Where and when else could you mail $1 to Rolling Stone's original hq and have them send you a longer Bob Dylan interview, and then on the opposite side, the publisher reveals their costs?
Without lights-out management, eventually physical access to power cycle will be needed.
For systems people care about, they already have BMC (Supermicro), iLO (HP), iDRAC (Dell) controllers.
Anything that can capture HDMI and spit it securely over a wire without some cloud-dependency bullshit, present "virtual USB" or input over the network, and close a RST circuit momentarily would do the job. The problem is, in the name of consumerishism and convenience, none of these home-gamer "solutions" have been independently audited that I know of by any reputable firm. (A competitor, NanoKVM, is known to be shady AF downloading serialized binary crap. It talks to tailscale without user permission, communication, or approval. Never use it for anything.) Don't trust something simply because there's press release or social media hype about it. I have to endure constant Cloudflare CAPTCHAs because it's probable that a large fraction of other customers on my ISP have pwned IoT (cameras, doorbells, whizbang startup weather station, etc.) DDoSing and hacking the rest of the world.
PSA: For the love of the sysadmin gods, please don't use desktops as servers. ECC RAM, HA, duty cycle, lights out management, and vendor support are completely different beasts compared to retail gear.
For non-lights-out, host-based remote desktop that can be self-hosted, RustDesk is able to work locally without relaying to any clouds. And using WG (non-TS) for "VPN"/remote network bridging, that's a pretty compelling option. I haven't yet checked if it can work in an air-gapped environment but I think it might work; but if it doesn't, that would be sad.
Can you elaborate further on the security concerns of NanoKVM?
I also fundamentally disagree on your implication that one should "never" use desktops as servers, it all depends on your needs and what trade-offs make sense for your situation.
I've been doing this for decades for a basic home server (essentially, for Plex, a personal Minecraft server and a couple of other minor things for my home) in combination with a backup strategy. I guess I've been lucky that I've never had data loss, but if it packed up tomorrow taking all data with it, it wouldn't be a big deal for me.
If I had used a full server, it would have been noisier, more expensive and possibly more power hungry. The amount of money I haven't spent at this point is very substantial.
Since there's no independent audit of these and no way to prove that these aren't being intercepted, I wouldn't be bragging about voluntarily installing potential infrastructure vulnerabilities.
They are firewalled and can only communicated with other devices on the LAN. We use the other systems on the LAN to jump to the KVMs. No simple infrastructure attack is possible.
Yes* most of the time. The purpose is the Pentagon doesn't want adversaries or anyone else getting their hands on classified gear or aircraft systems because it's basically flying around with a datacenter nowadays. If it's in deep water, NAVSEA may bust out FADOSS gear and make it a OJT exercise for junior recovery personnel.
Missed opportunity to discuss GSHPs and instead pushes electric HPs because it's a business blog masquerading as a .org to push product.
And also, contractors and maintenance shops push products that minimize their costs and maximize their profits. It's also why private equity owns effectively every high voltage motor capacitor manufacturer in the US and why those capacitors have such short lives now. It's not about minimizing TCO, it's about maximizing customer dependency upon service and parts without seeming there is any other choice balanced with the stochastic equilibrium of potentially more reliable alternatives threatening this "cottage" industry.
PS: clean your coils, change your air filters (without excessive MERV flow restriction), surge protect ECMs, and check your caps.
Correction: a sphere has infinite faces so it's not an "convex poloyhedron [sic]." A convex polyhedron must have finite faces, so apeirotopes aren't allowed.
If you've already managed to assert your boundaries and they've failed to respect them, then your boss is failing to listen, do their job, and maybe simply there to collect a paycheck and follow the path of least resistance rather than have a backbone.
Try to have them see the light or you'll need to find somewhere else to be for your own sanity. Maybe bring your boss a copy of the No *sshole Rule by Prof. Sutton.
Never put up with excessive toxicity because silence gives consent and your feet vote. Just as there are many other workers, there are many other jobs.
Yes, I am disappointed with my manager, especially given the number of times and the insistence with which I've raised this. It's clear to me both that he's afraid how this will reflect on him to his manager, and he's afraid of how the other engineer will react. He wants to keep the peace, which means me just sucking this up.
I don't want to leave this job unless I've exhausted all other possibilities. With this exception, it's great.
But the thing for your manager is, if you leave because he didn't handle this, that will also reflect badly on him. And it sounds like leaving because of this is a real option for you. You wouldn't just be saying it to blackmail your manager - you're really thinking that you may have to leave because of this.
Sowing the seeds for war with yet another ethnonationalist supremacy signal of separation with NIH. Present day leadership of China, Russia, and Israel (and DPRK too.) are merely echoing American and Third Reich "superpower" expansionist aspirations. Human nature hasn't changed and never will, hence history will always rhyme.
It's interesting that they actually did the work, though.
One alternative way to reduce their dependency on foreign platform vendors would be to blow the existing market up. Coreboot and similar exist, and if they got a state-sized injection of resources, they could reasonably drive vendors like Phoenix and AMI out of the market, leaving behind an ecosystem without any particular dominant player.
There is a solid argument for UEFI being a terrible mess, so if they want to leverage a "remove foreign dependencies" as motivation to make something better, more power to them.
It started with the IBM PC and manual configuration -> PNP -> PCI -> ACPI -> and then finally, UEFI, subsuming ACPI and EFI. It's what happens when something is designed by committee and has to provide backward compatibility, it becomes Turing complete and produces a document 1131 pages long. It's the worst standard that's been tried, except for every other. If it would've been developed for a green field by a smaller committee who cared about simplicity in a different reality then would've been better, but it's what we have that exists here and how.
The issues of forking are: fragmentation, balkanization, and reinventing a wheel that already exists. Microsoft sure a shit ain't going to support it. It makes OS and hardware support for everyone else more difficult. They're locking themselves in and shutting the door to the rest of the world.
If it's so "terrible", then you're free to write your own and get OS and hardware vendors to support it, otherwise you maybe frivolously complaining about reality.
In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others.
...
It is equally evident that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices. Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal.
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We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State. But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.
- Excerpt from James Madison, Federalist 51, 1788
The founders were unable to have conceived of a nation of 340 million, mass media or social media, or politicians beholden to foreign nations, lacking in integrity, and slavishly enriching themselves and their wealthy buddies. This is a system that that refuses to be reformed from within and is essentially completely captured as a play thing for an economic aristocracy. This is merely a pulling back of the curtain of ostensible pretense rather than a change in fundamental nature. It's a big, extra "F U" to everyone not rich.
https://archive.org/details/wholeearthcatalo00unse_7/page/62...
Where and when else could you mail $1 to Rolling Stone's original hq and have them send you a longer Bob Dylan interview, and then on the opposite side, the publisher reveals their costs?
https://archive.org/details/wholeearthcatalo00unse_7/page/12...
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