Announcements, Ideas, and Discussion - CHMW into 2021 and Beyond

[John Conroy]

OK lets see a show of hands, who had to Google UPS (uninteruptable power supply) and SLA (service lease agreement) like I did? I din't even know uninteruptable was a word!

 

[David]

Shhh I’m uninterruptible while Googling.

 

[John Conroy]

While it is an opinion from the East, mine would be no adds. If there us an annual fee to pay then so be it as the resource is well worth the price. Yes lads, your opinions and guidance is worth money. As for a sponsor, so long as it is a “partner” of the forum. I used to watch MrPete on Youtube. While my reasons for no longer watching his channel are associated with his politicizing of his channel, I didn’t
like how Bangood and others were shamelessly sending the guy stuff in order to promote their wares. If a sponsor wants to use the forum to promote a product and maybe start a conversation thread about that product, its uses, strengths and weaknesses, then I’m all in.

Cheers all.


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It seems like half the people on Youtube are shilling for Banggood now.

 

[CalgaryPT]

OK lets see a show of hands, who had to Google UPS (uninteruptable power supply) and SLA (service lease agreement) like I did? I din't even know uninteruptable was a word!

I saw the word "Cloud" and my mind went straight to the Philadelphia Cream Cheese Commercials. You guys are amateurs.

 

[Brent H]

Ironically enough we have had several critical failures on the ship that were directly related to the UPS failing and interrupting the power to the bridge equipment ....odd that the "protection" was the cause of the failure

 

[CalgaryPT]

I have zero idea what a UPS battery is nor do I want to ask, but if we needs one we needs one. I chipped in but I’m really better off not knowing why UPS is in the battery business

If only our wives thought that way about our machines.

 

[kevin.decelles]

Ironically enough we have had several critical failures on the ship that were directly related to the UPS failing and interrupting the power to the bridge equipment ....odd that the "protection" was the cause of the failure

Huge business in servicing those. Battery testing, generator testing , battery servicing and replacing cells, board upgrades......

And the kicker , pay to dispose of it later.....

Like elevators.... license to print money


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[Chicken lights]

If only our wives thought that way about our machines.

No wife happy life?

That doesn’t sound right...

 

[Jwest7788]

Huge business in servicing those. Battery testing, generator testing , battery servicing and replacing cells, board upgrades.

Yeah, testing this is how I found out the batteries I have on hand weren't any good, I pulled the plug to switch to "on battery" and 80% of the batteries started bulging, burning, and letting the smoke out. Admittedly, there are about 25 better ways to test, but that was the fastest test result I've seen in a long while.

The equipment in these cases is likely leased, or bought/depreciated/replaced on a 3-5 year cycle. You rarely ride out equipment

Haha, true of businesses for sure, not hobbyists though, there it's more like riding out equipment that was already ridden out. haha
This is the way of the hobby machinist. Wait until it's too old for commercial use, and has bounced around kijiji for a year or two, then is the time to strike. lol
Jokes aside, I wish it was easier to find old-ish servers, it seems like they must be sent to recycling, instead of hitting the used market.

If I were setting up a cluster of servers, I'd probably put a plan in to replace the equipment every 3-5, have a data backup/recover strategy (which you need to practice) etc. Depending on your server setup, disk mirroring/RAID setup should be considered. Enterprise grade servers typically come with redundant power supplies/network cards so if one fails, the other kicks in.

I'm covered on this end of things, I have functionally a poor-man's data center cobbled together with auction purchases and consumer hardware. Redundancy at every level, running a mix of RAID for host root partitions, and CEPH (Their promo video) for everything else. --> Marketing is awesome, but I could've made a good IT, haha.
@kevin.decelles, Do you happen to know of a "redundancy" checklist or something that I could cross reference to be sure I haven't missed anything?

OK, Calling to a close the call for donations, we're good team!

There were nearly 20 folks who chose to help by donating in the last couple of days! 20!
To each and every one of our members, both those who contributed monetarily, and those who contribute by participating in the conversation, Thank you guys.

It's really awesome that before even asking, folks started stepping up, and generally to be reminded that we can pull together funds, if we need to, is a testament to how awesome this group is.
Generally it removes a lot of worry knowing that I can call for help if ever needed.

From the many who chipped in a few bucks, to the few who gave a chunk of what was missing, I am not certain how to show the impact that your contributions have,
but I am hopeful that as you visit the forum in future you know in the back of your minds that you directly contributed to the long-term sustainability of the forum.

In a similar vein, every time you have to reset your clocks due to the power dropping, know that you saved me from an early morning trip to the office to "reset the forum" / make sure everything is A-OK, and for that you have my personal thanks.

Once the site is moved "back down to earth" in the coming weeks, I'm going to add a date stamp to the footer of the site, something like: "It's been since Feb XX' since this forum was offline", as a little "head-nod" to everyone reading this.

JW

 

[David]

Thanks for all your hard work @Jwest7788!

 

[kevin.decelles]

Jokes aside, I wish it was easier to find old-ish servers, it seems like they must be sent to recycling, instead of hitting the used market.

Bang on -- we pay people to truck it away. Years ago you could snag one or two here and there....... then the privacy laws tightened up, and now you need to destroy the hard drives and prove it was done. I just tossed 3 Dell PowerEdge servers at the landfill this summer. I parted out the insides, took the drives (for destruction @historicalarms style with a shotgun slug), and kept the fans switches and misc wiring. They were dual CPU processors, dual power supply, dual NIC, not good at all for graphics workloads (low end graphics card), and were TOO noisy for my liking, hence the small-form-factor Lenovo's I'm using now.

I've still got two server rack frames though, one is going to be a power coating oven some day...... hopefully big enough to do motorcycle frames......

 

[Jwest7788]

Bang on -- we pay people to truck it away. ... then the privacy laws tightened up, and now you need to destroy the hard drives and prove it was done. I just tossed 3 Dell PowerEdge servers at the landfill this summer.

This makes me sad. haha

I understand destroying the drives, though even that arguably a waste as there must be a way to securely (random-write?) / wipe the drives without destroying them. But the rest of the machine, where is the privacy risk there?

 

[Jwest7788]

Well, getting my own thread back on track here, haha.

1) Meetups - How should we be handling meetups as we march slowly towards vaccine rollout?
I guess it's more of the same, we stand by for now and plan to get back into the groove post covid..

2) Sponsor - We have been approached by a potential sponsor
No change here.

3) Forum Hosting / Costs - Probably more changes coming down the pipe
Wrapping up preparation on my end, likely to migrate things over within the next two weeks or so. Had a omg load of batteries turn up in the mail the other day. I didn't get the poor UPS guy's hobble-walk until I had to move the boxes. Thought I was going to slip a disk carrying those damn batteries around. Which at least partially explains the shipping costs.

Here's a couple of the worst fire hazards that were replaced, swollen and leaking acid:

And I took over the kitchen for the weekend, because my wife loves when hobbies leave the garage. lol

4) Advertising - What if we can generate revenue without bothering members with ads?
No major change here, but I am thinking about a test at some point down the road. I am pretty sure we can get some ads on the site in a fashion that most don't notice it, if that makes sense, but no movement for now.

5) Chapters - Planning for future
I like the idea of spreading ownership/management of meetups to other cities somehow, not really sure how to get it off the ground though.


6) Stability
Everything been good around here lately? Seems like it from the analytics side.
Images still all sorted? etc.?