“I hereby sentence you to two years on your own VLAN with no gateway”

I just had a chat with my oldest (almost 13 years y.o.) asking him some theoretical questions in the hope to spark some curiosity: “When you connect to a Roblox game, what do you think you’re connecting to?”. It took him a few leaps of imagination to realize that he’s connecting to a physical machine somewhere, and now he’s curious as to how such a machine looks. So that server stack I’ll be setting up, he’s interested in tagging along.

He already knows full well that there are more to PCs than just the windows UI, as I’m a linux guy, but I don’t think they’re aware of just how much can be done with a computer once you go outside of the usual GUI app that connects to some cloud service.

So, provided that his teacher agrees (after all, I have to take him out of school for what effectively will be “alternative education” for a few days so we can fly down to the head office), he’ll end up with bragging rights of having dealt network hardware that costs more than the average computer, and computers that cost more than the average house.

I think so too. My kids are around the age I was when I first started tinkering with PCs, but they don’t have any awareness of what’s going on under the hood, (to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days).

I’m thinking of asking their teachers if I can take them out of school for a day each and bring them to work with me for educational purposes so they get some perspective in the form of networks and servers.

Sure, they’re mostly interested in gaming, but I want them to see what kind of infrastructure is needed for a multiplayer game, specifically the hardware that they never get to see.

I’m building a new server stack in a couple of months, and most of it will be used for testing, so I’d like for them to help build and connect it.

First of all, welcome.

Depends what you’re after, really. I find that lemmy has less of an echo chamber, but the average political stance is a lot more left-ish than reddit.

If your opinion is considered garbage, you’ll probably be downvoted for it, but banned is another thing; You can find an instance more to your liking, for example if you post tankie stuff on lemmygrad, you’ll probably only get praise from there.

It mostly comes down to how a platform with many people tend to naturally operate - garbage people get treated at such by the rest. So whatever your leanings might be, I suggest you find an instance that is somewhat reasonably close to share your values.

Other than that, one of the main differences from reddit is the content quantity - Smaller user base means less content. And I’m perfectly fine with that, as I can keep up with the feed without scrolling for hours.

Also, here I can say that I don’t give two shits about neither Zelda nor Link, without fear of backlash. At least yhe contemporary games - Everything since Link II for NES has been kinda meh in my book.

And if you want to filter out politics, blocking lemmygrad takes away most of the tankie-spam.

Greetings, fellow traveler. May I ask what is your line of work?

No. But I am owed a beer for every project I show up to. Happens around twice per year.

Before a project that involved outfitting a survey ship headed for the Mediterranean, this conversation took place: (paraphrasing)

Me: This storage cluster is based on 10gig/s network. I don’t think the data processors will get the throughput they require.

Chief tech: I tallied up the data transfers, and the time available should suffice with 10g/s.

Me: Did you account for the fact that they duplicate the data and transfer a lot of it twice?

Chief tech: No. But I’ll tell them not to do that.

Some time goes by. Project starts, 1PB of data is collected, and processing is starting up, scheduled to complete everything shortly before they arrive back in the home port. Then my phone rings.

Project manager: Throughput speeds are too slow. Is there anything that can be done, or do we have to eat the daily fine for being too late?

Me: How much is the daily fine?

PM: (number) USD

Me: I’ll make the purchase req now for one tenth of the daily sum. That should increase the throuput.

PM: Hardware install involved?

Me: Yes. I’ll order, configure, and document everything for the chief tech to plug&play during their refuel stop.

PM: I owe you a beer for the next projects.

The extra cost wasn’t that much, considering it was the same upgrade I recommended before project startup anyway. We just had to pay for express freight from the vendor to my home, and from my home down to the ship. Long story short, it worked out. A Mellanox 2100 was shipped down to Malta, and installed by the crew, and it worked out of the box. I was worried about the extensive VLAN and LACP setup in play. But as that setup was my design, I managed to wing it when preparing this switch. I had been using the production cluster for some testing earlier, so it already had the necessary kernel modules for the 100gig cards. The processors had everything wrapped up and written to tape the day before arriving back home. The night of arrival there was a project completion dinner for the crew and us field service personnel. I drank for free that night. I don’t remember it all, except that it was fun, and that the only reason why I called it a night at 0300 was because the hotel bar was closed.

To the chief techs defense, he wasn’t that wrong. He’d made a reasonable estimate based on the numbers he had available. Unfortunately he didn’t have all the numbers, as well as give the processors some head room for fudge factor. This chief tech was mostly experienced in only providing raw dataand thus working without the processing aspect.