One foot planted in “Yeehaw!” the other in “yuppie”.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’m also on a 7Pro with no issues with WPA3, when it comes to stuff like this, and you’re running a Telco/Cable provided access point, my blame would start there as those things are never the way they’re supposed to be, they run screwed with firmware that you can’t control the updates on and never know if they’re doing everything the way their supposed to or not.

    Wha? Where did I say I was using the ISP provided modem? Oh, no-no. I buy all my equipment outright and my AP is the current top-of-the-line Netgear Docis3.1 modem/router combo.


    I’ve double checked this issue as well. As soon as I enable WPA-3 my pixel just refuses to connect, but no other device in my entire home does. Pretty sure it’s the Pixel somehow.









  • On a technical level, user count matters less than the user count and comment count of the instances you subscribe to. Too many subscriptions can overwhelm smaller instances and saturate a network from the perspective of Packets Per Second and your ISPs routing capacity - not to mention your router. Additionally, most ISPs block traffic traffic going to your house on Port 80 - so you’d likely need to put it behind a cloudflare tunnel for anything resembling reliability. Your ISP may be different and it’s always worth asking what restrictions they have on self-hosted services (non-business use-cases specifically). Otherwise going with your ISP’s business plan is likely a must. Outside of that, yes, you’ll need a beefy router or switch (or multiple) to handle the constant packets coming into your network.

    Then there’s a security aspect. What happens if you’re site is breached in a way that an attacker gains remote execution? Did you make sure to isolate this network from the rest of your devices? If not, you’re in for a world of hurt.

    These are all issues that are mitigated and easier to navigate on a VPS or cloud provider.

    As for the non-technical issues:

    There’s also the problem of moderation. What I mean by that is that, as a server owner you WILL end up needing to quarantine, report, and submit illegal images to the authorities. Even if you use a whitelist of only the most respectable instances. It might not happen soon, but it’s only a matter of time before your instance happens to be subscribed to a popular external community while it gets a nasty attack. Leaving you to deal with a stressful cleanup.

    When you run this on a homelab on consumer hardware, it’s easier for certain government entities to claim that you were not performing your due diligence and may even be complicit in the content’s proliferation. Now, of course, proving such a thing is always the crux, but in my view I’d rather have my site running on things that look as official as possible. The closer it resembles what an actual business might do, the better I think I’d fare under a more targeted attack - from a legal/compliance standpoint.




  • “Your application” - the customers you mean. Our DB definitely does it’s own rate limiting and it emits rate limit warnings and errors as well. I didn’t say we advertised infinite IOPs that would be silly. We are totally aware of the scaling factors there and to date IOPs based scaling is rarely a Sev1 because of it. (Oh no p99 breached 8ms. Time to talk to Mr customer about scaling up soon)

    The problem is that the resulting cluster is so performant that you could load in 100x the amount of data and not notice until the disk fills up. And since these are NVME drives on cloud infrastructure, they are $$$.

    So usually what happens is that the customer fills up the disk arrays so fast that we can’t scale the volumes/cluster fast enough to avoid stop-writes let alone get feedback from the customer in time. And now that’s like the primary reason to get paged these days.

    We generally catch gradual disk space increases from normal customer app usage. Those give us hours to respond and our alerts are well tuned. It’s the “Mr. Customer launched a new app and didn’t tell us, and now they’ve filled up the disks in 1 hour flat.” that I’m complaining about.


  • It is definitely an under provisioning problem. But that under provisioning problem is caused by the customers usually being very very stingy about what they are willing to spend. Also, to be clear, it isn’t buckling. It is doing exactly The thing it was designed to do. Which is to stop writes to the DB since there is no disk space left. And before this time, it’s constantly throwing warnings to the end user. Usually these customers tend to ignore those errors until they reach this stop writes state.

    In fact, we just had to give an RCA to the c-suite detailing why we had not scaled a customer when we should have, but we have a paper trail of them refusing the pricing and refusing to engage.

    We get the same errors, and we usually reach out via email to each of these customers to help project where their data is going and scale appropriately. More frequently though, they are adding data at such a fast clip that them not responding for 2 hours would lead them directly into the stop writes status.

    This has led us to guessing what our customers are going to end up at. Oftentimes being completely wrong and eating to scale multiple times.

    Workload spikes are the entire reason why our database technology exists. That’s the main thing we market ourselves as being able to handle (provided you gave the DB enough disk and the workload isn’t sustained for a long enough to fill the discs.)

    There is definitely an automation problem. Unfortunately, this particular line of our managed services will not be able to be automated. We work with special customers, with special requirements, usually fortune 100 companies that have extensive change control processes. Custom security implementations. And sometimes even no access to their environment unless they flip a switch.

    To me it just seems to all go back to management/c-suite trying to sell a fantasy version of our product and setting us up for failure.


  • That is exactly what we do. The problem is that as a managed service offering. It is on us to scale in response to these alerts.

    I think people are misunderstanding my original post. When I say that customer cluster will go into stop writes, that does not mean it is not functional. It is an entirely intended function of the database so that no important data is lost or overwritten.

    The problem is more organizational. It’s that we have a 5 minute SLA to respond to these types of events and that they can happen at any random customer impulse.

    I don’t have a problem with customers that can correctly project their load and let us know in advance. Those are my favorite customers. But they’re not most of our customers.

    As for automation. As I had exhaustedly detailed in another response, we do have another product that does this a lot better. And it’s the one that we are mass marketing a lot more. The one where I’m feeling all the pain is actually our enterprise level managed service offering. Which goes to customers that have “special requirements” and usually mean that they will never get as robust automation as the other product line.


  • Our database is actually pretty graceful. It just goes into stop writes status. You can still read any data and resolving the situation is as easy as scaling the cluster or removing old records. By no means is the database down or inoperable.

    Essentially our database is working as designed. If we rate limited it further then we have less of a product to sell. The main feature we sell of our database technology is its IOPS and resiliency.

    Further, this is just for a specific customer, it has no impact to any other customers or any sort of central orchestration. Generally speaking the stop writes status only ever impacts a single customer and their associated applications.

    Also, customers can be very stingy with the clusters they are willing to buy. We actually are on poor terms of the couple of our customers who just refuse to scale and just expect us to magic their cluster into accepting more data than its sized for.


  • Probably not feasible in our case. We sell our DB tech based on the sheer IOPS it’s capable of. It already alerts the user if the write-cache is full or the replication cache is backing up too.

    The problem is, at full tilt, a 9 node cluster can take on over 1GB/s in new data. This is fine if the customer is writing over old records and doesn’t require any new space. It’s just that it’s more common that Mr. customer added a new microservice and didn’t think through how much data it requires. Thus causing rapid increase in DB disk space or IOPs that the cluster wasn’t sized for.

    We do have another product line in the works (we call it DBaaS) and that can autoscale because it’s based on clearly defined service levels and cluster specifications. I don’t think that product will have this problem.

    It’s just these super mega special (read: big, important, fortune 100) companies have requirements that mean they need something more hand-crafted. Otherwise we’d have automated the toil by now.



  • I agree. I think 1440p+HDR is probably the way to go for now. HDR is FAR more impactful than a 4K resolution and 1440p should provide a stable 45ish FPS on Cyberpunk 2077 completely maxed out on an RTX 3080Ti (DLSS Performance).

    And in terms of CPU, the same applies. 16 cores are for the gentoo using, source compiling folks like me. 8 cores on a well binned CPU from the last 3 generations goes plenty fast for gaming. CPU bottlenecking only really show up at 144fps+ in most games anyways.