• 3 posts
  • 17 comments
Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: July 22nd, 2025
  • I don’t pay annually. I’m locked in with permanent licensing because I’ve used it for over a decade (see: legacy licensing). Unless that changes, and something else can do the mixed drives as well as Unraid, I don’t see that changing for me any time soon.

    For my servers that aren’t mixed JBOD, I use Fedora/CoreOS with Quadlets, so believe me when I say that I know that outside of that specific use case, there are better options.

    But I use Unraid specifically for the ability to mix drive sizes and easily emulate and rebuild failed disks. That’s it. That’s the whole reasoning as to why I still use it.

    Oh, also, while yes, it did become a subscription (which does not apply to me anyway), it’s not necessarily a standard annual subscription, it’s a one time purchase and then you can choose to stop paying until you want to update again. The subsequent payments are less than the first purchase of the license and do last for a year. You still own your license when you stop paying, you just stop getting updates until you pay that lesser amount again. While similar (and I personally wouldn’t buy a license today), it isn’t what an annual subscription normally implies.

  • Yeah, YMMV on the USB drive. While running Unraid for a little more than a decade, my main server chewed through around 2-3 drives causing crashes each time. It could have been bad luck with the flash lottery, though.

    I assume this means I’d need another drive to boot it from?

    That is correct. You’d need a drive just for booting, outside of any array or pool that you might have. I bought a tiny 32GB Samsung mSATA SSD for $15 (new) for my transcoding server, and I somehow scored a brand new Micron 250gb 2.5 SSD for ~$25 for my main server (both from ebay) which I use for this purpose.

  • My Epyc 7702 does have onboard TPM, but my supermicro H11DSi-NT doesn’t pass it through to the OS, for some reason. It seems like it’s a common thing for supermicro boards - the enterprise ones like mine have TPM headers instead. I do wish that weren’t the case, though.

    On my second Unraid server (which I use for transcoding), the i9-12900T’s TPM does pass through properly and I was able to use it, no external TPM needed.

First, I know that Unraid is not FOSS and I’m a month late, just to get that out of the way. But for those that are running Unraid and haven’t updated to >7.3.0, there’s good reason to (other than for security patches): internal boot and TPM licensing.

This update allows you to boot from an internal drive, no more chewing up flash drives. As a long time Unraid user (for over a decade), this was a long time coming. My server ate several flash drives. Setting it up was a breeze, once I updated to 7.3.x, the wizard to configure it came up and I was able to move it to one of my internal SSDs. All I had to do after that was go into the BIOS and set the boot priority correctly.

Internal boot works without a TPM, however you’d still need the flash drive with your license on it plugged in at boot. If you have a TPM on your server, though, you can migrate your license from your flash to your TPM, with another simple wizard. After migration, you no longer need a boot flash drive.

I had to get a Supermicro AOM-TPM-9665V TPM chip for my motherboard, but I’ve got it all set now. It’s a relief to no longer have to rely on flash drives now - my server’s rear exhaust fans were blowing directly on them, causing them to overheat and eventually crash my server.

Unraid posted about this in their blog here: https://unraid.net/blog/unraid-7-3-0

I haven’t tried to log into my account for a few weeks because LinkedIn is a cesspool. When I logged in just now (with a passkey, btw), it brought me to this page.

I’ve had this account for over a decade and used it to get my current position. I don’t want to use LinkedIn, but it’s pretty much a requirement in my industry.

I’m not sure if I should cave or what. I read the privacy policy for Persona’s ID verification and it states that the data is immediately destroyed after verification, or held for three years.

This shit should be fucking illegal, and yet, in much of the world, it’s being made enforced legislation. Fuck any company and politician that supports, funds, or operates this bullshit.

I tried to look this up but everything seems to be related to exterior load bearing walls…

A month or so ago, we noticed a good amount of water coming through the concrete porch into our basement. This portion of the 1940’s basement below the porch used to be a garage, and sometime in the 90’s (according to dates on portions of the sheetrock) they put in a wall where the garage entry was to expand the living space. I don’t think this was load bearing when they put in the wall.

It seems like this leak was happening in 2017 as well, since new sheetrock was added and they tried to fix it with spray foam (which is obviously not water tight and did not fix the problem).

Anyway, I ended up ripping off the sheetrock to see the damage. All four sides of the framed wall are at least partially rotted, with the top and bottom plates completely compromised on the corners. This means that I should probably replace the entire wall, which would be “easy” if it wasn’t load bearing…

However, over time and possibly accelerated with water intrusion, the concrete above has a long, horizontal crack which may go through both sides. The crack doesn’t line up perfectly on both sides, but it’s definitely possible that it’s cracked all the way through. If that’s the case, it means that this wall has now become load bearing, possibly holding up a portion of the porch above.

My thinking is that I could get a jack post (or a bottle jack and 4x4 post), put it in the middle, and then build framing on both sides with pressure treated 2x6s. Then I could remove the jack, and attach blocking between the two portions of new framing.

The other, more expensive but safer option would include talking to a structural engineer. I got a quote from one, and he wanted $900 to come take a look. I can afford it, I suppose, although I’m worried that he’ll end up telling me what I already know.

Pictures below. Note that this is concrete on all 4 sides, and that the drywall has now been removed from both sides.

Here’s the wall: Wall with exposed studs, showing damage and concrete on all 4 sides

And here’s the crack on one side: Horizontal crack in concrete above wall