Most good trackers can be used completely free of charge. But you have to work your way up to them, proving yourself as worthy on a lower tier tracker.

There are plenty of guides on this. Most recommend starting with an open interview on RED or MAM, then using the invite forums once you qualify.

You can also watch for open sign-ups. TL opens its doors a few times per year (and usually during December), and it’s at least as good as the public trackers. Sometimes these have invite forums, but usually not. TL does not.

You will, however, want to spend money on a VPN with port forwarding. This should run ~$30/year.

I feel like this is the type of comment that, were it posted to one of the big sites, would’ve gotten reposted to the rest of them. Not unlike the original meme.

A couple years ago when it was fresh, my employer was hit by the massive price hikes (initially quoted somewhere around 700-800%). They primarily explored Nutanix. Between negotiations with VMware and the lackluster offerings from Nutanix, they determined it was actually cheaper to stay on VMware.

I am not in that area, so I don’t have a lot of additional details, other than it’s a large enterprise with multiple data centers.

What did you switch to?

Have you asked them why they don’t use it? It may be something as simple as missing content, or it might be the UI they don’t like.

To me, this seems like a security flaw in Chromium. Websites should not be able to access any of it (yes, even just the extensions) regardless of what code they’re running.

Not great for LinkedIn, but a critical failure of Chromium.

This is highly dependent on what your needs are and how you plan to solve it. SATA-3 maxes at 6gbit, which SAS-2 had in 2009. Most cards are x8, and have at least 4 full speed SAS lanes (of whatever generation). That means 24 Gbit. PCIe x8 2.0 (from 2007) had 4 GB (32 Gbit). So if that meets your needs, you can run it on an ancient board.

However, if you need something more advanced, such as SAS-3, a SAS expander, or a card with more native lanes, then you would need to plan accordingly.

I’ve been running on an LSI 9211-4i4e, which is only a PCIe 2.0 card, for many years. I did notice my speeds dropped when I expanded the 4e to a 15-bay DAS (plus the 4 internal SATA drives), but it’s still enough to meet my needs.

It’s not really about 24/7, but it is about quality of components. Enterprise gear is made using slightly better parts and tighter tolerances. Things like more expensive capacitors rated for more hours/cycles, better power filters, things like that.

The end result (and this is easily verified) is the failure rate is much, much lower than comparable consumer-grade equipment.

There is sometimes a blurry line between what counts as enterprise vs pro-sumer vs consumer gear, though.

If you can use SAS (you’ll need a SAS PCIe card, roughly $50 used), get SAS drives. They are enterprise-grade exclusively, there is a massive supply of used drives as servers get refreshed, and a very limited secondhand market because most people can’t use SAS drives.

You won’t get the latest or largest drives, but you’ll get something that works perfectly fine for home use.

I recommend against Go Hard Drives. They get drives that previously failed but currently test ok, then wipe the SMART data. I had a whopping 133% failure rate (all 3 original, plus 1 replacement) before I returned the whole thing.

If you insist on using them, do the most extensive burn-in testing you possibly can. I would use at least a full week, to make sure it’s actually (semi-) reliable.

Something tells me the demographics don’t overlap very much. I’m betting that most people going to a club already have and use a Facebook account. Unless there’s a massive cultural difference among young adults in Australia.

Are they from China/Chinese clients? A number of these are modified to never seed, so they always show as having 0%.

I left them years ago, but their VPN software has (had?) a critical bug - the killswitch treats “connecting” the same as “connected”.

Meaning that if the connection drops for any reason and is not immediately reestablished, you not only lose all protection, but you have a false sense of security.

Kind of. They will be multiples of 4. Let’s say you got a gigantic 8i8e card, albeit unlikely. That would (probably) have 2 internal and 2 external SAS connectors. Your standard breakout cables will split each one into 4 SATA cables (up to 16 SATA ports if you used all 4 SAS ports and breakout cables), each running at full (SAS) speed.

But what if you were running an enterprise file server with a hundred drives, as many of these once were? You can’t cram dozens of these cards into a server, there aren’t enough PCIe slots/lanes. Well, there are SAS expansion cards, which basically act as a splitter. They will share those 4 lanes, potentially creating a bottleneck. But this is where SAS and SATA speeds differ- these are SAS lanes, which are (probably) double what SATA can do. So with expanders, you could attach 8 SATA drives to every 4 SAS lanes and still run at full speed. And if you need capacity more than speed, expanders allow you to split those 4 lanes to 24 drives. These are typically built into the drive backplane/DAS.

As for the fan, just about anything will do. The chip/heatsink gets hot, but is limited to the ~75 watts provided by the PCIe bus. I just have an old 80 or 90mm fan pointing at it.

The one I had would frequently drop the drives, wreaking havoc on my (software) RAID5. I later found out that it was splitting 2 ports into 4 in a way that completely broke spec.

I don’t want to speak to your specific use case, as it’s outside of my wheelhouse. My main point was that SATA cards are a problem.

As for LSi SAS cards, there’s a lot of details that probably don’t (but could) matter to you. PCIe generation, connectors, lanes, etc. There are threads on various other homelab forums, truenas, unraid, etc. Some models (like the 9212-4i4e, meaning it has 4 internal and 4 external lanes) have native SATA ports that are convenient, but most will have a SAS connector or two. You’d need a matching (forward) breakout cable to connect to SATA. Note that there are several common connectors, with internal and external versions of each.

You can use the external connectors (e.g. SFF-8088) as long as you have a matching (e.g. SFF-8088 SAS-SATA) breakout cable, and are willing to route the cable accordingly. Internal connectors are simpler, but might be in lower supply.

If you just need a simple controller card to handle a few drives without major speed concerns, and it will not be the boot drive, here are the things you need to watch for:

• MUST be LSi, but it can be rebranded LSi. This includes certain cards from Dell and IBM, but not all.
• Must support Initiator Target (IT) mode. The alternative is Initiator RAID (IR) mode. This is nearly all, since most can be flashed to IT mode regardless
• Watch for counterfeits! There are a bunch of these out there. My best advice is to find IT recyclers on eBay. These cards are a dime a dozen in old, decommissioned servers. They’re eager to sell them to whomever wants them.

Also, make sure you can point a fan at it. They’re designed for rackmount server chassis, so desktop-style cases don’t usually have the airflow needed.

To anyone reading, do NOT get a PCIe SATA card. Everything on the market is absolute crap that will make your life miserable.

Instead, get a used PCIe SAS card, preferably based on LSi. These should run about $50, and you may (depending on the model) need a $20 cable to connect it to SATA devices.

I did this back in the days of Smoothwall, ~20 years ago. I used an old, dedicated PC, with 2 PCI NICs.

It was complicated, and took a long time to setup properly. It was loud and used a lot of power, and didn’t give me much beyond the standard $50 routers of the day (and is easily eclipsed by the standard $80 routers of today). But it ran reliably for a number of years without any interaction.

I also didn’t learn anything useful that I could ever apply to something else, so ended up just being a waste of time. 2/10, spend your time on something more useful.

Intel’s future hasn’t been looking great, for a bunch of reasons, unrelated to Trump.

I’m not saying you should avoid it (“Be greedy when others are fearful”), but you should really make sure you understand what you’re getting into.

The big caveat is that the BIOS must allow it, and most released versions do not.