I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2025

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  • An unmanaged switch is just a single plane where all ports are equal. All ports share OSI layers 1 and 2. Anything you plug into port 24 can always reach anything you have plugged into port 3.

    Managed switches (also sometimes known as “smart” switches) provide additional features on top of that. The most useful is VLANs (virtual LANs) which let you segregate traffic. Two ports on different VLANs share the same physical layer (layer 1) but are separated at the data link layer (layer 2). This lets you create up to 4096 different networks on the same switch; each network is isolated from the other. If port 24 and port 3 are on different VLANs, then they will not be able to communicate unless they can reach a common router at layer 3.

    Additionally, managed switches let you do things like disable/enable ports (for security, power savings, etc), enable port mirroring, and combine multiple ports into an aggregation group (e.g. bond four 1 Gb links into one 4 Gb link).

    The available features on a managed/smart switch vary by manufacturer and, often, by the license level (sadly common in enterprise gear). VLANs, port control, mirroring, and LAGs are usually common “baseline” features, though.











  • Iced Raktajino@startrek.websitetoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldJellyfin Dongle
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    7 days ago

    Maybe one of those HDMI “stick” PCs you can get? There’s x86 Android builds you can run or you can do like I did with my media PCs and boot into Openbox and just launch a fullscreen browser right to Jellyfin and control it from your phone. (My main setup uses Emby but should be able to do the same with JF).

    I’ve actually got a portable Jellyfin server I take with me. Built on the OrangePi Zero 2W with a USB->NVMe acting as media storage (as well as the Jellyfin DB). It’s got several other services running as well as a second Wifi adapter so it can also act as a travel router.

    For playback, I pretty much just use my laptop or phone but have thought about adding one of the “stick” PCs as a client for it.






  • The only reason I gave up on Docker Swarm was that it seemed pretty dead-end as far as being useful outside the homelab. At the time, it was still competing with Kubernetes, but Kube seems to have won out. I’m not even sure Docker CE even still has Swarm. It’s been a good while since I messed with it. It might be a “pro” feature nowadays.

    Edit: Docker 28.5.2 still has Swarm.

    Still, it was nice and a lot easier to use than Kubernetes once you wrapped your head around swarm networking.


  • I had 15 of the 2013-era 5010 thin clients. Most of them have had their SSDs and RAM upgraded.

    They’ve worn many hats since I’ve had them, but some of their uses and proposed uses were:

    1. I did a 15 node Docker Swarm setup and used that to both run some of my applications as well as learn how to do horizontal scaling.
    2. After I tore down the Docker Swarm cluster, I set them up as diskless workstations to both learn how to do that and used them at a local event as web kiosks (basically just to have a bunch of stations people could use to fill out web based forms).
    3. One of them was my router for a good while. Only replaced it in that role when I got symmetric gigabit fiber. Before that, I used VLANs to to run LAN and WAN over its single ethernet port since I had asymmetric 500 Mbps and never saturated the port.
    4. Run small/lightweight applications in highly-available pairs/clusters
    5. Use them to practice clustered services (Multi-master Galera/MariaDB, multi-master LDAP, CouchDB, etc)
    6. Use them as Snapcast clients in each room
    7. Add wireless cards, install OpenWRT, and make powerful access points for each room (can combine with the above and also be a Snapcast client)
    8. Set them up as VPN tunnel endpoints, give them out to friends, and have a private network

    Of the 15, I think I’m only actively using 4 nowadays. One is my MPD+Snapcast server, one is running HomeAssistant, ,the third is my backup LDAP server, and one runs my email server (really). The rest I just spin up as needed for various projects; I downsized my homelab and don’t have a lot of spare capacity for dev/test VMs these days, so these work great in place of that.