Some IT guy, IDK.
I want to point out, that… for communism, even on paper, to be a lovely idea and/or successful, the person in charge needs to have two things:
I would add to point 2, that anyone who is that altruistic, would not desire to have, or hold, any power over others.
The combination of these two things will keep any rosy ideas about communism, as just ideas. In practice, it will be, or become corrupt, and the people will suffer. Pushing it into a downward spiral of violence against the people, until an inevitable revolution occurs and the communist dictator is removed by any means necessary (often involving them no longer living).
Don’t get me wrong, there are different issues with capitalism, socialism, any monarch based society… Pretty much every system is flawed. The key differentiator is whether we have the ability to deal with the challenges of a system as it arises. So far, communism has the least methods by which to do this.
You can do whatever you want. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s “wrong”. A big part of homelabbing is to try stuff. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine, you learned something, and that was the point.
For me, I don’t see a UPS as essential. It’s generally a good idea, but not strictly essential. My servers are on 24/7, because I have services that do things overnight for me. I also know that some people access my lab when I’m not awake, so I just leave it on so it can be ready for anything at any time. It poses some unique challenges sometimes when running stuff that’s basically 24/7/365.
Be safe, have fun, learn stuff.
Yep, there’s actually quite a few more than what I mentioned, if you get into the advanced dialogs.
IMO, it’s unnecessarily complicated, but given that NTFS is used for network file sharing in large companies, I get why it’s so crazy. They probably demand those kinds of granular permissions.
I know Linux is a lot simpler. Just read/write/execute, and a single group, single owner, and a setting for “everyone else” kind of thing, which is generally sufficient for 90% of use cases.
I’m a sysadmin and I work with Windows a lot.
The short version is that only the users granted permission to a given set of files can access those files. With NTFS permissions it’s… Complicated. You can have explicit permission to a file, or implied permission via a group that you’re a part of, or some combination of those things. You can also have read, but no write. You can have append but not create, you can have delete, but not list. It’s a lot of very granular, very crazy permissions.
There’s also deny permissions which overrule everything.
What has likely happened is that the posters user account doesn’t have implied or explicit permission to the file, but if you sign in as an administrator, even if the administrator doesn’t have permission to read/write/append/delete the file, the administrator has permission to take ownership of a file, and as owner, change the permissions of a file. Being owner doesn’t mean you can open/read/write/append/delete anything, you can just change permissions and give yourself (or anyone else) permissions to the file.
Changing ownership is a right which, as far as I’m aware, cannot be revoked from admin level users. They can always change ownership. Owners of files cannot be denied the right to change the permissions of a file as far as I know. This will always result in some method by which administrative level accounts can recover access to files and folders.
In my experience, exceptions exist but are extremely rare (usually to do with kernel level stuff, and/or lockouts by security/AV software).
The poster might legally and physically own the device and all the data contained therein, and may have an administrative level account on that device, but the fact is, their NTFS permissions are not set to allow them access to the data. The post they’re replying to is trying to let them know how to fix it by using an administrative level account and they’re not tech-savvy enough to follow along.
I don’t blame them. File permissions issues are challenging even for me, and I fully understand the problem.
That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.
It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.
So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).
Awesome.
IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.
That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.
I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.
I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.
My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Well, I’m probably going to try to get my ccnp for kicks. I’ll re-do my CCNA, then do my ccnp. By the time I go for my NA cert I’ll pretty much be ready to go for the np cert.
I’ll build a new resume emphasizing my network stuff, though my resume is already fairly heavily focused on networking as is, and try again.
I’m pretty happy with my job in almost every way, I know most of the things I would need to know to be successful, despite it being a more generalist position, and my co-workers are cool. Management is better than most, and the pay is more than the last two generalist positions I’ve worked, plus it’s work from home, so I’m pretty comfortable where I am for now. The pay, despite being higher than I’ve gotten previously, is a pretty far cry from what I probably deserve, just way too low, under $55k USD (I’m not in the US, but the conversion puts me under 55). From what I’ve seen online, median salary for a systems admin, which is basically what my job mostly entails, is around $73k USD… So I’m around $20k/yr shy.
I know network admins are similar, depending on the complexity/importance of the network they administrate. I’m aware of people in networking that are making more than 100k USD a year; and right now I consider that to be where things start to cap off for networking. I’d be pretty happy with $73k USD.
Yep, I’m sure they do.
Realistically, does any average consumer know what’s on which circuit?
Spanning the split phase will screw you up, across breakers won’t be fun but shouldn’t pose any serious problems, as long as it’s not in different sides of the split phase.
I’m pretty sure they say this because actually explaining what will work and what won’t either requires significant prior knowledge of power systems, or a couple of paragraphs of explainers before you can get a rough picture of what the hell they’re driving at.
Everyone I know who has used powerline, just plug it in and see if it works. Those who were lucky, say it’s great and works without issue, etc. Those who were not lucky say the opposite.
I’m just over here watching the fireworks, eating popcorn.
I feel this, especially since I’m more into networking, but my work is more generalist.
I open my mouth about networking and people’s eyes glaze over. Even very experienced senior people can’t really understand what I’m talking about when it comes to some of the more intermediary networking concepts. Meanwhile I tune into a podcast that’s networking focused and they’re basically speaking Latin for me.
There’s so much that I don’t know. I get the broad strokes of things but I’m hopelessly lost on so many of the more nuanced bits of networking.
I really want to break away from generalist work and get into a network focused position, but after 10 years as a generalist in various MSP companies, most places won’t take me seriously as a networker and won’t even sit down for an interview.
I’m good at other stuff, damn near expert level with some things, but my passion is networks and the workplaces I’ve been at just don’t care to help me learn any of it. My current place barely has any networking more complex than a profile based L2L VPN… Switches are basically ignored, and VLANs are rare.
I facepalm every time I discover that the guest network is just bridged into the same subnet as the LAN. I’ve raised the issue a few times and never been given the green light to fix it, often because the network isn’t able to be managed remotely.
You kids. Got off my lawn. Leave me in peace with my scour.net.
I’ve been doing IT work for more than a decade, I was a nerd/“computer guy” well before that. I’ve had a focus on networking in the past 15-20 years. You learn a few things.
I try to be humble and learn what I can where I can, I know that I definitely do not know everything about it, and at the same time I try to be generous and share what I’ve learned when I can.
So if you have questions, just ask. I either already know, or I can at least point you in the right direction.
It definitely sounds like you have some challenges ahead. I personally prefer MoCA over wireless, simply because you can control what devices are able to be a part of the network, and reduce the overall interference from external sources and connections.
With WiFi, being half duplex, only one station can transmit at a time (with come caveats). Whether that station is a part of your network, or it is simply operating on the same frequency/channel, doesn’t matter. So in high density environments, you can kind of get screwed by neighbors.
MoCA is also half duplex (at least it was the last time I checked) so having a 2.5G MoCA link, to a 1GbE connection (on the ethernet side) should provide similar, or the same experience as pure ethernet (1G full duplex)… The “extra” bandwidth on the MoCA will allow for each station to send and receive at approximately 1Gbps without stepping on eachother so much that you have degraded performance.
However, it really depends on your situation to say what should or shouldn’t be setup. I don’t know your bandwidth requirements, so I can’t really say. The nice thing about ethernet is that it on switched networks (which is what you’ll be using for gigabit), the. Ethernet kind of naturally defaults to the shortest path, unless you’re doing something foolish with it (like intentionally messing with STP to push traffic in a particular direction). The issue with that is that ethernet doesn’t really scale beyond a few thousand nodes. Not an issue for even a fairly large LAN, but that’s the reason we don’t use it for internet (wan side) traffic routing. But now I’m off topic.
Given the naturally shortest-path behavior of ethernet, of you have a switch in your office and you only really use your NAS from your office PC, you’ll have a full speed experience. If nothing else needs high-speed access to the NAS, you’ll be fine.
Apart from the NAS or any other LAN resources, the network should be sufficient to fully saturate your internet connection. So the average WiFi speeds should be targeted towards something faster than your internet link (again, half duplex factors in here). I don’t know your internet speed so I’m not going to even guess what the numbers should be, but I personally aim for double my internet speed for maximum throughput on my WiFi as much as I can. The closer you can get to doubling your internet speed here, the better. Anything more than that will likely be wasted.
There’s a ton to say about WiFi and performance optimization, but I’ll leave it alone unless you ask about it further.
Good luck.
It can be faster, it really depends on whether you have a clear-ish channel for the mesh, which is why I would recommend something on the higher end, hopefully with a dedicated radio for mesh, so it can be on a different channel with (hopefully) less interference.
If the mesh radio is shared with client access, or if it’s on a busy channel, it may be much, much slower than some options.
Depending on where you live and what your power circuits look like (not the outlets, the circuits that power them), you may have a great, or very poor experience.
I’d need to know what country you live in to know more, since power wiring standards vary from country to country. In the USA and Canada (I’m in Canada and the USA is the same), we use split phase and crossing the split phase will severely hinder the ability for powerline to perform.
It’s a viable option, not my favorite option, I’d recommend MoCA (coax) over powerline, but it’s ultimately up to you.
IMO, powerline is going to depend on a lot of factors including what kind of power you use, which varies from country to country. Where I am in North America, we use 240v split phase, and the powerline adapters are 120v (half phase), so if one unit ends up on one side of the phase, and one ends up on the other side of the phase, you’re going to have a bad time, if it links at all… So knowing which “side” of the split phase your powerline is on becomes critical, which is not something most people know about their power situation. As a result, it’s basically a crap shoot whether it will work well or not.
I have three suggestions for you.
Easy mode: find a triple radio mesh wifi system and get at least two nodes. Generally the LAN Jack on the satellite nodes will bridge to the LAN over WiFi. Just add a switch and use it normally. This will harm your overall speeds when connecting to the NAS from other wired LAN systems that are not on the same switch. I’m not sure if that’s important. As long as your internet speed is less than half of your WiFi speed, you shouldn’t really notice a difference.
Medium mode: buy MoCA adapters and use coax. Just be sure to get relatively new ones. They’re generally all 1G minimum, but usually half duplex, so there’s still sacrifice there, but MoCA is generally better than WiFi. The pinch is making sure you stop the MoCA signal from exiting your premise. You don’t want to tap into someone else’s MoCA network, nor have them tap into yours. There are cable filters that will accomplish this, or you can air gap the coax. I’m not sure how much control you have for the ingress/egress of your coax lines. You can yolo it and just hope for the best, but I can’t recommend that.
Hard mode: do ethernet anyways. Usually in rentals, nobody can complain with holes in the walls the size you would get from nails to hand pictures, not much larger than a picture hanging nail, is a cup hook. What I did at my old place, which was a rental, was to buy large cup hooks, and put them every ~18" down the hallway, and load it with ethernet cables. I used adhesive cable runners to go down walls near doors and ran the cables under doors to get from room to room. I got lucky that two adjacent rooms shared a phone jack and I replaced the faceplate with a quad port Keystone faceplate on each side. One Keystone was wired to the phone line to keep existing functionality, the rest were connected to eachother though the wall as ethernet, and I just patched one side to the other (on one side was the core switch for my network). That was my experience, obviously your experience will be different. I used white ethernet to try to blend it in with the ceiling/walls which were off-white. In my situation, I was on DSL and used the phone jack in one of the bedrooms for my internet connection, that bedroom was used as an office and it neighbored my bedroom where I used the jack to jack connections through the wall to feed my TV and other stuff in the bedroom. The ethernet on the cup hooks went from the office to the living room where I put a second access point (first ap was on the office) and TV and other stuff. Inbetween the bedrooms and the living room was the kitchen and the wet wall was basically RF blocking, so I needed an access point on either side, so one in the office near the bedroom and bathroom, and one in the living room, provided plenty of coverage for the ~900sqft apartment we were renting. Most everything was on wired ethernet, and the WiFi was used mainly by laptops and cellphones.
I live by the philosophy of wired when you can, wireless when you have to. Mainly to save WiFi channels and bandwidth for devices that don’t have an easy alternative option like mobile phones and portable computers.
I don’t think you’re in a bad spot OP, and any of these choices should be adequate for your needs, but that will vary depending on what speed internet you have, and how much speed you need for the LAN (to the NAS and between systems).
Good luck.
The act of someone sitting at a brand new Mac, with a never-before-used interface, and immediately clicking the computer icon to drag it to the trash, is such a powerful image for me.
The statement of, “this is what I think of this computer” is so strong, because I have to believe that whomever did that must have been a tech person to be at the event; but perhaps they just thought it was a shortcut and didn’t like shortcuts on their desktop so they tried to remove it? Like, you can do this with Windows… Because the computer object (in Explorer) is immutable, and any reference to it is simply a link to that object.
I prefer the thought of them just being like “this computer is trash” and doing that, and causing the system to crash.
I’m suggesting that my “investment budget” is nothing.
I think this one flew right over your head.
Specifically, I’m making light of the fact that no matter how hard I try to make a living wage, I still struggle to make everything work, indirectly shedding light on the recent discussions about stagnant wages and out of control inflation, raising costs to live while providing me no means by which to afford those increases.
Most months I barely have enough left over to buy myself a single meal at a restaurant as a once-a-month treat, nevermind have money set aside for retirement or have an “investment budget”.
The exact issue I asked for help with? Yes. There it is.
I’m not sure anyone doubted that was the issue; I didn’t honestly expect someone to swoop in and just hand me a perfect solution.
I know that I’m not the target for most of these applications and my requirements are different than pretty much everyone seeking this style of software.
Long story short, it’s a difficult problem and as of yet, I haven’t found a workable solution. I’ll keep looking. I have plenty of ideas of what to do when I finally solve this issue, but for now, I just have to make due.
Remember you absolutely must not go to these specific sites.
Do not do it.
See you all tomorrow for class.