I'm glad I bought the new chassis, the old one was over 10 years old and is going EOL next year. I only use it for file storage and don't expose it to the internet, so the lack of updates is less concerning than it could be. Still...

I could throw some drives in it, use it to back up my "production" (ha!) Synology unit and store it somewhere else for offsite backup.

I've never been a fan of my mail sitting in the cloud, but the benefits outweighed the advantages. Now, I've been concerned about leaving semi-sensitive data out there.

I have a homelab and could spin up a docker or LXC container easily, so I could certainly run another mail server for my other domains. Mailcow looks good, I've seen other all-in-one mail solutions as well.

My Synology NAS even has a pretty decent mail/collaboration app.

I'd like to end up with my email sitting behind my firewall, webmail available through my reverse proxy, and the only data sitting in the cloud being backups in encrypted blobs.

Before then, I'll need to upgrade my internet. Backing up 2TB of data over my 600/20 cable connection would be painfully slow and cost around $100 in overages.

Comcast blocks most SMTP traffic (and I think AT&T still does, too) so I'll need a solution to act as mail exchanger for 2-3 domains and forward them to me on an alternate port.

In the meantime, I could just download my mail from Google via IMAP and delete it from the server as I go.

I ran DSM 6.2 for the better part of two years, then after a power outage the chassis didn't come back.

One nice thing about Synology is their migration process. I bought a new chassis, installed the old drives into the new chassis, ran the system installer, and it recognized the old drives. After an OS upgrade and about 10 minutes, the drives, the pools, and most of the settings carried over.

Not too shabby.

I work out of my home office full-time. I spend a lot of time here, and so I'm used to the way things look - and sound. I was on a video call this week when something felt off. I took off my headphones and heard it.

clunk.

clunk.

One of the drives in my homelab was beginning to fail.

My Proxmox server hosts an Active Directory domain, Windows test environment, LXC containers and Docker containers. It hosts media services, ad blocking and backs up data from my family's computers.

This "homelab" isn't one of those half-racks full of industrial-grade servers in closets you see on YouTube. I assembled mine over the years from end-of-life, unwanted and discounted hardware. My primary server is a laptop purchased on eBay for parts, with screen burn in and missing keys. It did, however, come with 20 GB of RAM. My firewall and NAS came from thrift shops. I'd thought about upgrading it, but it serves my needs well and cost less than a used Dell desktop.

I deactivated the failing drive and replaced it with a spare drive I had laying around. I would have set up a hot-spare, but I needed all of the bays in my NAS.

clunk.

While the NAS drive was beginning to fail, the clunk was coming from an external USB drive used to back up the NAS. The drive was sitting vertically as was designed. I turned it around so the drive lay horizontally, and the noise went away. When I was starting out in IT, we had a superstition about running spinning drives sideways, thinking it could make a head crash easier. Turns out that superstition still lives in the back of my head.

I spent the rest of the afternoon pruning backups, putting a replacement external drive on my Amazon wishlist, and re-routing cables, like you do when you run a homelab.

The event was a discussion with Kevin Driscoll, author of "The Modem world: a Prehistory of Social Media", and danah boyd, author of "It's Complicated".

The event talked a bit about the history of BBSes and contrasted current social networks with the local communities that sprouted up around BBSing.

To me, in a nutshell, BBSing was an exclusive group - not many people had computers, and the onus was on a caller or sysop to buy a modem, get a phone line (or share a line and risk the hazards of doing so...), find terminal software and build a BBS list.

The panel could have been an open discussion - I'm sure many of the people in the crowd were sysops at one time, or even current sysops. Thankfully, they dodged a bullet by avoiding the sys-op/sise-op wars of the 1990s.

I went with 3 sysops/friends of mine from the golden-age of BBSing. Taipan Enigma and Dr. Strangelove started NIRVANAnet(tm), and Zardoz and I were some of the first sysops to join the nascent network. We joked that the panelists missed out on the culture that they were observing.

It was good seeing people I'd spent the 90s conversing with, both online and in person at the user meetups we'd arrange. The idea of going out for beers afterwards was suggested, but I had an hour drive, early work days ahead, babysitters to let go, and so on. Quite unlike the old days when a couple of nights out ended up with staying up all night, posting on BBSes, greasy-spoon diner breakfasts, and going home to nurse a hangover.

Reddit, I may browse -- there are a couple of interesting subreddits I read for technical info and advice. We'll see.

I need to find an RSS feed for news, I realized that I get most of my news from Twitter these days.

1999 was a crazy, interesting time.

I was working in the middle of the first dot-com boom, right in the center of it all. I quit my job at a gaming company for a jump in responsibility and a share of a streaming music startup right in the middle of the Napster mess. I was in the meeting on business deals where we danced around money, because no one was sure who should be paying whom. Do we pay for exposure, or do they pay for content?

There were 3 search engine companies within a couple of blocks of me. Hotwired became the cool new site. Friends at web companies were charging clients like they were attorneys, getting them a presence on that web thing that they didn't understand.

South Park, a little green oasis in the SOMA area of San Francisco became the center of "Multimedia Gulch". Companies that had been focused on CD multimedia moved to web design and creative services.

It all went a little too far. fuckedcompany.com documented some of the excesses, like flake.com, a portal for breakfast cereal lovers, and a company down the street that had their coming out party on a Tuesday and closed the doors on a Thursday.

[oh, the parties - it seemed like someone was getting a round of funding and throwing a party in their converted warehouse/sweatshop space. One of the guys at my startup hosted an email list with all of the "private" parties going on almost nightly in SOMA. The recyclers in the area had a field day with collecting empty beer cans and bottles...]

By mid 2001, the money had started drying up, Aeron chairs and office furniture were available at bargain prices from closed-door dot-coms. 9/11 ended the boom once and for all.

A friend of mine, a San Francisco native, went through his address list in 2002 and realized that two thirds of his contacts had left the city as quickly as they'd come a few years back.

But, it was a good time while it lasted.

I found it...

20 years ago, a kind of daily journal of things I found significant, trivial goings-on, photos I'd shot while working in San Francisco and things I wanted to save in Google's cache lest they dissapear.

Man, that was a long time ago - a whole life ago. Most of the photos are of places that no longer exist, old architecture replaced with new.

I'd love to find a lightweight, supported browser that didn't support any of the bloat that's been added over the years.

Gemini is nice, the markup is simple, but someone complained that it's SSL only. I don't see that as much of an issue, I prefer encrypting everything to make the target data pool larger. Encrypt your shopping list.

That leaves us with Gopher. The markup is a little more difficult, although it would come back to me after decades. It's not encrypted, not a big deal given the content (although, see my previous comment...). When Mozilla took gopher support out of Firefox, I thought that would be the end of it, but I found a Gopher client for Windows - and now I found Lagrange, a cross-platform browser that does Gopher and Gemini, I'm quite happy.

If only it would support basic HTML, I'd have a perfect SMOL WEB browser...

I took a quiet afternoon alone recently to do some homelab housecleaning. Breaking one of my primary rules of homelabbing (don't replace it if it ain't broke) I replaced an 8 port gigabit ethernet switch (saved from a dumpster at work when it wouldn't support 802.1x) with a smart switch that supports VLANs (on sale for 40% off).

Put my Linksys router back in place, running OpenWRT. My plan is to set up a VLAN for a guest/IoT network, a separate VLAN for PCs and media servers and another VLAN for my test Windows network.

After setting all this up, out came the canned air. My NAS sucks in dust like no one's business, so I took it offline, took the drives out and blasted the dust out of it. It's much quieter now.

Then, I replaced my hodgepodge of network cables, all different colors and all too long, with shorter black cables for the lab and color coded cables for uplink to my switches.

Took the back off of my "server", a Lenovo Thinkpad. Replaced the thermal paste and blew the dust out.

After all that, my UPS started beeping and flashing a REPLACE BATTERY warning. Got a new battery in a couple of days later, and APC has a battery recycling program, which means one less dead hardware item lying around.

For a sysadmin, this was a relaxing day.

Better to leave posts as-is, errors and all. This isn't meant to be polished, by any means.

There's a lot to be said for pocketable cameras. With a LOMO, I'd leave the focus at 8-10 feet and in sunny weather (or shooting with ASA 400 film), you'd probably get your subject in focus. Reach in your pocket, shoot, repeat. I've been shooting again with an old Canon digital pocket camera, but it's not quite the same.

With my phone I need to pull it out, unlock it, press the camera app, wait for it to load, then sight and shoot. It's just not the same.

Back in the '90s, having an internet presence meant having a box sitting at your employees colocation facility or if you were lucky, on the end of your home DSL connection. I ran Linux as a firewall, web server and mail server on my home connection, others were into the *BSDs, and one friend of mine ran IIS on a DEC Alpha workstation running Windows NT for MIPS processors. I blogged, had a couple of mailing lists, shared secondary DNS for people who offered secondary DNS for me, and ran Jabber for a short time.

I miss those days where you felt like an active participant in the network, rather than a "consumer" of "services" provided by a couple of players.

I've started to see people running their own Mastodon nodes at home or in the cloud, and it's heartening to see people taking control of their presence again.

There are a ton of options nowadays for a home internet node. A Raspberry Pi can suffice. The old PC you have in your closet could do just as well. Some routers can load OpenWRT software, which turns your proprietary router into an embedded linux system that routes, firewalls and can run small apps like static web servers.

I run realitycheckBBS, a telnettable bulletin-board system I'm run since 1991. With my BBS software, I've got traditional telnet and web-based message boards, mailing lists, file areas via FTP, a functional web server with blogging and templates, news server, mail server and IRC. It's all running on a Windows box, but I could easily move it to Linux and get a standalone web server like NGINX or Apache to more easily build non-BBS web apps.

Running this blog is another guily pleasure. I started off with a daily personal blog in 2000. It varied between being a photblog, a personal blog and a place to store techical information I wanted to save. It's now all photos, and another domain hosts a "brand" site with the technical information from the past and new technical info.

I'm running Blosxom, a web blogging tool I remembered from back in the '90s, when PERL was *the* thing - another guilty, nostalgic pleasure.

Stream-of-consciousness blogs fell by the wayside with Twitter and Facebook, it's nice to buck the trend.

I miss that sense of combining the surroundings with my vision that cameraphones don't seem to capture.

I have a handful of decent digicams from the mid 2000s, a DSLR that currently has a lens focus issue, and 2 prosumer cameras. I'm planning on taking one with me when I go out. The problem is, I need to look harder for subjects. My best photography days happened when I was working in San Francisco; it's a subject-rich environment, from candid people shots to geometric architecture, street abstracts and urban decay are all within a 30 minute lunch walk.

My photography is available at www.kataan.org if anyone's interested.

I took a calculus class in college from a professor who inspired me. He'd grown up in a world where people did calculations by hand, and he saw calculators as tools that would free mathmeticians from grunt work and let them do the theoretical work, the dreaming. He required students to spend a little more and get programmable calculators. We spent the semester getting to know our calculators and getting to use them to do all of our heavy lifting, so to speak.

Before that class, I mostly used computers to play games. After that class, I saw calculators and computers as tools to do the repetitive, error-prone work and started programming in earnest.

I was a poor college student, so I picked the Casio - it was the cheapest option available. Other kids splurged on the HP 41CV or HP 71 calculators, which I would have loved to have. I have an HP 41 emulator on my phone, that's the closest I'll come to one.

The FX-3600p is a lightweight compared to today's graphing calculators - it could store two programs in memory and each was limited to (I think) 38 steps. That was enough to store equations and let you run through several iterations to graph it, saving a ton of time.

It does have its charms, though. The calculator I received arrived in great shape, and the original lithium CR2025 battery is still going strong.

Thought it was time for a cleanout, so I took it apart, vacuumed the heck out of the inside of the case, got the sticky dust off of the cards and the motherboard with a nylon paintbrush. Took the CPU cooler off, dusted off the heatsink, cleaned all of the fans thoroughly. Removed the dried thermal paste with alcohol and cotton swabs, and placed a thin coating of new paste on the CPU. One last blow-out with compressed air, re-assembled the case, fired it up, and now my system is running at 29C.

Not bad for 30 minutes' work.

New computers are a LOT easier to work on than when I started fixing PCs. Remember masses of too-long tangled ribbon cables, multiple ISA cards for IO, and full-height disk drives?

I've typically gotten by with older hardware and gotten a lot of life out of it (10+ years out of a Dell Precision Workstation T3400, 5+ years out of my current Dell Inspiron 3847 desktop) but I'm looking to make a leap with the next desktop system I buy.

I've had SATA-3 SSDs in my desktops for some time, I'm looking for a desktop with NVMe storage - I think they'll be useful for longer than sticking with SATA. TPM would be nice, as Windows 11 will require it.

My current system has a 4th generation i7, it seems that newer i5s will run circles around it. I still would like an i7 at least.

A tower PC case makes more sense - trying to cram another drive into a SFF case is a pain, and I'm always worried about cooling and airflow.

The Dell 7080 looks like a good choice, renewed, they're inexpensive - they can take a lot of memory and support NVNMe.

Many people are working from home exclusively or a couple of days a week as part of a hybrid work environment. With a few tweaks, a home office can do double-duty nicely.

My home office has evolved recently, as I've written about previously. I have a desktop PC with a 34" ultrawide monitor and work laptop with a 14" screen. I want to use the big monitor for everything. I plugged my laptop directly into my monitor's second HDMI port and bought a Logitech MX keyboard and mouse that pair with up to 3 devices. Now, I can use my desktop monitor, keyboard and mouse with either system.

Audio was the next challenge. I started with a pair of headphones on my work laptop and another on my home desktop, but had to switch back and forth, and deal with 2 sets of cables.

I bought a Jabra Elite 45h wireless headset. It's noise isolating, has great battery life, good microphone performance without a boom microphone (I felt so 2000s before!) and it can sync to 2 different devices.

I bought a pair of Creative Pebble V2 desktop speakers mostly for looks and to streamline cabling - they're USB-powered. I had them plugged into my desktop, but realized when switching audio devices that there was a listing for my monitor HDMI connector. I did some poking around behind my monitor and found a 3.5mm headphone jack. Plugged the speakers into my monitor and now I have room audio that plays with the active HDMI connection!

My printers have always been networked, so no office changes were needed to enable me to print from my work laptop.

My only non-shared peripheral is my trusty Logitech C920 webcam many years old and hasn't failed me yet, while providing good 1080p video of my office.

My next challenge? Office lighting.

tilde.chat, the IRC server shared by the other tildes has a fun trivia channel - I'm keeping it running in the background when I work.

On the retro front, I just processed a request for a Fidonet node number from a sysop running a mailer he wrote himself, running on OpenVMS. That's got to be a first, especially since he's writing his mailer from scratch.

I have a couple of friends who ran obsolete, orphaned hardware from a time when computers weren't so boring.

One of them rescued a MIPS-based Windows NT 3.51 system and ran a web site on an old version of IIS for many years past its practical life. Another ran AI/X on an IBM PowerPC desktop system and ran his web site on that for years.

My foray was running a Sun SparcStation 2 with 48 megabytes of RAM. I used that system as a development box and a backup to a Sendmail bastion host for years, reading mail from Exchange in PINE.

I remember trying blosxom when I'd first heard of it, probably about the same 1997-1999 timeframe? It seemed like that's when I remember the first tilde pages and the first web sites owned by real people. I don't think I ever got it running in production, it was probably a little too soon. My first blog attempt was hosted on a Linux box at my house, the content was written on Blogger, and back then, blogger could FTP the static files to your web server. I'd use a Windows app like w.bloggar to write the entry, upload them to Blogger, and Blogger would upload the files to the linux server sitting next to me.

Seemed a little roundabout, but we were happy to be able to serve web pages at all, let alone do it efficiently.