That sounds like the average megacorp terms of service these days.

Yes, just because everyone’s doing it doesn’t mean they can’t be better. They should be better, but worldwide government regulations don’t force that (yet).

But at some point to interact with any kind of large company, your information is going to end up crossing the path of a large company, especially one of the hyperscale cloud and connectivity providers like Microsoft, Akami, Cloudflare, Google, Amazon, etc.

Whether businesses get copies of information is usually included in a site’s privacy policy, and if you’re curious about that list (and it’s not publicly documented), I’d hope there’s a contact to get more info about the policy (like a privacy@ email address)

If you really want to limit your information exposure, you either have to audit everyone you do business with this way (because most large companies do this) or hire someone (or a service) to do it.

You could also consider not interacting with large companies at all - but you’d limit yourself from part of the modern world. If that’s your game, by all means by my guest.

Memory unlocked that’s been a hot minute ago

Didn’t apple used to make their own IR remote for that? Is the hardware onboard the Mini preset to use their hardware or is it more generic once Linux is installed?

Others have some good information here - all I’d like to add to the root is that Windows and Mac have a built-in DNS cache and it’s pretty straightforward to add a DNS cache to systemd distros (if it’s not already installed or in use) using systemd-resolved or dnsmasq if you really dislike systemd. Some distros enable this from install time.

Systems that utilize a DNS cache will keep copies of DNS query results for a period of time, making the application-level name lookup speed essentially 0ms for a cached result. Cold results obviously incur the latency of the DNS server itself.

HLS is a bidirectional protocol though - the system’s total network latency affects how quickly it can change to a new bitrate stream as conditions improve or degrade. And despite the name, it’s not just limited to live content. You can use this to deliver fixed-length content

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

Not on a flash based motherboard (so basically almost everything recent). On modern systems usually the only thing the battery powers is the clock, which is why they have a separate reset to defaults header/button/switch.

(The CMOS memory of old is replaced with flash memory, al la SD Card or flash drive)

TLDR: probably a lot of people continue using the thing that they know if it just works as long as it works well enough not to be a bother.

Many many years ago when I learned, I think the only ones I found were Apache and IIS. I had a Mac at the time which came pre installed with Apache2, so I learned Apache2 and got okay at it. While by release dates Nginx and HAProxy most definitely existed, I don’t think I came across either in my research. I don’t have any notes from the time because I didn’t take any because I was in high school.

When I started Linux things, I kept using Apache for a while because I knew it. Found Nginx, learned it in a snap because the config is more natural language and hierarchical than Apache’s XMLish monstrosity. Then for the next decade I kept using Nginx whenever I needed a webserver fast because I knew it would work with minimal tinkering.

Now, as of a few years ago, I knew that haproxy, caddy, and traefik all existed. I even tried out Caddy on my homelab reverse proxy server (which has about a dozen applications routed through it), and the first few sites were easy - just let the auto-LetsEncrypt do its job - but once I got to the sites that needed manual TLS (I have both an internal CA and utilize Cloudflare’ origin HTTPS cert), and other special config, Caddy started becoming as cumbersome as my Nginx conf.d directory. At the time, I also didn’t have a way to get software updates easily on my then-CentOS 7 server, so Caddy was okay-enough, but it was back to Nginx with me because it was comparatively easier to manage.

HAProxy is something I’ve added to my repertoire more recently. It took me quite a while and lots of trial and error to figure out the config syntax which is quite different from anything I’d used before (except maybe kinda like Squid, which I had learned not a year prior…), but once it clicked, it clicked. Now I have an internal high availability (+keepalived) load balancer than can handle so many backend servers and do wildcard TLS termination and validate backend TLS certs. I even got LDAP and LDAPS load balancing to AD working on that for services like Gitea that don’t behave well when there’s more than one LDAPS backend server.

So, at some point I’ll get around to converting that everything reverse proxy to HAProxy. But I’ll probably need to deploy another VM or two because the existing one also has a static web server and I’ve been meaning to break up that server’s roles anyways (long ago, it was my everything server before I used VMs).

A static PNG tile database for world.osm is even larger. Without a solid vector tile solution, this is the most efficient data format for disk space.

Also, there’s a post render CDN cache in front of the rendering layer to offset load, plus there’s I think some internal caching in renderd. It’s a pretty complex machine, but databases of the world are in fact huge.

OSM’s core tile servers have dozens of cores, hundreds of GB of RAM each, and the rendering and lookup databases are a few TB. That’s not trivial to self host, especially since one self hosted tile server cannot always keep up with a user flick scrolling.

Edit: car GPS maps and the old TomTom and Garmin devices have significantly less metadata embedded than a modern map.

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A well managed server won’t init an arbitrary drive and has a lock screen with a password so that the most a rubber ducky would be able to do is reboot it. Which is something you’d already be able to do if you had access to the front panel with the power button.

You may not but your phone will fail over to data if it loses its lease and stuff like background update tasks will cease to function (like Windows Update or dnf cron)

On/off:
I have 5 main chassis excluding desktops. Prod cluster is all flash, standalone host has one flash array, one spinning rust array, NAS is all spinning rust. I have a big enough server disk array that spinning it up is actually a power sink and the Dell firmware takes a looong time to get all the drives up on reboot.

TLDR: Not off as a matter of day/night, off as a matter of summer/winter for heat.

Winter: all on

Summer:

• prod cluster on (3x vSAN - it gets really angry if it doesn’t have cluster consistency)
• NAS on
• standalone server off, except to test ESXi patches and when vCenter reboots cause it to be WoL’d (vpxd sends a wake to all stand by hosts on program init)
• main desktop on
• alt desktops off

VMs are a different story. Normally I just turn them on and off as needed regardless of season, though I will typically turn off more of my “optional” VMs to reduce summer workload in addition to powering off the one server. Rough goal is to reduce thermal load as to not kill my AC as quickly which is probably running above its duty cycle to keep up. Physical wise, these servers are virtualized so this on/off load doesn’t cycle the array.

Because all four of my main servers are the same hypervisor (for now, VMware ESXi), VMs can move among the prod cluster to balance load autonomously, and I can move VMs on or off the standalone host by drag-and-drop. When the standalone host is off, I usually move turn it’s VMs off and move them onto the prod cluster so I don’t get daily “backup failure” emails from the NAS.

UPS: Power in my area is pretty stable, but has a few phase hiccups in the summer. (I know it’s a phase hiccup because I mapped out which wall plus are on which phase, confirmed with a multimeter than I’m on two legs of a 3-phase grid hand-off, and watched which devices blip off during an event) For something like a light that will just flicker or a laptop/phone charger that has a high capacitance, such blips are a non issue. Smaller ones can even be eaten by the massive power supplies my Dell servers have. But, my Cisco switches are a bit sensitive to it and tend to sing me the song of their people when the power flickers - aka fan speed 100% boot up whining. Larger blips will also boop the Dell servers, but I don’t usually see breaks more than 3-5m.

Current UPS setup is:

• rack split into A/B power feeds, with servers plugged into both and every other one flipped A or B as it’s primary
• single plug devices (like NAS) plugged into just one
• “common purpose” devices on the same power feed (ex: my primary firewall, primary switches, and my NAS for backups are on feed A, but my backup disks and my secondary switches are on feed B)
• one 1500VA UPS per feed (two total) - aggregate usage is 600-800w
• one 1500VA desktop UPS handling my main tower, one monitor, and my PS5 (which gets unreasonably upset about losing power, so it gets the battery backup)

With all that setup, the gauges in the front of the 3 UPSes all show roughly 15-20m run time in summer, and 20-25m in winter. I know one may be lower than displayed because it’s battery is older, but even if it fails and dumps it’s redundant load onto the main newer UPS I’ll still have 7-10m of battery at worst case and that’s all I really need to weather most power related issues at my location.