Quiet. Mostly harmless.
Technology, modern, vintage, hardware, software.
What's wrong with doing the impossible?

Web site: 17c.eu

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Indeed, I have always made sure to buy drives from different brands, different models, different manufacturing batches. Oh, and enterprise grade, as the consumer drives would die like flies.
I still have 2 old drives bought on 2 different continents with serial numbers only a few thousand apart, which died within weeks of each other...

2026-10-19 22:11:29 UTC

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Btw, if you write tapes, always verify you can read the tape on other drives, not just the drive you wrote it on. Don't ask me how I learned that lesson...

2026-10-19 22:09:15 UTC

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With current pricing, LTO only makes sense if you have something like 100+TB of backup data. Older LTO drives are much more affordable, but also lower capacity, so higher cost per byte on tapes.
So I use a lot of disks spread over multiple sites.

2026-10-19 21:20:23 UTC

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To be fair, I gave up on ZFS many years ago when it irretrievably thrashed an entire multi disk file system on a Sun OpenSolaris system. But I would agree that it looks like things aren't getting any better.

2026-10-19 10:41:34 UTC

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I started with some virtual machines. Given recent developments, I have parked the FreeBSD one for now and focus on the NetBSD VM first. I should perhaps also have a look at OpenBSD, even though their AI policy seems a bit less solid than the NetBSD one. Installing on actual hardware is something I'll get to later.
Hardware support appears to be a bit variable, so which one works best for your laptop likely depends on specific hardware details.

2026-10-12 21:36:30 UTC

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I had to check the definition of "native language". Conclusion: By the literal description as given by dictionary.com, German does qualify as that. However, given that it is also considered synonymous to "first language", I am not entirely sure what the actual intent of the dictionary editor was, as I would not consider it my first language...
Generally, the use of the terms "native language" and "first language" in English seems very fuzzy and ill-considered.

2026-10-05 11:38:46 UTC

Yay. I just got hit on the nose by rsync sloprot. Somehow I had avoided it so far. The "don't worry, it's fixed in the next version. Just upgrade" response doesn't fill me with warm fuzzy feelings. I'm now pondering my options. I haven't found a clear obvious safe choice for a slop free fork yet, and switching to another implementation will involve a verification process, and possibly porting of tooling.
Can we please just keep our software working reliably?
#linux #unix

2026-05-30 17:09:50 UTC

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oh, I guess I'm definitely in the self hosting category, running most of my services on my own hardware.
4.3GB is actually surprisingly low. I anticipated needing several TB. I would be looking for peers with a similar interest in keeping the good parts of good old Usenet alive, without the porn, copyright violations, and other nonsense. Been using it since 1987 or so.

2026-05-30 15:53:58 UTC

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interesting. I was just pondering what would be involved in running my own news server again. It's been decades since I last did that. I would rather not depend on a single commercial upstream provider, so I'm wondering if there's still an active (and sensible) peering community to exchange with. I would certainly filter rather rigorously to a set of (mostly spam free) core discussion groups. I can't dedicate 100s of TB of disk space to this...

2026-02-28 19:31:37 UTC

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Oooh, a cathode ray tube...

2025-04-25 20:47:16 UTC

UK: There has never been a country this good at shooting itself in the foot!
US: Hold my beer.
#WorldPolitics