It looks like the connector is U.2 so I’d look for motherboards that indicate support for that explicitly. From a quick search, it looks like SuperMicro makes some. This is getting out of my area of expertise though; I just know the crazy drives exist…

Assume an unlimited budget for now, I just want to know what’s out there.

I mean, if you’re willing to pay the price of a car per SSD they go up to at least 122TB density per drive… (e.g. Solidigm SBFPF2BV0P12001 D5-P5336 – $16K~$20K depending on supplier from a quick search)

I don’t actually recommend that for personal use, but since you were curious about what’s out there, there’s some absolutely crazy shit in enterprise server gear if you have deep enough pockets.

Just run a web server and expose the specific files you want to share through that?

There’s something else going on there besides base64 encoding of the URL – possibly they have some binary tracking data or other crap that only makes sense to the creator of the link.

It’s not hard to write a small Python script that gets what you want out of a URL like that though. Here’s one that works with your sample link:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import base64
import binascii
import itertools
import string
import sys

input_url = sys.argv[1]
parts = input_url.split("/")
  
for chunk in itertools.accumulate(reversed(parts), lambda b,a: "/".join([a,b])):
  try:
    text = base64.b64decode(chunk).decode("ascii", errors="ignore")
    clean = "".join(itertools.takewhile(lambda x: x in string.printable, text))
    print(clean)
  except binascii.Error:
    continue

Save that to a file like decode.py and then you can you run it on the command line like python3 ./decode.py 'YOUR-LINK-HERE'

e.g.

$ python3 ./decode.py 'https://link.sfchronicle.com/external/41488169.38548/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG90ZG9nYmlsbHMuY29tL2hhbWJ1cmdlci1tb2xkcy9idXJnZXItZG9nLW1vbGQ_c2lkPTY4MTNkMTljYzM0ZWJjZTE4NDA1ZGVjYSZzcz1QJnN0X3JpZD1udWxsJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9bmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV90ZXJtPWJyaWVmaW5nJnV0bV9jYW1wYWlnbj1zZmNfYml0ZWN1cmlvdXM/6813d19cc34ebce18405decaB7ef84e41'
https://www.hotdogbills.com/hamburger-molds/burger-dog-mold

This script works by spitting the URL at ‘/’ characters and then recombining the parts (right-to-left) and checking if that chunk of text can be base64 decoded successfully. If it does, it then takes any printable ASCII characters at the start of the string and outputs it (to clean up the garbage characters at the end). If there’s more than one possible valid interpretation as base64 it will print them all as it finds them.

Nginx is running in Docker

Are you launching the container with the correct ports exposed? You generally cannot make connections into a container from the outside unless you explicitly tell Docker that you want it to allow that to happen… i.e. assuming you want a simple one-to-one mapping for HTTP and HTTPS standard ports are you passing something like -p 80:80 -p 443:443 to docker run on the command line, adding the appropriate ports in your compose file, or doing something similar with another tool for bringing the container up?

I’ve put drives into standby mode with the gnome disks GUI tool on my regular desktop when they were being noisy and I wanted some peace for a while. If the drive was mounted before I put it to sleep, trying to access something on the disk will cause it to spin back up.

Are you running different versions of the software? (e.g. different versions of ffmpeg, maybe?)

I don’t like Anubis because it requires me to enable JS – making me less secure. reddthat started using go-away recently as an alternative that doesn’t require JS when we were getting hammered by scrapers.

netstat -tp – that’ll show you TCP connections and the associated program, doing a DNS lookup for the IPs they’re connected to. You may need elevated permissions to see what some processes are.

There are a bunch of other options (e.g. -n to get numeric output instead of looking up names, -l to get programs listening for incoming connections, etc); check the man pages for more details.

I just right click on the terminal to change the profile to whatever I feel like it should be in the moment (usually red). I do it by reflex, basically. I never felt the need to try to set up automation for different servers, but I expect there’s probably a way to do that if you really wanted to.

“You love the robot more than me!” 💔️

I (manually) set the background color of my terminals depending on the machine I connect to. I currently have profiles for red, green, blue, and black backgrounds with black as my default. I usually use red for ones I want to be especially careful of.

I’ve been trying to figure out a related sort of video streaming setup for work (without Owncast, but with a similar sort of 24/7 goal plus other considerations) and have been looking into using ffmpeg’s capabilities to output either HLS or DASH segments + manifests. (FFMPEG can do both but I don’t know which would be better for my needs yet.) The sources I’m working with are RTSP/RTP instead of RTMP and I only need streaming to browser clients currently – although it working with VLC naturally by pointing it to the manifest is nice.

HLS and DASH work by having videos split into small chunks that can be downloaded over HTTP, so just replacing the manifest allows for continuous streaming (the client pulls it repeatedly) without the server needing to maintain a continuous connection to the client.(Fan out to CDNs works naturally since the video chunks are just files that can be served by any web server.)

It should be possible to do some creative things by either creating / modifying the manifests myself with scripting or by piping chunks into another instance of ffmpeg from a script. (I’ve done something similar using -f image2pipe in the past, but that was for cases where I need to do things like create a video from an image gallery dynamically.) That’s as far as I’ve gotten with it myself though.

I don’t know what the right answer is either, but I’m also interested in finding out and hopeful you get additional responses.

I have an older version of TrueNAS on it from when it was still FreeBSD based (instead of Linux). I might replace it with Scale whenever I get around to doing maintenance on it next – or maybe just go to stock Debian or something since I don’t use most of the bells-and-whistles.

I run my NAS that way too. I just mount it and play videos with VLC if I want to watch something I have on it. The main reason I have a NAS is because I ran out of drive bays in my main system a few years ago… Works fine for my needs currently; no need to make it more complicated.

What was the most ridiculous or funny boundary push you saw?

Trolling someone by attaching a camera to the ceiling right above their keyboard. I’ve been paranoid since I saw that stunt pulled… They got their point across about physical security though.

I’ve worked for a university before and it was very common for staff to remote into their systems from home – usually with SSH for CS types or Remote Desktop/Team Viewer/etc. for less computer-focused folks. (The former usually didn’t have much issue – the folks using the latter mechanisms got compromised a number of times… -.-) There was also a campus provided VPN that was required to access certain systems with instructions to students and staff on how to use it, but other systems just got public IP addresses.

If what you’re doing is related to your work and campus IT doesn’t object, you’re probably fine to do it. I’ve run various kinds of websites and web apps for colleagues to collaborate on research projects. Being able to do things like that is kind of the point of the internet.

Having seen a number of students, uh, push the limits and find the boundaries of acceptability the hard way though… I’d strongly advise you not to install cryptominers, run TOR exit nodes, or torrent TV shows/movies/etc. That kind of thing tends to get your systems in hot water with IT or other parts of the bureaucracy…

In principle, sure. I’m not aware of an existing out-of-the-box solution that’d do what you want, but it also wouldn’t surprise me terribly if someone’s cobbled something together to do this before.

If I wanted to make something like this personally (and couldn’t find an existing solution), I’d start by doing some research into PBX software like Asterisk, what derivatives and extensions people have made for that, etc. – being mindful that I’d likely be digging into a deep rabbit hole…

You can run docker containers with multiple volumes. e.g. pass something like -v src1:dst1 -v src2:dst2 as arguments to docker run.

So – if I understood your question correctly – yes, you can do that.

Giant middle finger from me – and probably everyone else who uses NoScript – for trying to enshittify what’s left of the good parts of the web.

Seriously, FUCK THAT.