qdotme

أول أمسdiscuss

Well, if they actually did a semi-decent comparison table, it would be easier.

It's a very crowded, relatively low barrier to entry, high barrier to switch space.

qdotme

أول أمسdiscuss

How does it compare to Mattermost?

qdotme

قبل 3 أيامdiscuss

Nice! I’ve dabbled with something similar on my own lately (originally wrote/vibed to explain some concepts that came up when discussing D&D) at diceplots.com - different approach, keeping the distributions exactly analytical at every step, never sampling.

qdotme

قبل 25 يومًاdiscuss

I’ve been in this profession for two decades as well. As both things.

My take on this is that we need both, because the market is cyclical. It’s just that it’s hard to perceive any of those cycles if you (a) live them (b) are not experienced enough to introspect.

I absolutely would love an obsessed plumber (and got one!) when it comes to deciding that we’re going to do PTFE tubing in our new house. An obsessed electrician in charge to overinvest into our grid, rather than a 3-month timeframe executive. Otherwise our critical infrastructure gets myopically degraded.

I also want the “working within timeframe” outcome.

And we, as an industry, swing wildly in both direction. The Cambrian explosion of shareware was the the former. We course-corrected into cathedrals of good software (I still love Windows 2000’s stability, the pinnacle of NT line), followed by the “reasonable timeframe” 4GB Electron apps, etc.

It will swing. Every complex system from logistic equation upwards will oscillate .

qdotme

قبل 29 يومًاdiscuss

Honestly, stop the KYC regime everywhere else.

We're making our law enforcement's job marginally easier, by making the criminals' job infinitely easier by creating millions of juicy PII honeypots.

No, you don't need my phone #, real name, captcha.. if you think you do, realign your incentives, and rethink what else can be used for your real need instead.

qdotme

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

I fear the same thing, but still am unsure why or how :)

Google/Microsoft and hosting your own email is a byproduct of how difficult (socially, not technically) hosting your own email has become - mostly because SMTP protocol is inherently broken by spam and patched by social construct (trusted nodes, abuse@, 3+ DNS entries and counting, etc). Purely technical solutions, such HashCash etc, got discontinued in exchange for social ones. Central providers made (sometimes in exchange for, sometimes as excuse of, spam protection) self-hosting socially hard.

Now, I wonder if, and how, once Anthropic and OpenAI need to demonstrate profitability, could hamstring local AI. Which has been /so far/ very valuable for me in doing things that hosted providers don't want liability for, and align against (even if totally lawful and fair use!).

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Yes, but equally so, some intelligent voters (who might've moved out of CA by now, as moving might be the best way to solve that disconnect) might also believe that we should be living in a Republic (and the government should not impose majority-favoured restrictions to the detriment of minority) rather than unrestricted Democracy. .

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Awesome idea!

I wish we have agreed on some fp16/fp8 format by now to add to it..

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

That explains the over-representation of Oceans in NYC’s supercharging network, and one of the worst side-effects of opening that network to non-Tesla operators.

Overall I think it’s a good thing, but it’s the closest to Eternal September I ever experienced in my life, the sudden change inclusion of cultural strangers in a shared space with its customs etc.

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Correct. Well, almost correct. Will see how much uptake this service will take (if any), and we can probably place it really close to the edge - for now it's on an Oregon server only.

That said, this isn't too far from mechanical HDD latencies of the /real/ SCSI drives.

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Thanks! It's truly a special concept somewhere between an overload and a pattern match. And unexpectedly performant - most of these are just type coercions, that resolve compile-time.

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Pretty much functions with pattern matching all-across, passing around bitstrings, relatively dynamically typed.

Grab a buffer, make sure it's at least as long as BHS, shove into BHS, ok, make sure it's at least as long as what the BHS requires...

Pattern matching is the hidden power of Elixir that's probably the hardest to get fluent with, it's IMHO harder than Rust's equivalent (because of gradual typing!) - but when it works it blows Pythons' match syntax way, way out.

  # Example: Login Request with immediate = 0x03 | 0x40 = 0x43.
  defp parse_lengths(<<
         _reserved::1, _i_bit::1, opcode::6,
         _flags::8,
         _specific1::16,
         ahs_length::8,
         data_length::24,
         _rest::binary
       >>) do
    {:ok, opcode, ahs_length * 4, data_length}
  end

  defp parse_lengths(_), do: {:error, :invalid_bhs}

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

The Pi4 shim actually exposes USB device as well. This works way, way better (and IMHO mostly because wired network is better than wireless for latency, ESP32’s feeble CPU aside)

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Well, sort of. I think a big portion about it for me was figuring out the TaskAttribute and ACA handling. Basically, many of these assumptions are (well?!) communicated to the block layer by the SCSI protocol (not even iSCSI, that is a thin layer) - but configuring it on the target side was always poorly understood.

We run "Ordered" - without queueing - so we essentially are trading off some /more/ performance for reliability in this situation. The block layer tends to handle it well in most OS.. I'll be game to test what softraid crypto would do to it (luks actually handles it reasonably!)

In terms of encrypted transport - the value is mostly in HMAC layer. That might die oddly if the ISPs decide to mess around with these packets because they look too cute - but for encrypted FS, it shouldn't be accidental, only malicious. (Accidentally, I've seen ISPs get upset over MPEG streams over netcat!)

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

That's a tricky one. Sort of - we just didn't have enough reason to implement it (nor IPv6 but this is a low lift, and we can get it done quickly).

We do suport VPD 0x83 and advertise consistent NAA/WWID, so linux will support multiple iscsiadm sessions to the same device, and it will be stitched across sessions as paths to the same disk.

We currently hardcode MC/S to 1 as part of login negotiations, advertise single portal and dropping a path will require a re-login.

So - theoretically yes, you can support multipath and it won't fall on its face, but without any practical benefits of it (no bandwidth aggregation and no failover - no ALUA) - at this point it's a single boring target.

But the underlying plumbing can support it - if you have a real usecase for it.

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

That was another reason for the RPi4 iSCSI shim (https://scsipub.com/initiators/PI4-iSCSI-shim/) - not over scsipub.com itself if you need performance (latency over WAN) - works "OK" but not great.

You can demo it out on scsipub without having to provision local SAN, and I came up with scsipub idea as a consequence of lack of any public iSCSI hosts to try things out.

Yes, it's ridiculous, but I have plugged my M1 Macbook Air to (LAN based) iSCSI through a Pi4. Works remarkably well.

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

I've answered some down the tree a bit for the inspirational use case for it.

Since I built it, I've started seeing it as a hammer for many nail-like problems - I think that would die down over time;

but.. I have my ESP32 "pendrive" that's net-synced. I have used it to install OS through UEFI-built-in initiator. I have added iSCSI targets to my windows laptop machine (and VMs) - while you need to deal with disconnects and reconnects, it actually works well enough.

It is a terrible idea, that doesn't sound as terrible for odd use-cases. But yes, the ESP32 over 2.4GHz over 3G internet is slow as molasses (20-30kB/s) - but when the alternative is 0.. or walking over there with a laptop, it works OK.

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

That was indeed one of the main drivers for it! ESP32 (especially with 2.4GHz WiFi latencies) is not super well suited for OS installs, but... many UEFI firmwares (and some network drivers!) will let you boot iSCSI directly.

The other one is the Raspberry Pi{3,4,5} iSCSI shim linked there as well - I have a bunch of them for a bunch of paying clients CI/CD kinds of work, and I wanted these to boot from network, not from microSD.

Both of these projects could've benefited from a public demo iSCSI endpoint, we have http://example.com and [email protected] - why not iSCSI

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Thanks! Let me know if you have any questions - I've long wanted to write something "system-level" in Elixir.

qdotme

قبل شهرينdiscuss

Hi HN - Tom here, I built scsipub.

The short version: it's iSCSI targets on the public internet. Pick an image, get a block device. The free tier doesn't need a signup at all - iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p scsipub.com and --login to iqn.2025-01.pub.scsipub:blank lands you a 64 MB scratch disk. There's a small catalog of OS images you can mount the same way.

The paid tier is where it gets less hobby-shaped: sessions survive disconnects, a single target can expose multiple LUNs, and SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations work end-to-end (REGISTER / RESERVE / RELEASE round-trip clean against sg_persist). That last bit is the cluster-storage primitive — Pacemaker, ESXi HA, and Windows MSCS all use PR for fencing — so you can actually back a 2-node failover cluster off a target on the public internet.

The post linked in the submission is the architectural decision log: Ranch 2.x listeners, a BEAM process per session, COW overlays with per-sector bitmaps, Caddy-managed Let's Encrypt for the iSCSI-TLS port without restarting the listener, and the four open-iscsi quirks that each cost me few hours. There's a section on what we're deliberately not solving (multi-region, RDMA, etc.) so you know the scope.

Two companion projects ship as embedded sub-sites on the front page — one turns an ESP32-S3 into a wireless iSCSI-to-USB bridge, one lets a Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 netboot directly from a target. Both linked from the landing page under "Hardware initiators".

Happy to answer any questions about the protocol, the deployment, or the BEAM-side design choices.

Submissions

Fixing "unfixable" 41TB BTRFS by Claude's one-shot

How we run iSCSI over the internet

Hosting for Starlink / Hosting on Starlink

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