I forget where I originally found this and Google on my phone was unhelpful.

My favorite annoying trick is x -=- 1. It looks like it shouldn’t work because that’s not precisely a valid operator, but it functions as an increment equivalent to x += 1

It works because -= still functions are “subtract and assign”, but the second minus applies to the 1 making it -1.

Fair - there are ways to handle it. I didn’t want to include specifics since I’m not a professional contractor for this sort of thing, but I should have indicated that there are exceptions.

Full extension rails are probably best going to come from the original vendor as a general principle, rather than attempting to use universal rails.

If you have a wall mounted rack, unless your walls are not drywall, physics is working against you. It’s already a pretty intense heavy cantilever, and putting a server in there that can extend past the front edge is only going to make that worse.

If you want to use full extension rails, you should get a rack that can sit squarely on the floor on either feet or appropriately rated casters. You should also make sure your heaviest items are on the bottom ESPECIALLY if you have full extension rails - it will make the rack less likely to overbalance itself and tip over when the server is extended.

Somewhat halfway between practical use and just messing around for fun.

Several years ago I built a GPS NTP clock out of an RPi3 and an Adafruit GPS hat. Once I had the PPS driver installed, it’s precision/drift got pretty good. According to its own self measurements, I got pretty dang close to NIST stratum 1 NTP servers, but those are hundreds of miles away so that measurement isn’t super precise. It’s still running today, clocking nearly 24/7 operation since (checks shopping history) 2017, though I replaced the breadboard and mini module with a full sized hat with the same chipset in 2021.

Recently I acquired a proper hardware GPS clock and I stacked the two against each other and found out my RPi did not half bad and can get between 0.5-10ms of the professionals (literally I’m pretty sure I’d need more precise measuring equipment to tell the difference between the two at this point than a regular computer). Now my homelab has fully redundant internet-disconneted stratum 1 time. Been half considering if I could write a GPSD driver for it as a joke, but I know upstream won’t accept it because it doesn’t offer SOOO many features they’d need.

As for what else - I just kind of keep an eye out for projects related to GPS and high precision time, like the open source atomic PCI card that was released a few years ago. Finding out what people are doing to get better and better time is just downright interesting.

Outside of the time world, it’s just fun to see what projects people come up with relating to maps and navigation. Stretch goal once I have enough server horsepower is to make a render-capable Open Street Map server with my home region loaded to start with, but eventually I’d like to get it to the point where I can load and process world.osm. That… Requires a LOT of CPU and SSD space.

Heyo, just wanted to say I appreciate the edit.

Some people see three extra clicks (which is what it took on mobile to get the real description out of GitHub) as a limiter. I actually clicked because I had guessed that with a name like “navidrome” it was something GNSS related, was surprised to see it was about music.

I’ve been self hosting for going on 7-8y, following various communities on reddit and Lemmy and I learn about new softwares every day. I’ll have to toss this one on my investigation queue.

Other have all mentioned various tech to help you out with this - Ceph, ZFS, RAID at 50/60, raid is not a backup, etc.

40 drives is a massive amount. On my system, I have ~58TB (before filesystem overhead) comprised of a 48TB NAS (5x12TB@RAID-5) 42TB of USB backup disks for said NAS (RAID is not a backup), a 3-node vSAN array with 12TB (3x500GB cache, 6x2TB capacity) of all-flash storage at RF2 (so ~6TB usable, since each VM is in independent RAID-1), and a standalone host with ~4TB@RAID-5 (16 disks spread across 2 RAID-5 arrays, don’t have the numbers off hand)

That’s 5+9+16=30 drives, and the whole rack takes up 950w including the switches, which iirc account for ~250-300w (I need to upgrade those to non-PoE versions to save on some juice). Each server on its own takes up 112-185w, as measured at iDRAC. It used to take up 1100w until I upgraded some of my older servers into newer ones with better power efficiency as my own build-out design principle.

While you can just throw 40-60 drives in a 4u chassis (both Dell and 45drives/Storinator offer the ability to have this as a DAS or server), that thing will be GIGA heavy fully loaded. Make sure you have enough power (my rack has a dedicated circuit) and that you place the rack on a stable floor surface capable of withstanding hundreds of pounds on four wheels (I think I estimated my rack to be in the 300-500lbs class)

You mentioned wanting to watch videos for knowledge - if you want anywhere to start, I’d like you to start by watching the series Linus Tech Tips did on their Petabyte Project’s many iterations as a case study for understanding what can go wrong when you have that many drives. Then look into the tech you can use to not make the same mistakes Linus did. Many very very good options are discussed in the other comments here, and I’ve already rambled on far too long.

Other than that, I wish you the best of luck on your NAS journey, friend. Running this stuff can be fun and challenging, but in the end you have a sweet system if you pull it off. :) There’s just a few hurdles to cross since at the 140TB size, you’re basically in enterprise storage land with all the fun problems that come with scale up/out. May your storage be plentiful and your drives stay spinning.

It is far less improbable than you think, especially if all of your drives have similar age/wear - as would be the case if you bought all 40 around the same time.

It being a laptop will almost undoubtedly make that endeavour more challenging. Off hand, I can’t think of a single non -proprietary internal connector from a major vendor that doesn’t already have a protocol established.

If there’s spare I/O, it’s most likely either not hooked up, was only used as a debug header, or fused off as a feature not available on that model. If it is indeed connected to something, you’d need to find documentation on that exact model of laptop since boards can sometimes vary even within the same series (such as whether a GPU is available). Chances are, whatever your find will need a specific vendor library that may or may not work on your version of the OS.

Unlike RPi and similar devices, you won’t find many consumer x86 devices that leave GPIO available and documented.

Off-hand, I think almost every LCD display I’ve encountered on x86 is plugged in to either a serial (for character displays) or higher-level protocol (for more complex displays)

Possibly important detail - what type of computer do you propose running this? Most methods that are common if you search the internet or ask here will likely apply to Raspberry Pi and it’s clones, but if you have something more esoteric it might not work.

I’ve got one to add that should be used more often than it is.

Wouldn’t that require running the service as an admin?

Likely won’t change CG-NAT config, the new modem would still have to get its IP address from the attached ISP

Good pun

I have a GitHub for commenting and contributing on GitHub

I have a Gitlab for commenting and contributing on Gitlab

I have a personal gitea instance for all my personal projects.

Honestly, the project default instance is whatever makes sense for that project.

Pocketses!

What has its got in its pocketses?

First catch is probably the LoC used to make that engine they’re talking about they wrote it in. You can set up an entire rudimentary webserver in Python in a dozen or so lines by starting off with import http.server. It won’t be a good production ready HTTP server but it will serve HTTP

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

I’m amazed at how much you described in a single sentence there

Can confirm that also works on OPN

Static outbound is a feature I wish more firewalls had because it requires the targeted device to send outbound once before it accepts incoming (or at least that’s my understanding)

Couldn’t agree more

However, unlike bundling a browser by default, you’d need to get a lot of websites to agree to “be normal” and support multiple browsers properly.