Who pissed in your dinner?

HA is pretty remarkable. When ever you hear the refrain "The S in IoT stands for security", HA is doing its damndest to fix that.

Mine (I have lots of them) provide single panes of glass for a lot of apps. My home one alone covers at least 15 phone apps, including eleccy supplier and even my car. There is a school in Dorset which is gradually rolling out ... ... anyway, I think HA is absolutely belting and I'm not sure what your snags actually are with it. Why not flesh out your issues with it and we can engage on the facts.

Your dad sounds amazing. I have multiple programming languages and NodeRED to fiddle with and your old man managed to do way more than me now, back in the day with PLCs and the like.

Good skills.

A country that actually has pennies (not cents) still has them. Ours have a tiny piece of thrice blessed unicorn horn baked into each one.

We're weird.

In the UK (flirted with EU, in and out and shake it all about within my lifetime!) we have similar rules.

The price on the ticket is what you pay at the till, with regards taxation etc. A receipt must provide a full breakdown if requested and will generally do so anyway.

The price on the ticket is called "an invitation to treat". That is a legal term related to forming a contract. You accept the invitation by toddling up to the checkout and offering to buy the item at the price stated on the ticket/label. The shop is well within its rights to refuse your offer of payment: a contract is a two way agreement, so if their offer to treat was in error, they can say so and refuse to accept your offer.

The price on the label is not binding but it must include tax so you will never find yourself at the till and an extra sales tax or VAT or anything else being added.

However, retail is so full of "sales" and other gadgets to grab sales, that contract law generally gets defenestrated. A retail store may honour a faulty ticket price to avoid bad publicity.

Bugger off you racist - I'm partly Devonian and have a massive collection of Commodore 64 games, that I didn't actually pay for. You'd be amazed how often you never hear "arrr!" in Plymouth or Exeter.

The "generic" SW England pirate accent thing is bollocks and a Hollywood fiction. It's closely associated with "Mummerset".

Anyway, I am a self-hosting fan to the point that up until recently my company offsite backups were stored in my home attic.

Let's do the traditional car analogy: If you are a mechanic then you can maintain your own car and your family's and your mates too. If not, then you can pay someone else to do it. You might go back to the main dealer (MS) or that bloke down the road (me).

I do run "vanity" email domains for my family and friends as well as the corporate ones for work.

"Oh, my sweet summer child,"

As soon as you kick off with that nonsense, you have lost the argument. There is a nonce (I use that term illadvisedly) on the Register who still insists on using it.

It was a mildly amusing rebuke in, say, the noughties. Leave it there. Nowadays you simply sound like a fuckwit.

DRS.

For me, the biggest win for DRS is being able to patch a cluster without pissing around with where the VMs are. I ended up writing a shitty Powershell script that nearly works - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fgerdesj%2FPat... I don't bother updating that script because I'm only using it until my last VMware cluster is toast.

Proxmox HA is good enough. Note that it supports autostart too properly. A VMware HA cluster has never supported autostart - you have to bodge it.

DRS needs a properly expensive license. The old Essentials Plus didn't get it - you only got basic vMotion and certainly not Storage vMotion. You had to go Standard at a minimum and ideally Enterprise Plus for the full toybox. Then more for Tanzu containers and all that bollocks.

Proxmox gives you OpenvSwitch and HA and Ceph and the rest for nowt, if you know what you are doing. Its no harder than VMware.

Hands up who's had to deal with their vCentre running out of space on one of its 15 odd volumes or its STS cert expiring. What about discovering that administrator@VCENTER.LOCAL is not root or that both used to have a 90 day password expiration. I've been a VMware fanboi for 20 years. Been there, seen it, written the wiki page and done it more than twice. Luckily I know how to use chroot ...

Now, your hot failover - I never used that in 20 years, with VMware. I used to run a Novell NetWARE setup that did that, back in the '90s with an eye wateringly expensive set of network cards. It's 2025 and clustering and app (not host) load balancing and failover is a fixed problem without invoking that horror.

"You're confusing vSphere with vCenter."

No they are not. They had a single ESXi and whilst ESXi is only a component of vSphere (if you pay for a license) it is fair to separate freebie ESXi from "full fat" vSphere. VMware's marketing also wasn't that clear either, back in the day, until v4ish - I'm old enough to remember ESX and GSX and all that guff.

A Proxmox box has the full feature set for clustering built in - HA and file system(s). You now also get (it is still in alpha, but frankly better than some VMware releases I've dealt with over the decades) a thing called Proxmox Datacenter Manager - a sort of super vCentre. Ideal for MSPs (like my company).

20+ years I was a VMware fanboi. No more. I am doing another migration at the moment.

I recently visited FL for a couple of weeks. The good Lord granted a massive swamp .. a concrete base with grassy islands! FL has a lovely climate (apart from the hurricanes n that) and FL man deployed air conn with the ability to freeze air.

Cold dry air is not healthy - humans are used to atmospheric humidity - we are largely wetish breathing beasts. Temperature range from -20C to +40C is quite easily manageable if coupled with suitable humidity. Cold, dry, SHARED air is really crap. Now you have shared heavy doses of viruses and bacteria to contend with.

There is no point in getting whizzed up about the plain fact that an American of any flavour will consume far more resources relating to heating and cooling than nearly any other human on the planet. It is the way of things. FL, CA and TX (man) are probably the worst exemplars.

AI ... LLMs are handy. They are just a tool and given enough training on decent data are a great aide memoire. They are the old school secretary (female - obvs) that predicts the woefully sexist boss's thoughts and fixes things up. ... without the casual abuse.

The hysteria with regards replacing programmers and so on is absolute bollocks.

A LLM does not know when it is talking bollocks, so for disciplines such as maths, it should be restricted to, say, a chat about theorems, axioms etc - all very useful but for goodness sake, do not ask it for a solution to a simple arithmetic problem.

I suggest you consider your LLM chats as one with a mate who is somewhat pissed - they will whitter on about all sorts of nonsense but also manage some sort of clarity.

I'm a consultant and own the firm. We are migrating our SMBs to Proxmox. I spent quite a while (25 years) getting to grips with VMware and I am absolutely livid (and also mildly sanguine!)

The world turns and we all have to adjust. I do find it rather distasteful how many people and businesses like me and ours have been treated without any consideration - we were their experts and we are now running away in droves.

A short term profit will be all they get.

TikTok's management are profit focussed, as any corporation should be, with a frisson of attention from above, occasionally. That would be the government having a tickle to the private parts to keep things moving smoothly (now that is a euphemism I hope I never have to deal with!)

TT is basically a nationalistic influence movement, par excellence. It's not shy and frankly rather well done. They looked at Google, Facebook and the rest, intercepted the ball and ran with it.

We reap as they sow or perhaps vv - you decide.

"But if someone posts something negative about another person and they claim it is "fake news" who decides?"

That would be libel and a court in some jurisdictions. Whether you can afford it is an issue too.

Elsewhere you are probably SOL.

I'm 53, a Brit and the son of two soldiers.

I went to several BFES (British Forces Education Services) schools in West Germany, back in the day. You may recall that things were quite fraught back then - different to today but also the same. We used to get bomb threats roughly weekly - just at school, it was worse for the troops. Some of those were traced to older kids having a laugh. (lol)

In about 10 years (roughly late '70s to mid '80s) quite a lot happened. I was 10 in 1980.

Anyway, govt agencies have to deal with quite a lot of crap that you never even hear about. Its quite hard to discern whether you have a murderous maniac on the blower or a kiddie trying to impress a girl or whatever.

I was roughly seven or eight years old when my Dad showed me how to look for impromptu devices on the chassis of a car. My brother is a year younger. We would always check after parking our car. That was the times.

Nowadays are different but we should perhaps re-allow the old norms to come back in and start to check our cars again, when it might be appropriate and be a little more observant about what is happening around us.

Your threat model might be more biased towards firearms, if you are US based, for example. Avoid them if you can!