spent on virtual servers?
| chpatrick wrote:
| One who can afford to buy the one in the article.
| misnome wrote:
| Based on what? They bought a cheap used server off of eBay?
| That doesn't disappear if you stop paying a monthly fee?
| chpatrick wrote:
| > In May 2022, I finalized the crazy decision to get a
| real rack-mounted server - I got a great deal on used
| drives (3x3TB), RAM (128GB of DDR3), and relatively
| powerful (read: power-hungry) CPUs (2xE5-2690) in a Dell
| PowerEdge R720XD, which I paid for with some bug bounty
| money I saved up.
|
| Plus electricity/internet costs, replacing broken drives,
| etc etc. You can get a lot of rental time out of that.
| midasuni wrote:
| One that has EUR400 a year or more to spend on powering a
| 120W server 24/7
| Symbiote wrote:
| Parents pay for that, perhaps without realising.
| lmm wrote:
| Assuming it really was drawing 120W, that's about 1000kWh
| for the year, so EUR300 at this year's unusually high
| prices, EUR150 in a more typical year, and probably half of
| that will be offset by reduced heating costs.
| taskforcegemini wrote:
| if all that you want is a "server", you might as well get a
| vServer for less than 5EUR
| chpatrick wrote:
| This is a real dedicated server though, it's just sitting in
| Germany instead of your house.
| PeterisP wrote:
| What $300+ worth difference does it being dedicated make to
| the 16-year old ?
| derelicta wrote:
| Ahah I wonder how much of the EFZ you already completed just by
| doing all those projects
| shishcat wrote:
| I'm a 16 year old with a small homelab too :)
|
| I used to have all of my services on cloud but since I got a
| 1G/1G home network and I found businesses decommissioning
| hardware and deals on local charity shops which source hardware
| from the landfill and give profits to charity missions, I decided
| to give it a go and try administering my own phisical servers.
| Currently running proxmox on 2 machines with one NAS and 14
| spinning disks, with some Minecraft servers, personal programming
| projects, vulnerability scanners, telegram bots, VPSes for
| friends, android and MacOS building VMs, storage, some ML school
| projects with the recently added 1050ti, and hosting the
| infrastructure for my school CTF competition.
|
| (Italy btw)
| daniel-s wrote:
| This is the really cool thing about the internet. When
| otherwise would these 2 16 year olds have found each other?
|
| They would otherwise have had to go to the same high school.
| midasuni wrote:
| Who pays the electric bill? Sounds like it's in the 50-100USD a
| month range for those two servers.
| shishcat wrote:
| 60EUR a month (tplink smart plug, calculated on the cost per
| kwh and other taxes). I try to pay most of it myself with
| money from side projects
| burnished wrote:
| Good on you and all but I wanted to note that its weird how
| persistently people are focusing on the powerbill. It is a
| drop in the bucket for many households monthly bills and
| very cheap as hobbies go. I think my mother would have
| killed for that deal.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| He's a 16 years old doing a very productive activity, I'd
| expect the parents to happily pay for it, I'd argue that if
| someone's son is interested in learn ing and the energy bill
| is obstacle to wait before to make kids, parents should feel
| an obligation to fuel their kids passions
| sodality2 wrote:
| As a former 16-year old, very grateful for my parents for
| doing exactly this to support my passions :)
| jorvi wrote:
| At EUR60 a month, that is EUR720 a year.
|
| OP indicated elsewhere here that they're trying to cover
| some of the costs with side projects, but EUR720 anually is
| a big bill to foot for less affluent parents.
| burnished wrote:
| Eh, power bill is the best one for an increase to appear
| on, way more wiggle room before anything important is
| shut off.
|
| Plus if we're talking about being poor it has two
| important benefits 1) excellent hours occupied to dollar
| spent ratio 2) engrossing hobbies typically mean they
| aren't out there rattling around stirring up trouble
| (which can get expensive in a hurry)
| xur17 wrote:
| As a former 16 year old, I distinctively remember having to
| negotiate to be allowed to run a computer 24/7 as a server.
| Part of my argument was calculating the cost to run the
| server ($10 / month for a 100 watt server at 0.10 / kwh
| running 24/7, a rough figure I use when referencing
| electricity costs to this day).
| qup wrote:
| I had to submit an essay to my father, at 16, about why I
| should be allowed to use a computer more than an hour per
| day.
|
| The essay won, but my father began talking about me while
| I was at the computer, saying I was a zombie who wasn't
| part of the family anymore.
|
| I was learning to code. I built a bunch of websites, and
| some projects and schemes that earned me fairly serious
| money in high school. I learned VB6, html, a little perl,
| and php, on my own, with no mentor, and an active booing.
|
| I'm not sure my dad has ever seen or visited a website
| I've built (dozens, maybe over 100). I even have bespoke
| code deployed right now, serving him, that he does not
| know exists.
|
| I still don't know why he tried to stand in my way all
| the time. I often think about where I'd be if I had an
| active supporter, like many kids have.
| norir wrote:
| I can't speak for your father of course, but I do think
| he likely had a valid concern that he may not have
| effectively communicated that all of this time with the
| computer was directly at the expense of time spent with
| the family. He may have felt hurt that you seemed to
| prefer the company of a machine to his and the rest of
| your family. He and you may also have very different
| conceptions of what a successful/happy life might look
| like. I'm not saying he's right, but from the outside I
| can imagine why he might not have felt supportive and
| also why you might feel resentful for the lack of
| support.
|
| Have you directly asked him why he wasn't supportive?
| Have you been open to his perspective or just assume that
| you're right and he's wrong? It's easy for us programmer
| types to try and simulate the mind states of others to
| avoid difficult conversations (speaking for myself of
| course).
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I still don't know why he tried to stand in my way all
| the time"
|
| Maybe he did not try to stand in your way, but was simply
| worried:
|
| "saying I was a zombie who wasn't part of the family
| anymore."
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| > I still don't know why he tried to stand in my way all
| the time. I often think about where I'd be if I had an
| active supporter, like many kids have.
|
| He was probably concerned about your familiar
| relationships. All relationships have an element of
| reciprocity. Plus he probably just missed you.
|
| In your situation it sounds like he could have benefited
| by being a bit more curious and accepting.
|
| IMHO as a parent rejecting the authencity of a child
| cancels out all the loving things you do because then you
| are not loving the child. You are loving an imaginary
| version of the child that only exists in your own head.
| rasse wrote:
| It's quite normal for parents to pay for their children's
| hobbies.
| comprev wrote:
| Your parents are probably footing a large electricity bill for
| this running hardware unless there is a revenue stream for your
| services? Either way, hats off to your folks for supporting
| your interest.
| shishcat wrote:
| I know, my smart plug reports around 60EUR a month of costs.
| Most of it comes from the massive amount of hard drives, I
| try to pay most of it myself with money from side projects.
| Anyway, I couldn't find rentable dedicated servers with this
| much storage for less than 50EUR a month, the upfront costs
| of new, energy efficient and powerful hardware is too much,
| and I truly enjoy running these servers myself.
|
| About the noise, my room has a small mechanical room and
| that's where the servers are located, the noise can't be
| heard from the rest of the room.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| IMHO it's a good way to get your parents to pay for your
| hosting costs without having to beg :)
|
| I was in a similar situation regarding storage. I ended up
| having to upgrade the drives for fewer bigger ones but
| there are other ways to reduce power consumption like
| putting your storage server on a timer and turning on WoL
| so that you can wake it up out of those hours if you need
| to. Obviously this is not possible if you are serving files
| to other users 24/7.
| varun_ch wrote:
| That is so cool! I've also been thinking of adding an old
| graphics card somewhere to support some ML stuff too - I just
| have to figure out how :)
| arnavpraneet wrote:
| >businesses decommissioning hardware been looking for this for
| years but never found them in my country (India). Been a 16
| year old with a homelab once, now older but no business
| hardware yet
| dalore wrote:
| When I was 16 I started an ISP in my bedroom. I had an 8 port
| octo serial cable into a computer for people to dial into, and an
| ISDN line going out. It's how I learned linux. Setup SMTP
| mailservers etc.
| 20after4 wrote:
| That's a pretty dope setup. I was running a web hosting company
| at that age (and likely near the same time period? late 1990s
| into the early 2000s). Couldn't have done the ISP thing because
| not even ISDN was available in my area.
| tonfreed wrote:
| 16 year old me would be super jealous. Awesome work, and I hope
| you keep flying high
| tombert wrote:
| I wasn't 16 when I discovered used rack mounted servers, but I
| was pretty young (21 I think?).
|
| I had a miserable job paying near-subsistance wages in 2012
| (about $30,000/year, no health insurance, Dallas TX). I needed
| something a bit more powerful than my laptop to do some
| experiments with video encoding, but I couldn't afford a "fast"
| computer at the time, at least not fast enough to do what I
| wanted. It didn't help that I was particularly bad at saving
| money until I was about 25.
|
| On a whim, I went on Craigslist and just looked up different ways
| of phrasing "fast cheap computer", and eventually stumbled upon
| "server". Upon doing so, I found that you could buy dated, but
| still useful rack mounted servers for basically nothing; in my
| case a seller was selling two rack mounted Dell servers, 16 cores
| each, 32GB of RAM, for about $250. I was just barely able to
| swing that, so I drove over, picked it up, and more or less
| defined the direction of my career for the next twelve years.
| bluedino wrote:
| Was there any reason you didn't use two 8-core desktops, for
| example?
| dannyw wrote:
| 1. Good luck buying 8-core desktops for $125 ea.
|
| 2. It's not easy to parallelise video rendering (not just
| encoding) across two machines.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| How about $114 for a workstation?
|
| https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=z440+worksta
| t... (sorry for the long URL, it was necessary)
|
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=z440+hp+workstation&s=price-
| asc-r...
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Well they did mention this was in 2012
| tombert wrote:
| In that particular time, I couldn't find any kind of
| computers for cheap that had those parameters. Servers were
| cheap and easy as long as I wore headphones and was vigilant
| about turning them off when I wasn't using them.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Rack mount servers have hidden costs. Sitting next to what
| sounds like a swarm of drones for one. Enterprise pricing for
| replacement parts is the other.
|
| (Dells have worked out for me ok, but not without having to
| replace backplanes and other parts immediately.)
| RecycledEle wrote:
| Workstations are (to me, magic) computers that use server
| processors and server RAM in kind of normal PC cases.
|
| Check out HP z440 and z840 systems on eBay (fleabay?) and
| Amazon.
| organsnyder wrote:
| All my recent additions to my homelab have been Dell
| Poweredge SFP systems. Businesses use them for a few years
| and then upgrading, so they're always available. I do make
| sure to get ones that have a PCIe slot so I can add a
| 10gbps card.
| tombert wrote:
| Counting my blessings, but I never had to replace any parts
| on them. They used boring SATA drives, which I had a few
| spares of even at the time.
|
| The bigger issues were the noise and the heat and power
| consumption. Not only did they take upwards of a kilowatt of
| power each, but being Texas I also had to take into the
| account the increased cost of air conditioning.
|
| I was only bitten by that one month where my power bill was
| like $150 more than usual, and from that point on I was
| vigilant about turning the servers off between uses.
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| >Sitting next to what sounds like a swarm of drones for one.
|
| When I was in high school I (for reasons I can't really
| remember) ended up being given a dual P3 rack server. I ran
| that as my primary machine for 2 years. We called it 'the
| Hurricane'.
| teddyh wrote:
| I stopped considering Dell servers when they started
| _requiring_ Dell branded hard drives in their newer server
| models.
| bombcar wrote:
| Old enterprise hardware was a godsend in college, where
| airconditioning and power was included in room and board.
|
| And since we were in the old dorms, nobody cared, even when
| one room was running A/C in the middle of (admittedly mild)
| winter ...
| alberth wrote:
| Raspberry Pi
|
| I'm surprised no one has mentioned Raspberry Pi.
|
| You get a decently powerful compute node, no noise, tiny
| footprint, for ~$100.
|
| https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/
| glimshe wrote:
| Beelinks on Amazon have better cost-benefit unless you use the
| RPis without accessories.
| Yusefmosiah wrote:
| Great work! What's your social media platform? Curious about your
| tech stack -- and what content/interest/community you're serving.
| varun_ch wrote:
| Thank you! The social media platform is a Twitter-like website
| for my friends (roughly 3000 of them registered, but smaller
| set of daily active users) that I started building in 2020. I
| made it to learn new technologies, so I've rewritten parts of
| it from scratch a few times. It's got a a SvelteKit/NuxtJS 2
| frontend (in the middle of a long rewrite) with a seperate
| ExpressJS API (which others have used to make their own
| clients, like an Android app!) that's spun off of an older
| iteration of the site where the frontend was coupled as
| templated HTML.
|
| I used MongoDB from the start, but I'm beginning to regret that
| - It's getting hard to maintain relational consistency and
| ensure all the data going in the DB matches the same shape as
| the site scales. Maybe it's time to migrate to Postgres.
|
| I mix up a few things from the rest of the world for my site -
| comments are nested like Reddit/HN, and posts/comments are rich
| text limited HTML like a blog. There's a really minimal
| algorithm that's relatively hard to mess with: chronological
| feed from people you follow, and a seperate Explore page with
| top users and trending posts (based on the recent likes)
|
| Profiles have seperate 'walls' from posts so they basically
| have little comment sections for people to use.
|
| The new site also has profile customization so people can
| change the accent colour that their posts and profiles appear
| as in other people's feeds, and there's little widgets to
| customize profile 'Sidebars'.
|
| It's nice to have a little quiet place seperate from the rest
| of the world, with its own ecosystem of clients, tools, bots,
| etc. (actually this year somebody made a Spotify Wrapped style
| recap website using the API!).
| danparsonson wrote:
| I have to say, this would be an impressive set of
| achievements for someone much older - great work and glad
| you're obviously having so much fun with it all!
| varun_ch wrote:
| Thank you!
| SunghoYahng wrote:
| How did you acquire so much knowledge in such a short time? Can
| you share your process with me?
| danparsonson wrote:
| Never underestimate the value of motivated experimentation.
|
| 1) Set a goal (e.g. host a Minecraft server for your friends)
|
| 2) Spend all your free time trying to achieve it
|
| 3) Go to 1)
| TrackerFF wrote:
| It says (on his website) that he started coding at the age of
| 7, so I guess he's had at least 9 years of mixed IT experience.
|
| But learning the basics of setting up a server isn't that hard.
| One of my first jobs involved a lot of similar work, and I had
| never touched a server in my life - purely a coder prior to
| that. Literally my first task was to go down to the server
| room, install a new server, and install Ubuntu server on it,
| and set up the server. Took me a week to get that done.
| 1116574 wrote:
| Static IPv4 is very important for getting into networking. Out of
| my friends, one had a free semi-static IPv4 (rotated once a year
| iirc), now he has the best paying job in devops. Another one had
| a cheap surcharge to get it, also turned into a job after few
| years. My other friend had (and still has) a cg-Nat, so never got
| into any deep IT stuff, other then PC building.
|
| You are very knowledgeable (for your coding and bug bounties) and
| very lucky (for the static ip, as well as understanding parents
| lol)!
| TheFuzzball wrote:
| 100%. When I was a similar age to OP and getting into web
| development it was the coolest thing in the world that I could
| map a port on my router and type in my public IP address at a
| friend's house and the website that I wrote would appear.
|
| If I did the same thing now there's a good chance I'm behind
| CG-NAT and it won't work at all, and a 100% chance that my
| public IP won't be the same in 2 months.
|
| We've really broken the internet. Between this and the average
| kid using a locked-down tablet the barrier to entry is higher
| than ever.
| jamespo wrote:
| My ISP is supposed to be moving users whose contract rollover
| to CGNAT.
|
| This is why IPv6 needs to be available everywhere, including
| on mobile.
| sgerenser wrote:
| I dunno, I don't really feel like having to use a service
| like dyndns or one of the dozens of clones is that big of a
| hurdle, is it? I recall using one of these services when I
| was in college (off-campus apartment with cable internet)
| back in the early 2000s.
| petronio wrote:
| For CG-NAT you don't actually get any inbound ports, so
| dynamic DNS won't help you.
|
| That being said, I know some ISPs over here that will block
| standard ports inbound beyond SMTP when you're not behind
| CG-NAT. I can imagine that leading to some who are just
| starting giving up when they've followed all the
| instructions to get HTTP on port 80 working and it still
| doesn't work without explanation.
| sgerenser wrote:
| OK, fair point. Forgot about CG-NAT, but dyndns still
| meant I was able to access stuff remotely despite not
| having a static IP.
| shooker435 wrote:
| Let me know if you're ever interested in a paid internship,
| Varun! Very impressive work putting this all together.
| mynameisnoone wrote:
| Congrats! At 16, I only had a 486DX2-66 with a 28.8K modem and a
| UPS.
|
| For other teenagers and teenagers-in-spirit to accomplish this
| feat:
|
| - Search for used enterprise servers on eBay. HP, Lenovo, Dell,
| and Supermicro are the typical brands to choose from.
|
| - Before purchase, find the specification docs, drivers, and
| firmware on the specific model to be sure it's something that's
| complete and usable, or can be completed for reasonable $$.
|
| - If you plan on running XenServer or VMware ESXi to then run
| multiple virtual machines on it, make sure the hardware is
| compatible by checking the OS hardware compatibility list (HCL)
| before buying it.
|
| - Avoid 1U servers because they're louder than 2U+ designs due to
| having to use shorter, smaller fans that spin very fast.
|
| - Make sure the CPU is at least as fast as a computer you own, or
| it might be a very expensive doorstop or an oversized "Raspberry
| PI": https://www.cpubenchmark.net
|
| - There is a gotcha with Dell, Lenovo, and HP servers using AMD
| CPUs where they are vendor locked. The plus side is sometimes
| sellers offer locked CPUs cheap enough that it makes sense.
|
| - ECC RAM. Friends don't let friends drive non-ECC RAM.
| https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html
|
| - SSD. Because spinning rust is for storage, not the OS.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110831080738/http://buyafuckin...
|
| - Try to get something with lights-out remote management (iLO or
| iDRAC) if it's already licensed.
|
| - When received, it's probably going to be dirty and have some
| scratches. Open it up and clean it with compressed air outside.
|
| - Bonus points: Convince the parental unit(s) to put a 19" patch
| panel and half rack in the garage. :]
| BeefWellington wrote:
| All of this advice is merely nice-to-have. You can easily just
| use an old desktop or laptop to do the same.
|
| I've homelabbed for a long time and have rackmounted systems
| full of old desktop parts, rather than buying or seeking out
| used server hardware. It just isn't required.
|
| ECC RAM? Nah. It's useful if you can find it cheap and your CPU
| supports it but it's overstated as a problem IME.
|
| I do agree you should buy 2U or even 3/4U equipment, if only so
| you can mount much larger (and thus quieter) fans.
| skydhash wrote:
| My file server is a 2011 mac mini, I attached two HDDs (5TB
| and 8TB) then installed services like Jellyfin and Gitea.
| varun_ch wrote:
| Thank you! Those are all really good tips. I heard stuff
| similar to some of them getting started myself, and I wish I
| heard the rest too. :)
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I started this way too, but many decades before. I wonder if OP
| found the R720 idrac "hack" on my blog! Kudos fella, you're just
| scratching the surface of the fun to be had. Bring a towel!
| varun_ch wrote:
| Thanks! I found the command here:
| https://blog.filegarden.net/2020/10/06/reduce-the-fan-noise-...
|
| Is that your blog?
| rasse wrote:
| Fantastic! I actually used your Quickz in a medical conference a
| month ago. Thanks for building that!
| varun_ch wrote:
| Thank you, that's really cool. I hope it worked well!
| yieldcrv wrote:
| at university we had a dorm wide private file sharing network, it
| stretched across all the dorms and over to a sister school as
| well
|
| I visited the top file sharer and he had a rack in his dorm room
| too, looked just like that
|
| kind of funny for 18 year olds
|
| I think you will like university
| miki123211 wrote:
| Fun fact.
|
| When I was a 16-year-old, it would have been significantly easier
| for me to get a $200 home server than a $5 Digital Ocean VPS.
|
| The online shopping service over here (Allegro, basically Amazon
| and eBay all in one) is perfectly happy to do pay-on-delivery for
| a small fee. You probably need to be 18 to sign up, but no Polish
| person ever actually cared about such restrictions and there's no
| age check.
|
| On the other hand, cloud services require you to have a debit or
| credit card, which you can't get without an intervention from
| your parents if at all.
|
| You can say lots of bad things about Bitcoin and crypto in
| general, but the youth rights angle can't be overemphasized
| enough.
| parineum wrote:
| > You can say lots of bad things about Bitcoin and crypto in
| general, but the youth rights angle can't be overemphasized
| enough.
|
| You're not in favor of parents controlling what their kids own?
| miki123211 wrote:
| I'm in favor of kids being able to do on the internet what
| they were already able to do in meatspace.
|
| In the 80's, a kid of basically any age could go to see or
| rent a movie, buy a book, make purchases at a store, play an
| arcade game with their friends or throw some cash into a
| payphone and call anybody they liked, all without their
| parent's knowledge or permission. There were very specific
| things that have been decided as "age inappropriate" by a
| democratic process of law (although one that didn't include
| the kids itself), and those very specific things (like
| alcohol consumption or X-rated movies) were forbidden,
| everything else was fair game.
|
| In the modern age, most of those things are done online, and
| most platforms require you to sign a contract to participate,
| which requires you to either be 13, 16 or 18, depending on
| platform and jurisdiction. Even if you get past that by lying
| about your age, you still need a payment method, which you
| can't easily get without explicit parental permission. There
| are exceptions, some platforms support gift cards that you
| can get over-the-counter, without any form of ID, but the
| point still stands.
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| > You probably need to be 18 to sign up, but no Polish person
| ever actually cared about such restrictions and there's no age
| check.
|
| You need to be 13.
|
| >On the other hand, cloud services require you to have a debit
| or credit card, which you can't get without an intervention
| from your parents if at all.
|
| With parental permission, a 13-year-old can open a free bank
| account with a debit card that works online. It's not a new
| thing, I had one 15 years ago.
| asveikau wrote:
| > With parental permission
|
| Back in the 90s I was a minor and doing similar things, I
| don't think I could have explained what I was doing to my
| parents. Even if I had the funds, they wouldn't believe it
| wasn't some scam or an illegitimate thing. I think teenagers
| who are tinkering don't always have buy-in or understating
| from their parents, so getting that kind of permission can be
| tough.
|
| I think I didn't have a debit card until 18. Then I got old
| Unix boxes on eBay.
| bhelkey wrote:
| > With parental permission
|
| Is the constraint the parent comment is referring to.
| throwaway167 wrote:
| Everyone's doing _when I was 16_.
|
| When I was 16 I read magazines about computers I couldn't afford,
| read Pascal code from a book that I wrote out in hand with pencil
| as I only had 2 hours time with a classroom computer each week,
| and almost died when getting a graphing calculator that could be
| programmed.
| spogbiper wrote:
| God that takes me back. Spent many hours writing programs on
| some cheap Casio and then for Christmas one year (15 or 16
| years old) I received an HP 48s and it was a whole new world.
| Good times.
| Aromasin wrote:
| When I was 16, I spent way too much time playing Leagues of
| Legends. My life would be so much easier now if I started
| practising what I do now that early!
| dehrmann wrote:
| Who's Pascal?
| teddyh wrote:
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pascal_(programmi
| ...>
| geek_at wrote:
| My dad worked for IBM in the software group but he was able to
| get decomissioned (usually broken) Thinkpads for me to tinker
| with.
|
| This is actually how I started my MSP company in the early
| 2000s. I was selling webspace hosted on Thinkpads with broken
| displays running Debian Woody (and Sarge) in a ventilated book
| shelf in my room.
|
| Good times
| qup wrote:
| Woody was my first Debian, I think directly after I switched
| from Mandrake.
|
| I was...17, I think.
| nwsm wrote:
| When I was 16 I wrote games on my TI-86 in TI Basic to play
| during school, and learned VBA to make silly desktop apps (one
| would open a bunch of internet browsers to a youtube video of
| mine- a montage of Call of Duty clips that I wanted more views
| on).
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| When I was 16 I was coasting to the State Science Fair on a
| fishing game I'd written two years earlier. Taught myself
| programming with the GW Basic language book. Totally worth it
| because I got to miss most of a day of class each for the
| county and regional fairs, and two for state.
| mdip wrote:
| I was this kid in my day. I had an extremely high-end PC that I
| built myself (to date myself, it cost well over $6,000[0] and was
| a home-built 486DX50 ( _right_ when they came out) maxed out
| motherboard RAM (that _might_ have been 16MB but memory escapes
| me), a Turtle Beach Wave Table Synth sound card, a video card
| capable of powering a display at 1152x1024 on a 16 " CRT display.
| I ran a multi-node BBS on two 9600, then 16.8K modems.
|
| Had it not been for the experience of "tinkering" with that PC
| and its predecessor (a ten year old 8088), I would likely have
| never become a software developer.
|
| I had the honor of building a gaming PC for a neighbor kid and
| watched over four years as he (unbeknownst to him) became a very
| competent geek. A few years of tweaking settings in games to eek
| out a higher frame-rate, fighting with firmware updates, video
| card drivers, software updates and every other bit of mayhem that
| the words "I want to game on my PC" evoke, and you pick up a
| wealth of knowledge "by accident".
|
| I hadn't talked to the kid in four years; met up with him, again,
| recently and I was blown away. First thing he does is pull a
| "Flipper Zero" out of his pocket and tells me about all of the
| crazy things he's done with it.
|
| He is as capable as any systems guy I've ever talked to. He has
| _no clue_ that he has this skill, either.
|
| It was such a good experience that I opted to buy my son a decent
| gaming laptop to graduate him from consoles. Over the last year,
| the same thing has happened to him. This year, my daughter (she's
| two years younger) _begged_ me to build her a desktop, so she 's
| getting a really nice Christmas followed by a year of
| learning/frustration. :)
|
| Oh, and the fam got a Flipper Zero this year, too. Can't have the
| neighbor kid have all the fun.
|
| [0] I saved up the money to afford it by building computers for
| other people.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > Had it not been for the experience of "tinkering" with that
| PC and its predecessor (a ten year old 8088), I would likely
| have never become a software developer.
|
| Now that I'm 25 years into my software career, one thing that
| absolutely blows me away is just how few software engineers in
| my teams actually own their own computers. It's less than 50%
| for my current team. Meanwhile, I'm the weirdo with several
| (gaming PC, gaming laptop PC, and general purpose MBP) in
| addition to my work laptop.
|
| > It was such a good experience that I opted to buy my son a
| decent gaming laptop to graduate him from consoles. Over the
| last year, the same thing has happened to him
|
| I went through that experience with my son as well. He's never
| shown great interest in being taught computer stuff, but did
| want to help with a PC build. Now, he's tech support for his
| friends.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The trend of people not even owning a laptop is fascinating.
| Smartphones are amazing devices, but how do people do that?!
| jstarfish wrote:
| Can't speak for OP, but we have a lot of people who request
| MacBooks at work and just do their personal activity on it.
| Saves them the $2k for the device and they don't have to
| concern themselves with it being lost, damaged or stolen.
|
| This does lead to what can only be described as an
| acrimonious custody battle whenever we do layoffs. High
| rates of "lost" equipment returns led to us ransomwaring
| the things to hold their unsynced personal data hostage
| until they return the equipment.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > High rates of "lost" equipment returns led to us
| ransomwaring the things to hold their unsynced personal
| data hostage until they return the equipment.
|
| Is that really worth it to get back what I would assume
| is on average a 3 year old laptop? Do you then re-issue
| this old, used gear to your new hires?
|
| That aside, using your work equipment for personal stuff
| (or vice-versa) is just a really dumb idea.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, even if it's not official policy, we just basically
| write-off all laptops given to staff and then give them
| if there's a layoff.
|
| In the rare case there's still a depreciable value on the
| books there is an additional severance payment equivalent
| to the final "value".
| pprotas wrote:
| > That aside, using your work equipment for personal
| stuff (or vice-versa) is just a really dumb idea.
|
| I see people say this all the time, but so far I have
| never seen any convincing arguments for why I should stop
| using my work laptop for personal use hah.
| jjav wrote:
| If you work for a company that has any kind of audits or
| certifications or regulation compliance or such (so,
| basically any company other than a recent tiny startup),
| your company computer is riddled with spyware that tracks
| every site you visit, all data in your files and buffers,
| may have keystroke recording, remote screenshots, and on
| an on.
|
| Even companies that don't necessarily want this stuff
| will have it forced on them by this or that auditor soon
| enough.
|
| And that's just the privacy angle.
|
| If you were to work on any personal projects on that
| company laptop now you have an intellectual property mess
| on your hands.
| fwmcbumcrumble wrote:
| > Is that really worth it to get back what I would assume
| is on average a 3 year old laptop? Do you then re-issue
| this old, used gear to your new hires?
|
| It depends on the device. A 3 year old M1 MBP is
| virtually identical to an almost brand new M2 MBP.
| There's no need to chuck an M1 MBP in the trash
| (metaphorically and literally) just because it's "3 years
| old".
|
| Now if it's a 3 year old low end Intel machine then I'd
| be more than happy if it went away.
| jstarfish wrote:
| It's less about the hardware itself and more about
| recovering/accounting for the data on it.
|
| If we can attest that no IP left with them and the device
| is out of its service life, sometimes we'll let them keep
| it out of pity. Ironically the most frequent
| justification is recognizance that they don't own a
| computer and can't easily look for another job.
| anticorporate wrote:
| > High rates of "lost" equipment returns led to us
| ransomwaring the things to hold their unsynced personal
| data hostage until they return the equipment.
|
| Sorry, but that's a pretty dick thing to do to someone
| who just got laid off, especially considering it could
| otherwise be a write-off.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It's not like most people are programming or writing Word
| docs on their phones. The most important thing they're
| doing is some form of banking. The rest of the time, it's
| just checking if things exist and sending messages to
| people. You don't need a laptop to do those things, though
| I personally prefer having the power of my Macbook.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > just how few software engineers in my teams actually own
| their own computers
|
| That sounds fine, if there is no corporate spyware inside.
|
| > Meanwhile, I'm the weirdo with several (gaming PC, gaming
| laptop PC, and general purpose MBP) in addition to my work
| laptop.
|
| That has more to do with gaming than with software
| engineering, doesn't it.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > That has more to do with gaming than with software
| engineering, doesn't it.
|
| I do use them for personal SW projects as well.
|
| > That sounds fine,
|
| Certainly, there's nothing "wrong" with that, but it does
| lead to specific scenarios, especially in cases of layoffs,
| where one could be in a position to not have a job or a
| computer to use for maintaining resumes, taking virtual
| interviews, etc. When I was laid off in 2022, there were
| several people that were panicking about that very fact.
| kredd wrote:
| You can get a very cheap chromebook for all that if
| there's a need. I own my laptop, but have had friends who
| went through layoffs and just grabbed a cheap one to find
| a new job.
|
| It doesn't make sense to own a laptop unless you will
| regularly use it. Quite a lot of people I know, just
| don't really use one outside of their work commitments.
| So your home hardware sits and collects dust.
| fibonachos wrote:
| I built my first computer when the "turbo" button was
| still a thing, and have probably built dozens more (for
| family, friends, and myself) in the ensuing three
| decades. These days I do the bulk of my non-work
| computing on an iPad with a Magic Keyboard, only pulling
| out the laptop when I need Fusion 360. If I get back into
| gaming I can see picking up a nice laptop, but for me the
| need or desire to own a desktop has passed.
| kredd wrote:
| Pretty much the same. I know in these circles we hate the
| fact that supermajority of people do their daily stuff on
| their phones, but it is what it is.
| granshaw wrote:
| So what, they "get off" using their employer's laptop as
| well?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Now that I 'm 25 years into my software career, one thing
| that absolutely blows me away is just how few software
| engineers in my teams actually own their own computers._
|
| I'm 15 years into my IT career and I'm amazed at how few of
| my colleagues seem to care about tech. They know their way
| around our company's instance of ServiceNow, or whatever
| their specific role demands of them, but there is very little
| curiosity, desire & wherewithal to branch out from their
| little space into something new.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This is most people, at most jobs, TBH.
| adversaryIdiot wrote:
| TBF working a full time job has sucked the soul out of me.
| The last thing I want to be doing on my free time is be on
| more computers. I used to be a kid eager about technology
| but now I am actually a boomer. I have a hard time using
| smart TV's now a days.
| mattlondon wrote:
| People may have other things in their life that may mean
| they don't have the luxury of time to spare on these sort
| of things.
|
| When I had kids _all_ of my hobbies stopped. There is no
| time left for anything non-essential.
|
| I simply no longer have the time - or frankly mental energy
| - for curiosity. Right now I am typing this while
| supervising bath time for a 3 year old.
| passwordoops wrote:
| If my experience is generalizable, it's going to get
| better when the kid turns 4. By 9 I was able to go back
| to spending real energy on hobbies, especially if I wake
| up early enough.
|
| Hang in there!
| genewitch wrote:
| Note: this seems like it only applies if you're putting
| your children into a school. If you're homeschooling that
| "free time" doesn't materialize. It also doesn't happen
| if you have two children (or more) a couple of years
| apart, as their school start and end times won't sync up
| except a few times over the course of > decade.
|
| I had a friend gently remind me that the reason he can be
| prolific at writing music these days and i "can't seem to
| find the time" is because i've raised 2 and currently am
| raising a third, and if he had kids he wouldn't write
| music either. My youngest turned 7 this year. Older two
| are out of the house.
| slily wrote:
| I felt that way when I was fresh out of school, now I find
| that my life is greatly improved by spending less time on
| (or thinking about) computers outside of work and more
| outdoors, doing some kind of physical activity.
| starkparker wrote:
| A _lot_ of IT these days, at least at software companies,
| is more akin to retail work (inventory, rotation,
| shipping/delivery logistics, compliance and permissions
| management) than tech support. This also makes it an
| attractive vector for tech/trade colleges because they can
| directly map such experience to higher-paying, less-
| seasonal work than retail.
|
| It's still a good foot-in-the-door role for people who
| still can't access education or job experience reqs for
| tech, but it's also now one of the roles where you can just
| park, work 9-5, get a better wage than retail, and not have
| to corral shopping carts. The tech end of internal IT
| support has moved more to SRE/ops roles.
|
| Hardware company IT is marginally more interesting but it's
| still more interested in tagging hardware than
| understanding it.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| When I'm in concentration mode for 8+ hours a day in tech,
| the last thing I want to do is fuck around with a
| misbehaving home lab. I used to have a server and switches
| and NAS and firewall etc. But got sick of troubleshooting
| unnecessary complexity. Now I've got a NAS and a desktop.
| My tinkering years are over and I just want things to work.
| That shit loses it's charm over time.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| I have a similar story as many on HN do. I had been stringing
| 10BASE2 coax around my "home lab" for years before I realized
| people will actually pay me to play with my toys. Of course I
| then sunk all of that money into more toys for the home lab.
|
| I now have a lot of friends with kids and some of them are
| teenagers. I've had some concern in my mind for a while now -
| their total knowledge of tech comes down to asking for a wifi
| password and watching prank videos (or whatever) on an app.
| When you ask them what they want to do when they grow up they
| say "influencer"... The most technical thing they know how to
| do is reboot "the router" when the internet is down. The second
| diagnostic step is to yell that the internet is down.
|
| They're great kids and I'm not criticizing them but I've had
| some concerns that there might not be anyone around to keep the
| lights on when our generation is gone. In our day using a
| computer and getting on the internet had huge barriers to entry
| but that came with the benefit of an explosion in tech talent.
|
| My point is it's great to hear there are still some nerdy kids
| out there getting under the covers!
| FredPret wrote:
| People with the interest and skill to debug technical systems
| have always been a tiny minority
| ryandrake wrote:
| > They're great kids and I'm not criticizing them but I've
| had some concerns that there might not be anyone around to
| keep the lights on when our generation is gone. In our day
| using a computer and getting on the internet had huge
| barriers to entry but that came with the benefit of an
| explosion in tech talent.
|
| I mean, thinking back to the '80s, I was probably one out of
| maybe 3 kids in my entire class who even had a home computer,
| let alone knew how to do anything more than play games.
|
| Back to the '90s, many more classmates had computers, but
| only a tiny, tiny few of us knew how to program and edit
| CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.
|
| Back to the early 2000s, I was the only person I knew with
| greater than a dial-up Internet connection or who knew the
| difference between a local and public IP address.
|
| 99.5% have always been laypeople, and that's OK. For every
| 200 kids today who only know how to ask their mom for the
| WiFi password, there's one who is setting up a home lab, and
| that's enough for the world's tech needs in twenty years.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| This reminds me, I lost my flipper zero and need to find it
| qup wrote:
| What cool things did he do with his Flipper Zero?
| bradstewart wrote:
| Same exact path here, just a few years later. Tried gaming on
| my mom's Gateway, which led to building my first PC with a
| Pentium D, which led to a hobby of constantly buying/selling
| hardware on ebay and swapping stuff out, which led to an EE
| degree, and here we are.
|
| No video games, no PC tinkering and overlocking, no EE degree.
| xu3u32 wrote:
| how old are your kids?
| awill88 wrote:
| You're a natural but don't forget to slow down, get done with
| school, find meaning outside of tech, and then change the world.
| You're already on your way.
| supermatt wrote:
| How loud is it with the mod you made to the fan?
| varun_ch wrote:
| Much quieter, but still loud enough that I was told to move it
| from the living room to an unused room :)
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| NAT doesn't get the hate it deserves for stopping people from
| running their own servers.
|
| I remember being being 18, making my first websites using the
| LAMP stack and not understanding why my friends were unable to
| access them from their homes. I knew the basic workings of the IP
| protocol, but hadn't read about NAT, and the responses online
| talked about "public and private IP addresses", which made no
| sense to me -- "Aren't all IP addresses supposed to be public?
| Isn't that how the protocol works?"
|
| Even after learning about how NAT works, I had no way to work
| around it, as my ISP blocked the router's web interface and I was
| unable to do port forwarding.
|
| I would bet that there are at least dozens of millions of people
| that didn't pursue a career in IT because of NAT. We should ask
| ourselves if collectively allowing NAT to be what it is was a
| good decision in the first place.
| spogbiper wrote:
| Most ISPs I've encountered (various places in the USA) do allow
| port forwarding or even replacing the ISPs router with one of
| your own. I'm not sure NAT has been a massive obstacle for most
| people interested in networking. And without NAT, we would have
| had to use IPv6 or something even worse. That would probably
| have turned off a lot of aspiring network engineers too.
| TheFreim wrote:
| > Most ISPs I've encountered (various places in the USA) do
| allow port forwarding or even replacing the ISPs router with
| one of your own.
|
| In the United States my entire life I have always been able
| to port forward when necessary, though I've only been on two
| or maybe three providers. I also would help friends in middle
| and high school port forward so we could connect to their
| game servers. Many providers seem to try to make it as hard
| as possible, attempting to lock down the interface behind a
| web panel. This can typically be bypassed by finding the real
| panel address locally or by getting a new router that isn't
| locked down. Growing up it was extremely easy, my provider
| didn't try to make it difficult, but now there is often a
| barrier to entry for people who desire to casually tinker
| with their network setup, which is unfortunate.
| retrac wrote:
| In some countries, NAT was implemented at the ISP level and
| you had no public IP at all. I remember it being a consistent
| practical barrier back in the 90s for stuff like file
| transfers. I had a public IP but the other person didn't and
| had no way of getting one or setting up port forwarding. Back
| when file transfers were often done with direct connection.
| organsnyder wrote:
| We had Comcast for 17 years, and they always allowed us to
| bring not only our own router, but our own modem. Even when
| we rented a combined modem+firewall+AP from them, it was
| trivial (and documented) to put it into bridge mode.
|
| We just switched to Metronet last month (5gbps symmetrical!),
| and while we have to pay $10/month to get a public static IP
| (CGNAT otherwise), they didn't care what was connected to the
| ONT, which operates below the IP layer.
| jve wrote:
| NAT was/is a great for blocking incoming connections by
| default. A lesson I learnt when I found in early Windows XP
| days that my files are gone and a .txt note was left on my C:
| disk...
| throwup238 wrote:
| Remember when connecting an unpatched system to the internet
| would get it infected by the Blaster worm within the day?
|
| I 'member.
| organsnyder wrote:
| A non-NAT firewall can have the same default rules.
| k_bx wrote:
| Tailscale solves this problem as is beginner-friendly, highly
| recommended.
| Cpoll wrote:
| How would you set this up? You'd still need a box with a
| public IP to proxy the traffic, no? (Unless you get all your
| friends to install Tailscale so that they can access your
| private network).
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| it/s called exit nodes in Tailscale
| Cpoll wrote:
| I don't think that would work? Exit nodes proxy traffic
| from the Tailscale network to the internet, not the other
| way around. Kind of like a consumer VPN.
|
| The other reply mentions Funnel, which I think fits the
| use case better.
| maybe_pablo wrote:
| If you want to expose a single web service you can do it
| via tailscale funnel[1] easily.
|
| [1] https://tailscale.com/blog/reintroducing-serve-funnel
| epcoa wrote:
| I'm confused, are you complaining about ISP CGNAT or NAT in
| general? Did your ISP assign you a public IPv4 or not? If the
| former then you are lucky, that is a relative luxury.
|
| > Even after learning about how NAT works, I had no way to work
| around it, as my ISP blocked the router's web interface and I
| was unable to do port forwarding.
|
| Well this is Hacker News, you replace the router with your own.
|
| I have yet to encounter a residential wireline ISP in the US or
| Europe where using your own router is not a possibility. Even
| those that implemented 802.1x or similar I have been able to
| either deal with directly or work around. Not saying there
| don't exist counterexamples but I would assume using an
| alternative router +/- MITM the old one would have been viable.
|
| Of course if the ISP was firewalling (likely) then you have a
| different problem.
|
| This isn't really a NAT issue. More of a specific ISP policy
| issue. (NAT and ipv4 have nothing to do with it, they can just
| as easily port block inbound 80/443 on ipv6.)
|
| The argument boils down to: My ISP locked down the admin page
| on my rented router ergo NAT is evil. It's not terribly
| sensible.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Did your ISP assign you a public IPv4 or not? If the former
| then you are lucky, that is a relative luxury.
|
| At least until the 10G fiber upgrade happens, Sonic has given
| me a _static_ IPv4 address for a decade.
| epcoa wrote:
| Sure. I still remember when I could order additional static
| IPs on residential cable internet.
|
| That doesn't mean most getting online today in Asia or
| Africa basically have a choice other than CGNAT IPv4 and
| IPv6 from their ISP. Your own _dynamically_ assigned IPv4
| is a relative luxury.
| sosborn wrote:
| Do they guarantee it is static?
|
| My current IP hasn't changed in years but I need to pony up
| if I want them to guarantee it forever.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Are you running any servers? I can't find it now, but I
| remember reading somewhere once that ISPs force IP
| changes more often on residential users that they detect
| are running servers.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I've been running a web server for the last year or so,
| and I still have the same IP from Comcast that I've had
| for years. When I was a teenager I also ran servers and
| had a stable IP for years. Ostensibly they say you're not
| allowed to run servers, but I'm guessing they'd only care
| if you're constantly using a significant chunk of your
| bandwidth.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Do they guarantee it is static?
|
| Yes, but it's only for grandfathered DSL.
|
| https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360009880293-Static...
| justinclift wrote:
| As a data point, the ISP I'm personally using here in
| Australia (Launtel, highly recommended) has static IPs as
| an option.
|
| It's not the default choice (most people don't need one),
| but people that do need a static IP can get one.
| sunshinekitty wrote:
| This is my take as well, we would not have any ip space if
| every machine had a public ipv4 address - this is kind of a
| silly argument to make, nat's provide a ton of usefulness.
|
| As a kid I didn't get it either but would port forward, run a
| vpn server, reverse proxy, and so on. It was a good learning
| experience trying to get my friends to install vpn clients!
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > nat's provide a ton of usefulness
|
| ... to companies like IPXO that are trying to acquire,
| rent, and treat IPv4 addresses like speculative real
| estate.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| > we would not have any ip space if every machine had a
| public ipv4 address
|
| Right, but then ISPs and hosting providers would have to
| have supported ipv6 10 years ago (or even earlier) when we
| ran out. Customers were already demanding multiple devices
| on their wifi 20 years ago, and without NAT, ipv6 would
| have been necessary.
|
| With NAT, you can't do p2p or self hosting. Without it, you
| couldn't use centralized services either.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| I remember joining an IRC FTP share channel when I was a kid,
| and wanting to share some of my files to get ratio to download
| some music and anime they had, and it was my first time
| attempting to setup an FTP and I thought i was all good to go
| and dropped my info in the channel and about 3 seconds later a
| bunch of people were lol'ing at my internal IP.
|
| They were cool though and everybody was helpful, learned a lot
| that night. IRC was so awesome in the 90s.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I had the advantage of being 18 when the internet was still
| pretty open and I had all the access I needed through my
| university. I even remember finding a list of root passwords to
| various machines at Standford lying in one of the computer
| labs. No idea how it got there. But I tested one with a quick
| rlogin and it worked fine. Oops. I emailed them to let them
| know and got basically a <shrug> in reply. Those days certainly
| were easier for a kid who was learning networking, but they
| couldn't last with more and more people getting connected and
| making it more tempting for bad actors to fool around.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > I had the advantage of being 18 when the internet was still
| pretty open
|
| There is no doubt that is an extreme advantage. When I
| started college in the late 90s an upperclassman was in my
| dorm for a party and saw a trophy i had from a USFirst
| robotics competition in HS, he invited me to join an
| organization he was in that built autonomous robots (we
| called them "vehicles") for a competition. In that lab, we
| had network drops and static IPs on the schools inet
| connection. The lab's admin knew the DNS guys and so we could
| run whatever we wanted on a fast internet connection with
| access to our own hostnames. At this time Linux, Apache, PHP
| and MySQL were just starting to take off. That lab and inet
| opportunity convinced me to change my major to CS and
| kickstarted my whole career.
|
| edit: that "lab" was really just an unused room in a random
| building with some desks and hand tools like screwdrivers and
| stuff to work on our robots. ..but it had rj45 plugs :)
| xattt wrote:
| It wasn't as hard back then to sift the chaff from the
| grain. You were either a computer nerd or you were part of
| the unwashed masses.
|
| If you showed any interest in computing, other geeks would
| take you with open arms (mostly) versus now where everyone
| and their dog wants in on the ground floor.
| j45 wrote:
| Nat provides safer networking for the same masses who can't
| understand it
|
| Depending on the year this was it was a pretty easy Google to
| learn to traverse nat, and use dynamic dns, or do port
| forwarding, even out to a Linode
| jrmg wrote:
| If we didn't have NAT ISPs would provide a router with a
| firewall that was just as safe.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| ISPs do provide routers with firewalls, for this very
| reason of course. You still need to open ports to actually
| reach the service you're hosting, only now you don't need
| to figure out what your actual IP is.
| granshaw wrote:
| Can't upvote this enough. It breaks the original spirit of the
| internet and is lazy "security" with a huge negative
| externality
| radiojosh wrote:
| How exactly does it break the spirit of the Internet? The
| spirit of the Internet is that we run out of IPv4 addresses
| and everyone who uses the Internet has to learn IPv6 and be
| an expert on firewalls?
|
| I can't tell if you're being elitist because your defacto
| position is that everyone who uses the Internet has to be a
| cyber security expert, or if you're just being obtuse because
| a couple of Google searches will usually set you straight on
| setting up port forwarding through your router.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| You don't need to be a firewall expert to use a firewall.
| Stateful firewalls have been around for longer than I can
| remember. The default for any consumer firewall is "disable
| by default", as they should be.
|
| Now with NAT we need to be disable UPnP, and deal with "NAT
| types" on gaming consoles. Or Nintendo Switches breaking
| your LAN because Nintendo tells you to put your switch into
| the DMZ: https://en-americas-
| support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
|
| Because of NAT, we now need to deal with firewalls _and_
| port forwarding. Plus, because of
| https://www.armis.com/research/nat-slipstreaming-v2-0/,
| your IPv4 firewall is practically disabled _because_ of NAT
| workarounds embedded into your router. You can pick between
| having a firewall on IPv4 or allowing WebRTC on any of your
| devices.
| granshaw wrote:
| Port forwarding doesn't help when your public facing ip
| could change at anytime
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't understand -- you can purchase your own router instead
| of renting one from your ISP, which usually works out cheaper
| in the end too, and port forward.
|
| NAT was a necessity when it was being introduced, so I don't
| understand the complaints. Sure it's annoying, but what was the
| alternative?
|
| I don't think anyone was dissuaded from IT because of NAT.
| Heck, if anything, learning how to configure it might have been
| some people's first step into learning about networking and
| then getting into it as a career!
|
| And let's not forget that NAT served as a default firewall that
| did more than any anti-virus to protect PC's from malware.
| norenh wrote:
| > NAT was a necessity when it was being introduced, so I
| don't understand the complaints. Sure it's annoying, but what
| was the alternative?
|
| IPv6
| crazygringo wrote:
| Nope. IPv6 _still_ isn 't supported everywhere.
|
| When you're running out of addresses, you need a workable
| solution at the moment.
|
| Not something that requires all networking equipment
| worldwide to be replaced with a new standard all at once,
| with is a practical impossibility.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| IPv6 would have been great if it was just bigger addresses
| but the actual system we got suffers heavily from the
| second-system effect.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Agreed, but does the blame lie in NAT, or the endlessly
| rainchecked IPv6 transition?
| radiojosh wrote:
| This is a terribly uninformed take.
|
| ISPs charge for public IP addresses. Do you want to be charged
| for a large enough block of public IP addresses to cover every
| networked device in your house? Because that's what you get
| when you don't use NAT. And if it weren't for NAT, the Internet
| would be running out of IPv4 addresses (it already is, sort
| of), so you'd either deal with much higher prices for IPv4
| addresses, or you'd have to learn IPv6, which is WAY harder
| than dealing with port forwarding through an IPv4 NAT.
|
| Not to mention the premium you'd pay for a router with an
| actual firewall, and you had better make sure you understand
| the firewall. Port forwarding on a working router is generally
| a lot easier than a firewall.
|
| If it was really impossible to set up inbound connections to
| your server, it was either a problem with the router or a
| problem with your ISP.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Arguably if people had somehow rejected NAT more violently,
| IPv6 might've been popular much sooner cause you gotta solve
| the "woops there are now more devices than addresses" problem
| _somehow_.
|
| For the sake of running a home server from a network not
| behind a NAT router, you don't need to understand much more
| about IPv6 than how to copy&paste an address.
| fragmede wrote:
| The fact that my laptop right now has 10 different ipv6
| addresses assigned to it when my ISP doesn't even support
| ipv6, (and two ipv4 addresses) says users need to
| understand more than copy and paste.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > ISPs charge for public IP addresses
|
| Because NAT allows them to.
|
| > Do you want to be charged for a large enough block of
| public IP addresses to cover every networked device in your
| house?
|
| Yes.
|
| > or you'd have to learn IPv6, which is WAY harder than
| dealing with port forwarding through an IPv4 NAT.
|
| Back in 2005, maybe. Now, it works out of the box, either
| through SLAAC or DHCPv6.
|
| > Not to mention the premium you'd pay for a router with an
| actual firewall
|
| In 2005, maybe. Today, $10 routers off AliExpress have a
| firewall, probably set to "deny incoming" by default.
|
| > Port forwarding on a working router is generally a lot
| easier than a firewall.
|
| I know for a fact that the routers of at least two ISPs use
| the exact same page for port forwarding and the firewall. You
| don't enter iptables commands, you specify a list of ports
| that you want to be open for a specific address, except now
| you don't need to differentiate between "source port" and
| "destination port".
| epcoa wrote:
| >> ISPs charge for public IP addresses
|
| > Because NAT allows them to.
|
| NAT increases the available supply of IPv4 addresses, it
| makes them cheaper.
|
| >> Do you want to be charged for a large enough block of
| public IP addresses to cover every networked device in your
| house?
|
| > Yes.
|
| You can actually just go out and buy a block of IPv4.
| https://auctions.ipv4.global/
| Runways wrote:
| Some might find your take bizarre, but the early architects of
| the internet were against NAT as well. Although, in their
| idealistic scenario IPv4 would not have held up as long as it
| did, and probably would have hastened the introduction of IPv6
| - not to mention the security concerns like all devices needing
| competent firewalls. Some people just didn't like that
| computers could be locked behind a network veil/wall.
| edg5000 wrote:
| It is shitty is that your ISP blocked NAT, that is certainly a
| crime against humanity, as running your own server is such a
| pure expression of freedom.
| gizmo wrote:
| NAT is an accidental consequence of IPv4 address shortage, but
| it turned out to a blessing in disguise. NAT gives every home a
| basic hardware firewall for free.
|
| Everything, for better and worse (mostly worse) is connected to
| the internet nowadays. Your watch. Your dishwasher. Your TV.
| Your light switches. These devices are all comically insecure
| but because they can't accept outside connections because of
| NAT it's not such a big deal. IPv4 limitations make outbound
| connectivity easy but incoming connectivity hard. This is what
| you want 99% of the time.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| NAT's firewall effect is purely coincidental. In fact,
| because people don't run firewalls because of NAT, attacks
| like NAT slipstreaming can open any port to any internal IP
| in your network by abusing SIP ALGs and fragmentation.
|
| Wherever NAT is enabled now, a statefull firewall is a better
| solution. Thankfully, this is the default wherever IPv6 is
| rolled out to consumers.
| cm2187 wrote:
| NAT, by virtue of also being a firewall, has actually prevented
| millions of home machines from being powned. The world is
| better with NAT. And I wouldn't want any modern IoT (including
| the IoT I am not aware of in all sort of kitchen appliances) to
| be on the WAN directly.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Your router comes with a firewall for this very reason. IPv6
| is enabled on over 40% the internet connections to Google,
| surely you don't think all of those people don't have any
| kind of firewall on their home network?
| cm2187 wrote:
| Then if you have a firewall you have the same port
| forwarding problems than with a NAT.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Not really? No need to mess with destination ports, no
| need to visit whatismyipaddress.com, no need to risk
| exposing your entire home network through SIP ALGs, and
| your Xbox/PlayStation doesn't tell you that you have a
| bad "NAT type". Plus, when you forward port 1024-65535 to
| your Nintendo Switch, as Nintendo says you need to do in
| its documentation, the rest of your devices don't have
| their P2P network traffic impeded.
| epcoa wrote:
| > when you forward port 1024-65535 to your Nintendo
| Switch, as Nintendo says you need to do in its
| documentation,
|
| Nintendo is a shit company that treats their customer
| base like bitches yet gets a tremendous steady amount of
| good will solely due to nostalgia. I'm the last to want
| to defend the challenges that NAT brings, but blaming it
| due to some rando corporation's asshattery is silly.
| Luckily, or not, their documentation is wrong, you almost
| never have to blanket port forward all UDP ports for the
| Switch.
|
| The GP point still stands as well. If you have a firewall
| set to block inbound by default (typical) you have the
| same basic port-forwarding bootstrapping/configuration
| problem. Also, the reasons you would absolutely need
| whatismyipaddress.com or similar apply to both v4 and v6.
| If you're configuring your router anyway you can get the
| v4 address.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Without NAT, you can do hole punching. A third server can
| coordinate two peers sending packets to each other to
| make their firewalls each see the connection as outgoing
| and allow traffic. With NAT, the peers don't know which
| port they're sending on, so they can't relay that info
| through the third party (though maybe you could have one
| port scan the other).
|
| Also, an application can use upnp to configure your
| router/firewall to allow traffic. You could do that with
| NAT too I suppose if ISPs allowed that, but you'd be
| contending with other users if you wanted a specific port
| like 80.
| justinclift wrote:
| Firewalls on home routers are often of the "shit" level of
| quality / capability though. :(
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Please see this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLrfqtf4txw
|
| In order to get some context and knowledge of History.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I've seen this video, and it's an interesting deep dive into
| the history of NAT, but it brushes aside IPv6 as an
| "alternative solution" and doesn't pay any more attention to
| it. Of course, that's not necessarily something to dig into
| when the topic is NAT and not IPv6, but it's hardly a defence
| for NAT, merely an explanation on how we got to this point.
| feoren wrote:
| > my ISP blocked the router's web interface
|
| This is the weirdest thing in your story. Your ISP disallowed
| you from configuring your router? I've never heard of such a
| thing, and it certainly sounds ... suspicious. You should be
| able to get to your own router without even connecting to the
| internet. Your ISP should never even know when you're
| connecting to your router. I commonly hit my router's admin
| page when my internet is down to figure out whether it's my
| computer or my external connection.
|
| Why would your ISP want to hire so many extra people to nanny
| all their customer's routers for them? Are you sure this wasn't
| an excuse from your parents who installed parental controls on
| it or something?
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| I sometimes wonder what got me into servers as a kid. I guess
| part of it was that the internet and open source were new, and it
| seemed like to be a "seed" in the network, rather than a "leech,"
| you needed a server. Plus I had already gotten into building PCs,
| which is to say, just assembling and disassembling cases,
| motherboards, and parts. So maybe for my teenage brain it seemed
| like having a server made you part of some secret internet club,
| and used a skill I already had.
|
| Around the year 1999, I was fortunate to literally have access to
| my Mom's basement with adequate power and a dedicated DSL modem
| with a static IP. Which was a total stroke of luck, that a small
| Seattle ISP called Speakeasy was willing to set that up, even
| though I was all the way in a suburb of New York. I guess I was
| part of their "nationwide expansion plan."
|
| I was 15. Once the house got this static IP and a fast enough
| uplink (I remember it being 1.5 Mbps down and 768 Kbps up -- that
| was enough!) ... I felt compelled to make good use of it. So I
| would cycle through old desktop PCs and use them as servers.
|
| In 2004, I was away at college but still had access to that wired
| basement. Using some money from summer jobs and odd jobs during
| the school year, I bought a 1U rackmount server off eBay to store
| there as a Linux server, and this let me set up a small array of
| hard drives in it. The static IP let me do remote development via
| SSH as if that basement were a colo. My biggest issue is that I
| had no monitoring for power and WAN uplink.
|
| I still have a record of the specs: Intel Entry Server Platform,
| P4 2.8Ghz, 1GB of RAM, two SATA hard disk slots, and built-in
| dual-NIC (one 100Mbps and one 1000Mbps), which I managed to get
| for around $600. I then managed to find two 250GB drives to put
| in there. I ended up using that server as my web development
| platform from 2004-2009.
|
| I also remember one summer where I did remote development over
| the LAN on that server, working from my desktop development
| machine (also Linux) via the 1000 Mbps local LAN port, which felt
| like living in the future. I was using sshfs and NFS and the like
| to test code directly on the web server and turn over web app
| releases to the client for review. This was 2005.
|
| After which I eventually found cheap colo and cloud options.
| Funny enough that static IP DSL line was in my Mom's house until
| she sold it in 2012. Thanks for all the fish, Speakeasy!
|
| p.s. there's this fascinating 2002 article still available
| describing Speakeasy and giving a little vignette of late 1990s
| Dotcom 1.0 history, where people who ran a popular internet cafe
| in Seattle could fancy themselves telecom executives!
| https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20020703&slug...
| iceflinger wrote:
| When I was 16 I was definitely hosting services for people on a
| monthly VPS, but it wasn't until a few years later when my cloud
| provider imploded with 2 hours notice while I was in class and I
| lost all my files that I started to self-host with my own
| hardware over a VPN.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I remember going through the entire qmailrocks.org guide on a
| PIII with 128mb of RAM (Running Fedora 1 or 2) and then saying
| "ok, send me some emails!" and my buddy immediately crashed it
| within like 30 seconds. We were laughing so hard.
| buttocks wrote:
| At 16, I had a 24 hour BBS running in my bedroom.
| globular-toast wrote:
| When I was 16 it took me a while to realise a "server" is just a
| loud PC with a weird shape that isn't optimised for use in the
| home. PCs cases are easier to work in and can fit larger
| (quieter) fans. Rack mount is good for networking equipment once
| you get above an 8 port switch, though.
| rconti wrote:
| This is awesome! It's like a retro version of my youth; as
| someone 25 years older, I realize that not nearly as many people
| are interested in homelab/self-hosting stuff now. And it's not
| retro for retro's sake; Varun is also working on the latest tech
| as well.
|
| (also, it took me too long to realize how close their name is to
| /var/run which made me smile when I thought of it)
| varun_ch wrote:
| Thanks! Never noticed /var/run. Might be an interesting idea
| for a personal logo or something :)
| palemoonale wrote:
| Of course not; most 16-year-olds are enjoying their teenage years
| instead. (as they should) And build social skills.
| varun_ch wrote:
| Haha that's totally fair - but I'm definitely still enjoying my
| teenage years and building social skills. I work on my hobby
| stuff in the free time I have _after_ enjoying my teenage
| years, hanging out with my friends (and studying for school) :)
|
| Thanks for the concern though.
| palemoonale wrote:
| Thanks for the reply. No concern though, i was just too nerdy
| myself w/ computers and missed out on important teenager /
| young adult stuff. This time never comes back! Most dorks
| here wouldn't understand though.
| jjice wrote:
| This is great, good on this kid. Networking was a mystery to me
| until I was like 18 so I missed out on some good years of self
| hosting. If I could go back, I'd buy a book on basic networking
| at 14 with some birthday money. That would be huge. I just didn't
| even know what to search for at the time. With all the free time
| I had in high school, this would have been a ton of fun to play
| with.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Those Dell R720s are a pretty sweet spot. This past summer I got
| a couple to replace some old dev/stg hardware and picked one up
| for my home lab: $305 landed with 256GB RAM and dual CPUs, 24
| cores, and dual power supplies. It normally runs quietly, though
| can ramp up if under heavy use.
|
| I added 8 1TB SSDs, and another 8 2TB spinning 2.5" drives. I had
| to buy a new RAID controller because the stock one wouldn't boot
| with all the drives in it (they are unsupported drives), and a
| 10gig NIC. All in for around $450.
| geek_at wrote:
| how much Watt does it pull?
| genewitch wrote:
| I had an HP proliant with 4 xeons, 40 total cores (80t),
| 192GB of ram, and 8 spindles. The 4 (four) power supplies ran
| about 600W idle and the BTU graph went to 1500W equivalent. I
| ran it on 240VAC on 2 supplies and it was generally around
| 1kw/h for my usage.
|
| It was electrically equivalent to a bitcoin miner.
| olavgg wrote:
| A dual socket supermicro with haswell/broadwell with only one
| sata ssd idles around 80 waitt. Full load up to 500 watt.
| linsomniac wrote:
| One that we have in production over the last day has been
| averaging 197 watts over the last week. So that's probably
| the upper limit of what I'm going to see on mine for my home
| lab use. I'll have lower use, and I have 8 7.2K discs where
| that has 14 10K. I don't have my home machine DRAC set up
| right now.
| reactordev wrote:
| > _"One day, I'm going to graduate and move out for university"_
|
| Seems to me like University would be wasted time. You're well on
| your way. If you can configure reverse proxies on nginx, host
| node apps, route ssh, and keep uptime - there's a job for you
| today...
|
| Do university on the side if you really want the paper but you
| already possess the skills to succeed. The insatiable desire to
| learn.
|
| Best of luck my friend.
| laserbeam wrote:
| > Do university on the side if you really want the paper.
|
| There are other good reasons for uni, like social and
| networking opportunities (doing a startup with like-minded
| students, maybe exploring the uni party life, learning how
| research is done...).
|
| None of the reasons are worth going into debt for though. You
| do indeed already have the skills needed to get a good job in
| the field. Uni is an option for you but definitely not a
| requirement.
|
| Feel free to go for a study field which is tangential to your
| interests (e.g. UX design, business...). Maybe you won't be
| doing any of that for a living but it's one of the best
| opportunities you get to learn how people you will end up
| working with talk and think. You can certainly learn the stuff
| you major in on your own.
| reactordev wrote:
| Going to Uni for networking and social reasons (as long as
| you aren't going into debt) is a great reason to go.
|
| I was simply suggesting that one already has the skills to go
| work and make a pretty handsome salary doing what they are
| doing _while_ learning what they want to learn.
|
| It's a whole lot easier to fund a woodworking shop when you
| have money. It's a whole lot easier to experiment with 3D
| printing when you have money. You see what I'm getting at.
| It's not the ends, it's the means.
| gizmo wrote:
| You can learn the easy stuff by tinkering. It's fun! Many
| people are smart enough to teach themselves anything. But
| actually sitting down and doing the work is the hard part. How
| many people are going to struggle through "Algorithms" by
| Cormen without the external pressure of coursework and exams?
| Almost nobody. And that's the problem. It's not that people
| can't learn by self-study, it's that nobody wants to.
|
| There is no alternative for learning to the structured
| environment provided by a good university.
| reactordev wrote:
| I like that kind of stuff and will gladly sit through it
| again and again until it's ingrained in my brain. Some people
| love to learn. Teach me something or lose my attention.
|
| You are right though that there's a huge difference between
| doing something as a hobby vs as a job. If you don't have a
| passion for it, it will feel like every other job. No matter
| what you are doing. However, hard work and discipline are
| good traits to start early so I'm still in the camp of "Go
| and work and make money instead of go into debt to learn".
|
| > _" There is no alternative for learning to the structured
| environment provided by a good university."_
|
| We can agree to disagree. I found the R&D lab of some of the
| companies I worked for far surpassed what my peers were doing
| in their labs.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| It's too soon to lock into a career path like this. Insatiable
| desire to learn is something that can lead to success in a
| great many fields other than the one that helped you set up
| your Minecraft server. OP can use college to find the field
| where society needs them most and there are the most
| opportunities. As "Server technician 12", they will make fast
| money but they won't be discovered or mentored appropriate to
| their talent.
| twodave wrote:
| When I was 16 (2001), I bought "Teach Yourself C" by Herbert
| Schildt, a video card and a Sony Trinitron with my summer job
| savings. I got to the end of chapter 5 where Herb starts talking
| crazy about multi-dimensional arrays, saw the next chapter was
| literal witchcraft and gibberish (pointers), got overwhelmed and
| decided I was on to plan B: become a rock star. Programming was
| just too hard. I used what I learned to program my TI-82 and
| cheat on math exams.
|
| Fast forward a couple years, and I'm in my first semester in
| college. I had some advisor (no recollection whatsoever who it
| was) recommend that I avoid declaring a major for a semester and
| just take a few courses in a variety of my interests. What a life
| saver.
|
| I bought my first Java book and started digging into it. It was a
| lot more approachable than the C book (sorry Herb!). I attended
| the first class and realized I'd already read past the end of
| what the class covered. That started a 15+ year journey (so far)
| on a path I thought I'd turned away from.
|
| I still play and enjoy the guitar. But I know I'll never be
| better as a musician than I am as a technologist.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Do you understand multidimensional arrays and pointers now?
| twodave wrote:
| Yeah, it ended up being one of those things you look at a
| second time and wonder why it seemed so hard the first time.
| It was a good lesson for me, though. Now when I hit something
| particularly dense I have a lot more patience with it.
| zabzonk wrote:
| schildt's are widely recognised as being some of the very
| worst. perhaps if you had chosen better (anyone could have
| informed you at the time) you might have made a better start.
| twodave wrote:
| I wish that were true. As the only teenager in my rural
| school even remotely interested in programming, the closest
| thing I had to advice came from my dad, who didn't finish
| college and liked to build computers as a hobby, but who
| didn't know the first thing about programming. I spent a long
| time trying to find a good C or C++ book at the time, and the
| C++ book I ended up buying was so much worse than Schildt as
| to be unmentionable.
| dekhn wrote:
| I got stuck in K&R as a high school student around the part
| where they implement malloc (I persisted through understanding
| pointers because they were necessary for me to understand
| linked lists, a data structure I used once in the 1980s and
| never since).
| icedchai wrote:
| I learned C in the late 80's from K&R 2nd edition and an
| Amiga-specific book I no longer remember exactly, back in
| middle school. I learned sooo much from books back then and
| just playing around on my own. There's so much more to learn
| now, but it's also so much easier to find information...
| icedchai wrote:
| I found the other book: https://www.amazon.com/Amiga-
| Advanced-Programmers-Abacus-Boo...
| dekhn wrote:
| my college roommate freshman year (1991) had an amiga and
| we argued about whether amigas were better than PCs. At
| the time, his amiga definitely was better than my PC.
|
| IIRC I bought a $25 C compiler,
| http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm but it only
| had a stack size of 6 function calls(!)
| Beijinger wrote:
| Windows server. This guy is a pervert.
| markhahn wrote:
| I'm sorry for his endangered hearing. Servers belong in the DC
| where their noise isn't such a problem...
| varun_ch wrote:
| The noise levels are bearable, the constant sound is comparable
| to the noise generated by other home appliances (although the
| original location was not ideal). We moved it to my an unused
| room so it's not audible anymore.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| How much do you pay for the energy, and how thick earpads do you
| have with these optiplexes in your room?
| captainkrtek wrote:
| This is great. Back when I was a teenager I found some ancient
| servers on craigslist and picked them up, they ran in my bedroom
| closet and sounded like a jet engine. Think my parents were
| concerned
| Sparkyte wrote:
| There are so many ways to overcome ISP limitations to drive your
| own server at home.
| eathren wrote:
| Sure, but ... he's 16.
| herohamp wrote:
| This comment is nonsensical
| spacecadet wrote:
| As others have said, I was this kid too. Go go go! Yay for
| homelabs.
| iamawacko wrote:
| Really cool! As a 16 year old I also had servers in my room. I
| still have them. They're towers, but they have ECC RAM, Xeon
| processors, and lots of drives. Arch Linux is the base operating
| system, managed by Ansible. Everything is connected together with
| a mesh network. I have Nomad and Consul running on each server,
| and self-hosting has been great fun.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Now that the iPad kid generation is growing up, I fear most don't
| even know what a file system is. The post desktop world is real.
|
| Abstractions are comfortable, but they might reduce the number of
| techie teenagers like OP in the future, and that worries me a lot
| passwordoops wrote:
| In the same we should be worried that people don't know how to
| grow their own food, procure their own heat, or build and
| thrive in a community. Not being snarky, I am genuinely worried
| about that
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Great comparison, that's even more worrying. If we suddenly
| loose fossil fuels and fertilizers, the lack of agricultural
| skills will probably kill billions.
| setr wrote:
| Unless you're in full apocalypse mode, every man for
| themselves, I'd expect for the most case people will learn
| from their neighbors quickly enough -- as long as a
| survivable subset of the population knows what they're
| doing
|
| What's going to kill billions is the lack of industrialized
| farming productivity, but you don't expect every individual
| to know how to resolve that
| berkes wrote:
| I doubt even the lack of industrialized farming
| productivity will "kill billions".
|
| It will certainly switch diets and most probably cause
| hunger and malnutrition for some time. But we can support
| billions of people, given the right diets. We cannot
| support billions of people's mcnuggets, beef burgers or
| cornflakes with milk. About a third of my food comes from
| stuff I make, grow and harvest myself. I can up that, if
| I need, but preparing, growing and harvesting are a
| hobby, not a full-time endeavor. I'm certain I can't up
| it to 100%. Maybe not even 50%. But some neighbor,
| friends and family can help out (and I them) and I'm
| certain with some ~100 people we could be self-
| sufficient. Sober, sure. But not dead.
|
| (I would die from lack of insulin within months, though.
| TII. So I am aware of how dependent on industry and high
| tech I am)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > About a third of my food comes from stuff I make, grow
| and harvest myself.
|
| 1/3rd of value or flavour is relatively easy. 1/3rd of
| protein or calories is a lot harder.
|
| Need those mechanized 2000ac farms growing corn, canola
| or wheat to supplement the homegrown
| tomatoes/potatoes/peppers/herbs/apples. But it's
| impressive what can be done with a somewhat small
| backyard in terms of value/flavour and not a lot of
| effort.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| No, without industrial scale fertilizer production, there
| is no way to grow enough food for our current population.
| Natural processes simply can't fix nitrogen fast enough.
| The main reason populations started exploding in the
| 19-20th century was because we found a way to produce
| nitrogen fertilizer in absurd quantities very cheaply.
|
| If that link in our global industrial chain breaks, a
| _lot_ of people will die. We can, of course, still grow
| food, but not anywhere near as much and it will take a
| _lot_ more care and attention to not deplete all
| available soil in a generation or two.
|
| In a hypothetical apocalyptic scenario, we might lose a
| lot of institutional knowledge about agriculture. It's
| not hard to imagine some average joes trying to farm the
| wrong way and accidentally starting another Dust Bowl.
| After all, that's how it happened the first time.
|
| Feeding 8 billion people is so, so much more complicated
| than just putting some plants in the ground. That we can
| do it at all is an absolute miracle of technology. We
| simply could not do it with only naturally available
| resources. Not by a long shot.
| lxgr wrote:
| That concern must be about as old as agricultural societies
| at this point. Specialization and division of labor really is
| nothing new.
| blueflow wrote:
| If only tech was at the point where it would be as reliable
| as your local supermarket or your house.
|
| When i'll leave for family home later, i'll take my laptop
| with me. My family is big, so the chances are high that i'll
| need to run some ADB or photorec on a SD card. I hate it[1].
| There is some knowledge/reliability deficit with computers
| that houses/heatings/food aquisition dont have.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HvtEhxINvQ
| q0uaur wrote:
| from my experience, heating has plenty of reliability
| deficit, probably getting way worse in recent years. fancy
| boilers with computers in them break way more often than
| they have any right to.
| brewtide wrote:
| Agreed. Likely in the search of efficiency, which
| oftentimes brings complexity, which then involves more
| precision or more pieces to a puzzle, or both.
|
| There is something to be said about the dead simple ways
| of things for sure, and all depending on object/item but
| a "sweet spot" where something is pretty darn efficient
| yet not overly complex.
|
| Our endless forwards towards "the most efficient"
| everything always carries consequences. People / society
| included.
| pixl97 wrote:
| More people at least knowing and having some practice with
| these things makes communities more antifragile.
|
| At our current rate of consolidation and specialization we're
| going to get to the point where so few people know how to do
| particular high tech things we may be at risk of someone
| taking those people out and leaving a massive capability hole
| across multiple industries.
| blueflow wrote:
| > risk of someone taking those people out
|
| Or just burnout, changing jobs or them leaving tech
| alltogether. I'd argue that many companies are already
| incapable of keeping their tech stack running as intended
| due to knowledge deficits.
| q0uaur wrote:
| we've done it to ourselves, by embracing MASSIVE
| complexity at every turn to get the fancy new features.
|
| i keep thinking about how we don't actually need 95% of
| the code running at my job to actually accomplish my
| company's goals. it's insane how we just kept going with
| the flow while features and maintenance effort exploded.
|
| that said, anyone know how well the BSD's work as a
| desktop operating system? mostly worried about hardware i
| guess, since it's already an issue on linux from time to
| time. but man the linux ecosystem, while wonderful,
| suffers from massive complexity too, or at least it looks
| more and more like it the longer i use it.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Yeah water and sunlight is too much for anyone to comprehend.
| Don't pretend that someone couldn't learn it in a weekend.
|
| Plant seeds
|
| Water
|
| Sunlight
|
| Pick weeds
|
| Wait
| BytesAndGears wrote:
| Did you forget a /s ?
|
| Growing food is much harder than that.
|
| Growing a few tomatoes or something is easy. But growing
| enough food to sustain yourself and your family is much
| more involved and requires a lot of training and
| experience.
|
| Most people could likely do it. But it would take them 3-5
| years of failures before they could reliably grow enough
| food for themselves. Probably more on the scale of a whole
| family.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Growing food year round for your entire family is quite
| literally impossible unless you have acres of land.
| vik0 wrote:
| Why do you think it takes that much land to feed an
| entire (average[1]) family?
|
| Besides plants, you could have animals, and get milk and
| meat from them. Chickens for eggs and meat too.
|
| It doesn't take too much land for it in my opinion. And
| if you live in a community that does that sort of thing,
| you could trade meat for tomatoes, and vice versa, or
| whatever, without relying on megacorps to give you your
| calories
|
| Localism is the way
|
| [1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-
| size-of-h...
| sokoloff wrote:
| My gut feeling (before searching) was that it would take
| around 2 acres to feed a person. Searching for data, it
| seems like estimates ranged from 1-3 acres per person,
| meaning that feeding an entire family would quite
| literally take acres of land.
| vik0 wrote:
| Can you link your source/s?
| sokoloff wrote:
| Here's the google search I used:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+land+is+needed+t
| o+f...
|
| None of them I found credibly suggested less than an acre
| per person.
| vik0 wrote:
| Alright, thanks
| kefabean wrote:
| There's a widely quoted myth that the UK's 'dig for
| victory' campaign during WWII deemed a standard allotment
| plot (~250m2) sufficient to feed a family of 4.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Or how a car works. I am always surprised that a lot of young
| people have no idea how many cylinders their car has or how
| to do an oil change, never mind any real repair.
| throwaway3090 wrote:
| Although, maybe that's ok. My car has 0 cylinders and
| doesn't require oil changes.
| loughnane wrote:
| My nephew, a sharp kid who started his freshman year at college
| in September, saw me working on my computer a year ago.
|
| He asked what I was doing and I said, "making a website". He
| asked, reasonably, how do you do that?
|
| Not wanting to get into details I said "it's just writing some
| files that chrome can then read". He asked, "what's a file"?
|
| I told him, but I was floored. He's not every kid, but it's had
| me thinking about how younger folks (I'm 38) will see
| computers.
| asveikau wrote:
| What is he studying? I feel like a lot of older people in non
| technical fields, even if they work with files, could not
| reason through exactly how to define a file.
| loughnane wrote:
| Went to a trade high school, the usual classes but a focus
| on carpentry.
| walteweiss wrote:
| Everything is a file!
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| You're a file.
| walteweiss wrote:
| I'm a file. You're a file. Everything is a file!
| adolph wrote:
| What is your definition of a file?
|
| Does it include bundles of files?
|
| What metadata does it include?
|
| Can it exist in more than one place? When a file is opened,
| is the file what is in processor and cache/RAM or what gets
| serialized to some persistent media?
|
| Metaphorically, is a file a sheet of paper or folded tan
| cardstock that holds many sheets of paper?
|
| Is a file unitary or can it contain other files? Is a
| directory a file? Is a link? Is a device a file?
| asveikau wrote:
| I mean, a file is an abstraction of several of the
| choices you are asking about in these questions, and
| different people will answer different things. ps. I've
| worked on filesystem drivers...
| rolph wrote:
| perhaps writing the -apps, and -data, for the site, might
| have more signifigant meaning [despite not being entirely
| correct] relating to a mobile context.
| koolba wrote:
| Has he never copied a _file_ to a usb stick? Or emailed an
| attachment? I don't understand how this is possible.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| If your whole computer life is using Safari or clicking
| apps, then yes, you might not ever see a "file".
| bo1024 wrote:
| Phone and Chromebook. Kids through highschool might never
| see anything else. Assignments are in google drive, etc.
| adolph wrote:
| Gdrive still has a concept of files and directories. It
| is kind of primitive in that way.
| smeej wrote:
| It does, but using it is really optional. It works
| equally well if you leave everything in the default Drive
| directory and use search to find whatever you need.
|
| If you're not used to thinking in terms of files, it just
| looks like a list of your most recent documents, with a
| search bar to find anything else.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I just read through the circa 2010 retrospective on how
| the Drive team tried to come up with their brand. 99% of
| the concepts were very based on the traditional physical
| idioms of files, mechanical hard disks, etc. iCloud was
| released midway through the project and so then they
| started making "cloud file" and "cloud disk" concepts. It
| was nearly an accident they ended up with an abstract
| shape like Chrome. But ultimately Google Drive icon has
| stood the test of time while files and disks have faded
| in to history.
| loughnane wrote:
| I gather most of his use was on his phone and a school-
| issued chromebook
| moritonal wrote:
| Course they have. But to them they see it as sharing the
| state of the app rather than saving and loading data.
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| Kids don't really use email these days, or usb sticks. They
| share more than we ever did, but directly via apps or
| mobile which doesn't work with "files". It seems reasonable
| in this case the thing missing is the abstraction of a
| "file". Think of how your phone works, you share pictures,
| video, text, posts, etc. but never files. Sharing to email
| is my phone's 5th or 6th priority option. It comes after a
| boatload of social media options, messaging, online
| storage, even some sort of AWS application I've never even
| launched.
| twothamendment wrote:
| I can answer for my kids. Everything they do is in the
| cloud and accessible on any device. I'm not sure they'd
| understand why anyone would want a thumb drive.
|
| As for attachments on emails, they don't (even for a 100%
| online highschool). To turn in a paper they can just hit
| "share" and select their teacher.
|
| Files and filesystems are almost dead to them. There is a
| little hope... My son googled to learn why a game was going
| slow and answers indicated he should delete the temp files.
| That was his first experience needing the file explorer.
|
| As someone who grew up with DOS and turned in CS homework
| on a floppy disk, it is almost hard to watch.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The death of the floppy disk has been nice to watch
| though.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I haven't used a USB stick in years as a tech person and
| virtually all my day to day document processing is in the
| cloud. It wouldn't surprise me if the person in question
| does know what a file is, but doesn't work with them enough
| as files to really get it.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| I think your nephew is the exception, not the rule.
| ace2358 wrote:
| I'm not sure kids, especially recently born ones will 'see'
| computers. In the same way that most people don't 'see' the
| abundant ressources around us. Air, water taps, power, cars,
| internet etc. These things will always have been there. Most
| children's have a rectangle with multiple circles on it
| pointing at them from their first hour on earth.
| tetris11 wrote:
| The concept of a file itself is pretty interesting in itself
| though, as this buffer that lives on disk and is referenced
| to indirectly. In Linux, everything is a file. In Emacs,
| everything is a buffer, and then maybe a file.
| Levitz wrote:
| Sure, the concept of file itself is an abstraction.
|
| It's a whole different thing to use an abstraction in order
| to make something understandable and to just handwave
| everything technical about it. It's not just a different
| thing.
| mavhc wrote:
| Has he never filed paper in a filing cabinet?
|
| Our abstractions are out of date.
|
| I managed my own file system by writing down tape counter
| numbers on the cardboard cover of the cassette tape.
| ptek wrote:
| A workmate (I do labouring and was doing traffic control that
| day) brought her teenage son a PS5. I don't know why parents
| would purchase consoles for their children as you don't learn
| any transferable skills (I guess you could be a streamer).
|
| I'm not saying being a sadist and give the kid a second hand
| laptop with *BSD because then the kid will want nothing to do
| with computers, especially if the laptop is cheap and doesn't
| have a working driver support (This is where Linux is better
| from my personal experience).
|
| This is also why I like HTML, I got a free internet CD with
| Netscape Navigator in 1996 when I was 12 and the three
| working examples (two with Netscape Navigator and one was a
| html email with Netscape Mail and News client) I had, I was
| able to play around with and create and learn basic HTML
| until I got a modem in 1998.
| dpig_ wrote:
| > I don't know why parents would purchase consoles for
| their children as you don't learn any transferable skills
|
| It's plausible that parents may just want their children to
| enjoy some leisure? To not feel like every experience in
| childhood should be preparation for labour?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| As a child, I was disappointed when I got a BBC B instead
| of a Megadrive. But I definitely learned more, and some
| of my leisure time was programming in BBC Basic.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Parent comment has big "alpha grindset" energy. Like they
| hadn't considered the concept of "toys".
| WWLink wrote:
| In my own anecdotal experience, if you are a computer
| gamer, you miss out on all the "console exclusive" stuff.
| Stuff like Gran Tourismo or the latest Kingdom Hearts or
| Final Fantasy or whatever. I can't really remember. Then
| when it is a game everyone plays, it tends to be something
| where the console gamers can't play with the PC gamers so
| it's like
|
| "Hey I just got the new counterstrike!"
|
| "Oh that's awesome! I have that too! We should play
| sometime!"
|
| "Yea what's your PS5 handle?"
|
| "My what?"
|
| "You don't have a PS5?"
|
| "Nah I have a PC"
|
| and yea.....
|
| That is my anecdotal experience though, and it was always
| bolstered by the benefits of PC gaming - cheaper games,
| ample mods, lots of sales, and the biggest game library of
| any platform. Plus better performance. And I could text
| chat on my keyboard while playing Quake 3 back then haha.
| Sadly text chat in games has died off as an art, in favor
| of voice chat and all the problems voice chat comes with.
| lol.
|
| Edit: And of course, the PC is a tool, the game console is
| just a dumb appliance.
| obmelvin wrote:
| There are many people in tech industry who began to learn
| about coding precisely because of video games. Age of
| Empires II was essentially the first gateway to my career.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| It was my gateway to a lifelong love of history and
| cultures.
| guyomes wrote:
| > you don't learn any transferable skills
|
| Actually, playing video games is an activity that let you
| practice real-time thinking. Other activities with real-
| time thinking include music instruments, sports and social
| interactions. By real-time thinking, I mean an activity
| that requires you to think and act within short timelapses.
| It appears also that activities involving real-time
| thinking can be quite fun, and few course in schools
| involve real-time thinking.
|
| Now, learning new languages like html or how to fine-tune
| LLM can be quite fun. Learning how to draw nice pictures,
| or how to write nice books can be quite fun too. It's nice
| to let children explore different activities (or free
| internet CD if we speak about 1996) so that they can find
| the ones that resonate with their inner motivations.
| westurner wrote:
| K12 CS Framework only mentions "file" 4 times:
| https://k12cs.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/09/K%E2%80%9312-CS...
|
| Computer file: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_file
|
| File system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I totally relate to this, but from the exact opposite
| perspective. I'm old-school, everything is a "file" to me.
| It's still weird to me that modern tools have abstracted away
| from "files" to just data. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just
| so different than how I came up.
| bfung wrote:
| It's ok, lots of "normal" folks today don't really know what
| a file is either. They just know it's an icon you can drag
| around.
|
| The kid at least asks questions!
| lxgr wrote:
| On the other hand, single-board computers are now both more
| capable and more affordable than ever, and arguably more open
| than most of the WIntel PCs I cut my teeth on (at least until I
| got my own and installed Linux on it).
| arnaudsm wrote:
| The UX of entry level laptops is terrible. Windows 11 +
| vendor bloatware are poisoning the well, I completely get why
| people are going iPad-only
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| except the ease and frictionless experience of iPads and
| most phones, combined with curated ecosysmtems of apps,
| means you never have to see how the sausage is made, or
| learn how to make your own
| bsder wrote:
| > Abstractions are comfortable
|
| No, those abstractions are _invisible_.
|
| Most teenagers simply don't understand that a phone and a
| tablet and a desktop and a laptop and a cloud server are all
| _computers_. They don 't understand that an app and a web page
| and that thing you install on a desktop are all _programs_.
|
| As soon as you educate them such that those abstractions become
| visible, the questions start to flow naturally.
| Dolototo wrote:
| I don't think we were ever normal.
|
| The entry barrier got so much lower with learning overall.
|
| Humans just don't care in avg how shit works.
| baz00 wrote:
| Yeah just teaching my 17 year old to torrent stuff. That was a
| learning curve and a half for her. So you don't know what File
| Explorer is?
| HankB99 wrote:
| Tomorrow I'll strike a blow for this. I got my (12 year old)
| grandson a Pi 5 for Christmas. I plan to spend as much time as
| he'll allow on-boarding and hopefully he'll learn the
| fundamentals. At the very least he'll need to learn how to open
| a terminal and launch the Docker container that runs a
| Minecraft server. :) There are other things that are included
| with the full RpiOS install that he can explore as well, like
| Scratch, Mathematica and Wolfram. And a few games that I tried
| and are absolutely horrible.
|
| His father, my son, earns a pretty good living writing code
| (and now managing a group that does this) and should be highly
| motivated to assist with motivation.
| throwaway3090 wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
|
| "Take their phones away and get 'em on Windows 98."
|
| That seems unnecessarily cruel though.
| mrmattyboy wrote:
| I completely get this - got my first "server" at 11 and a ex-dc
| "real" server at 13 from ebay after I got my first job.
|
| Really glad people are still doing this! (I learned a lot from
| getting PS5 PCs from the local dump, which now don't sell
| electronics and now "retro" PCs are becoming more and more
| expensive - I wasn't sure if this ability for kids to buy a cheap
| PC and tinker (which may or may not help lead to feeling
| comfortable moving on to running their own servers etc.)
| twbarr wrote:
| My first real "server hardware" was a Sparcstation 5 I bought
| under a bridge at the Dallas first Saturday swap meet. I was
| maybe... 15? Before that, it was Linux on whatever commodity PC
| my dad had passed down to me. Running Linux on that
| Microchannel-based PS/2 was a bitch and a half for a 5th
| grader.
|
| I had _absolutely_ no idea what I was doing, but I feel like my
| general comfort with diving into things where I still have no
| idea what I'm doing started then and there.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I had a server in my room at 13 :)
|
| It's cause I wanted a Linux box to host Minecraft servers on,
| that didn't take up resources on my main computer. It ended up
| serving the purpose rather well.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| But they should. Imagine something like a Helm in every household
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Imagine the hearing damage having a server in your room would
| bring (speaking as someone who got tinitus from a defective
| Toshiba laptop harddrive)
| timcobb wrote:
| When I was a young teenager in the 90s, the thing that blew my
| mind when I got my first computer was that it turned out that
| _all computers were servers_. The computer didn't need to be in a
| rack form factor, or expensive, or any of that. It just needed
| Winsock, TCP/IP, and that was it! My computer was the same as any
| other computer on the Internet.
|
| So, while this post is cool, I wish there was less emphasis on
| the hardware, which is pretty irrelevant for running a Node-base
| app and serving it to the Internet. You also don't need a static
| IP--you just need to figure out dynamic DNS :).
| foresto wrote:
| I _prefer_ non-server-class machines for purposes like this.
| Modern single-board computers make very capable home servers,
| and are far smaller, quieter, cheaper, and less power-hungry.
| fwmcbumcrumble wrote:
| Servers piss away power at idle because they're not designed
| for low idle power consumption.
|
| I personally just a regular PC desktop because I need the
| expansion slots. But SFF PCs are amazing home servers, and
| have more than enough power for what you actually need.
|
| Also don't forget laptops. They're designed from the group up
| to be efficient AND have a built in UPS. My home server for
| the longest time was an old laptop with 32 gigs of ram (back
| when that was a huge amount).
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Now, dynamic DNS is not something to worry about but CGNAT
| timcobb wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, I'd never heard of that.
|
| That would be transparent for me as a subscriber, though? I
| imagine the packets are routed to my cable modem based on
| some other identified like a MAC?
| mcfedr wrote:
| CGNAT means you don't have an internet routable IP, so you
| have no way of hosting something anyone can access without
| some external proxy, such as cloudflare or tailscale
| timcobb wrote:
| Oh so it's just like home NAT, and they won't let me port
| for ward
| foresto wrote:
| It's more complicated than that.
|
| https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-
| works#concernin...
| kraftman wrote:
| I really enjoyed reading this because it was so similar to how I
| got into the field. I felt myself reading about you running
| windows and going 'oh wait until you discover ubuntu, oh you
| did!', reading about all the services and going 'oh wait until
| you discover docker, oh you did!', 'nginx, oh i should tell him
| about openresty! wait hes using it!'
|
| Great job in getting so stuck in and teaching yourself so much,
| it took me until 26 to get to where you're at now!
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| I had rack mount equipment running in my house for a while; not
| sure how he sleeps with it in his bedroom. The best part of the
| "cloud" was getting all those boat anchors out of my life.
| a-dub wrote:
| 1200 baud modem on an atari st at age 6, building pcs by age 9,
| seller's permit to buy computer parts at cost at age 10,
| turbo/borland c at age 11 (also some vb and mark williams
| coherent, but we don't talk about that) slip and slackware at age
| 12, dug trench for phone line and full-time bbs up at age 13,
| first software job at 15.
| usernamed7 wrote:
| I didn't ever have servers in my room... i kept them in the
| basement! I had a PBX running asterisk for the house landline, a
| file server, a monitoring server, and a few sandbox boxes. All
| old PII/PIII machines. My PBX called me (on my cisco desk phone)
| every morning to wake me up, and made me answer some basic math
| questions or else it called back. I sometimes forget how much i
| was up to with technology and linux.
| alexpotato wrote:
| I bought an old rackmount server from a colleague who had in turn
| bought a bunch in an auction.
|
| I lived in New York City at the time and had to physically carry
| the server for about 20 blocks home from the train station. The
| entire way home I though "Man, this thing is HEAVY"
|
| I then got home, plugged it in and realized it was LOUD. I though
| "I know, I'll disconnect all the fans". Turns out even with all
| of the fans disconnected it was still the loudest thing in the
| apartment.
|
| I ended up ditching that server and just buying a refurbished
| small form factor HP desktop machine. That worked great, was
| quiet and ran find until a Hurricane Sandy related power surge
| fried it.
| westurner wrote:
| Smartphone in hand, but no Raspberry Pi experience, no server
| anywhere
| bastawhiz wrote:
| My first "server" was my dad's old PC, which was moved to the
| basement and given an 802.11b PCI card so that it could connect
| to the internet. I pirated a cracked copy of Windows Server 2003
| from eDonkey to install on it and built an ASP.Net website in VB.
| I wanted a domain name, so I used a dynamic DNS client to set my
| .TK domain to point at my home's IP (with port forwarding on the
| router--running on 8080 since Verizon blocked 80), updating every
| ten minutes.
|
| I learned so much from the experience. If I was a kid today, I'm
| not sure I'd run a server in my home, though. For as much as I
| learned, there's far more that you can do and learn running code
| on other people's computers. I spent so much time trying to get
| the thing to just _run_ in the first place that I missed out on
| learning and doing a lot of the things that having the damn thing
| in the first place would have enabled.
|
| For two years, I taught a class of high school students how to
| make websites. We used Glitch, and I'm still consistently amazed
| at how much you can do with very little to get started. I can
| only wonder what I'd have created if I had what kids today have.
| hateful wrote:
| You should know that a lot of IKEA coffee tables and shelves are
| the exact width of a equipment rack. You can buy ~$8 rails and
| turn that table into a rack for that server. though the weight
| may be an issue.
|
| Edit: found one example: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/14/lack-
| rack-ikeas-cheapest-t...
| grimgrin wrote:
| I love your enthusiasm, varun, and how you're chasin the things
| that exhilarate you. uni will probably do excellent things for
| your curiosity, best wishes
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