Why does everyone think the term came from Star Wars? I know it was used in steampunk before then, and google suggests it goes back to a 1958 article about robots. Sorry, not trying to be pedantic, just feels like a lot of people give Star Wars unjust credit for things they didn’t actually create.

Don’t forget that managers think the same thing – if it’s free then it is somehow an inferior product but if you pay for something then that automatically makes it better. This applies forward as well… the more they pay for something, the “better” it must be.

For example… Cybertruck.

From my perspective, open-source products are greatly superior because you have the entire community of users and engineers working on a known issue, rather than a few paid engineers who may not even use the product. Even more importantly, the community will solve problems that a corporation has decided aren’t worth the effort or are “obsolete”.

Yeah I think there’s some good ideas that have been built up with the ABL devices over the years, and that mesh leveling seems great. However I also feel like more people should take the time to get their beds physically as flat as possible first, because otherwise your printer spends a lot of time micro-stepping the Z, and I’ve seen some mesh maps that looked absolutely horrible.

Playing around with arduino devices, I have some laser rangefinders that seem like they could work well for an ABL. That might also be a good way to map out the idea I mentioned about creating a thin full-bed shim to get a truly flat bed, and after that perhaps you would only need to do a fast four-corner calibration with the ABL to make sure nothing has changed.

I’ve never had auto-leveling on my own printer, but the one at work has it and I wouldn’t want it. It was great for the first couple years, then the sensors started suffering from corrosion and now it just doesn’t work for crap.

So on my own printer (fully manual) I have always treated the paper test as nothing more than an initial step to make sure the nozzle doesn’t plow your bed during the leveling process. It will get you close, but not close enough. To really dial in your bed, you need at least a 5-point 1st-layer print test so you can really get that initial layer adhering nicely at all points, and this of course performs the calibration with the bed at full heat so it matches conditions during actual prints.

The biggest problem I had was my aluminum bed was badly warped when I got it, but fortunately just bowl-shaped. I cut CD-sized discs of aluminum foil to build up the center – 13 layers in total, then put a glass or G10 bed over that to really get a flat surface. I finished mine with a PEI sticker on top of the G10.

Another problem is that all beds will be completely unique from each other. I have one of the original Ender 3 Pro printers, and purchased a Creality glass bed with it. There was nothing that wouldn’t stick to that bed, and I used a 10mm calicat (which has 4mm feet pads) as my tests for all new filament. Clean the surface occasionally with 91% ISO, and life was good… but after a few years the surface wore out and I was forced to get a new bed. Ordered directly from Creality again, and man, nothing at all would stick to that piece of glass, even for large prints. I tried everything down to brake cleaner to solve the problem and finally gave up on it. That’s when I started working with the G10. The point of this is that you can tell someone a particular bed will solve all their problems, and you will be wrong. The reality is that sellers use different manufacturers to make their product and you never know what you’ll get.

Your observations about the bed warping from the tightness of the screws is interesting, I never thought about that part before. I have heavy springs under my bed, and I have always suggested people get those springs as tight as possibly without being completely closed, then adjust the Z-switch to that point before you start your leveling process. Tight springs means the screws should never wander. It’s been around 3 years since the last time I even touched my leveling screws, and I just fired up the printer and ran some new pieces last week without any issues. A good tool is one that you can ignore for a year, then use it without having to recalibrate. Anything else is just frustrating!

There are a lot of suggestions we can make to help newcomers get their bed leveling correct, and there are a lot of variables that we simply can’t account for including manufacturer defects. One idea I had years ago but never got around to trying is to print a thin sheet of filament the size of the entire bed, ironed to create a top surface perfectly flat to the nozzle but taking up any imperfections in the aluminum plate. Then put a thin bed over the top of that, and you should have a perfect surface that lasts nearly the life of the printer. Seems like a good idea, but how do you figure out where to fill in those first layers until you have a final layer that covers the full bed?

You might check if a simple CPU upgrade would get you there. I previously ran some 2005 Poweredge servers that came with a Pentium D processor, and it cost me something like $8 from ebay to upgrade to a Xeon and start running KVM.

Keep an eye out for people trashing perfectly good desktop machines because Windows 10 is being retired.

If you want a server that “does it all” then you would need to get the most decked-out top of the line server available… Obviously that is unrealistic, so as others have mentioned, knowing WHAT you want to run is required to even begin to make a guess at what you will need.

Meanwhile here’s what I suggest – Grab any desktop machine you can find to get yourself started. Load up an OS, and start adding services. Maybe you want to run a personal web server, a file server, or something more extensive like Nextcloud? Get those things installed, and see how it runs. At some point you will start seeing performance issues, and this tells you when it’s time to upgrade to something with more capability. You may simply need more memory or a better CPU, in which case you can get the parts, or you may need to really step up to something with dual-CPU or internal RAID. You might also consider splitting services between multiple desktop machines, for instance having one dedicated NAS and another running Nextcloud. Your personal setup will dictate what works best for you, but the best way to learn these things is to just dive in with whatever hardware you can get ahold of (especially when it’s free), and use that as your baseline for any upgrades.

Ah that’s handy to know the status can show more detail for individual interfaces! I still use /etc/network/interfaces to set up each port so systemd shows them all unmanaged. Maybe some day I’ll try switching to that kind of setup.

Where do you find default link files at? There’s nothing relevant under /usr/share/doc/systemd/. I had to do a lot of online reading to find an example of selecting them by the MAC address, and the NamePolicy= line was critical to making it actually work.

I don’t suppose you happen to know of a way for systemd to manage a DSL connection (CenturyLink)? The old pppd setup seems to be getting hammered by systemd for some reason even though there’s no service file for it, but ppp0 refuses to try connecting on the new server until I can log in, stop it, and restart it again. It’s like it is trying to connect way too early in the boot and gets locked up.

But why doesn’t it ever empty the swap space? I’ve been using vm.swappiness=10 and I’ve tried vm.vfs_cache_pressure at 100 and 50. Checking ps I’m not seeing any services that would be idling in the background, so I’m not sure why the system thought it needed to put anything in swap. (And FWIW, I run two servers with identical services that I load balance to, but the other machine has barely used any swap space – which adds to my confusion about the differences).

Why would I want to reduce the amount of memory in the server? Isn’t all that cache memory being used to help things run smoother and reduce drive I/O?

And how does cache space figure in to this? I have a server with 64GB of RAM, of which 46GB is being used by system cache, but I only have 450MB of free memory and 140MB of free swap. The only ‘volatile’ service I have running is slapd which can run in bursts of activity, otherwise the only thing of consequence running is webmin and some VMs which collectively can use up to 24GB (though they actually use about half that) but there’s no reason those should hit swap space. I just don’t get why the swap space is being run dry here.

I did run across it and tried doing a reload, but it looks like according to the help file that doesn’t do anything with the link files? I tried networkctl status but that doesn’t show any info about what files are being used so I’m not sure what you’re seeing? It only gives me a list of the IPs used by each interface, plus some log info at the end of ppp0 going up and down while I was setting it up. If it helps, this is what one of my link files looks like…

[Match]
MACAddress=24:6e:96:4e:21:73

[Link]
NamePolicy=
Name=wan0

Yeah frustrating is definitely one word for it. I was up until 4am Saturday morning trying to get this one issue resolved, everything else worked almost perfectly on the new firewall setup except I couldn’t get out to the internet. I had already tried renaming the files earlier and that didn’t do the trick so I’m not sure why it finally decided to start working, but all eight ports are correctly configured now. (Not that I have much faith in what will happen down the road if one of the network adapters needs replaced.)

And the only reason I had to fight with giving all the network ports new names is because “predictable naming” is NOT… Turns out if you cold boot the machine the interfaces get named one way, and if you do a reboot they get a different set of names, so I had no choice about renaming them by MAC address.

Oh well, maybe someone else will see the post and offer some suggestions. I can’t imagine having to do this again on my other servers when I upgrade them from Buster.

If your card has an x4 pinout, then it probably needs the additional bandwidth. Plugging it into an x1 slot (if it was possible) would slow down the network traffic. Get a better motherboard with an x4 slot on it so you can use the hardware you want. or find something else that will fit your computer.

Honestly even the 1Gb quad port card I have requires an x4 slot, although I saw some dual-port 2.5Gb x1 cards on ebay. Maybe you could just use two of those?

Even the older versions work pretty well, depending on the features you need. I use it for all my 3D modeling, I could never get the hang of other CAD software but this one just “makes sense” to me. I even used it last year to create a model of a trailer I wanted to build, worked out the finer details of how everything would fit together and some options like adding ramps, and once we got to the point of building the trailer it was just a matter of copying the dimensions and cutting out all the steel.

Yeah? OK well it’s certainly worth taking a closer look at, and I was also doing some reading on Yacy. I’ve run one in the past called mnogosearch, with a lot of customization, but it would be nice to get into a community project like this.

But is it decentralized? Do the results from multiple spiders get added to give everyone the same quality searches or do I need to scan the whole internet myself?

[edit] I was looking at this earlier and couldn’t find the info. Started searching again just now and found it immediately… of course… (The answer is YES)

Yep, that’s exactly what I was looking at (https://github.com/searx/searx). As I said, it was a QUICK dive but the wording was enough to make me shy away from it. For all the years I’ve been running servers, I won’t put up anything that requires the latest/greatest of any code because that’s where about 90% of the zero-days seem to come from. Almost all the big ones I’ve seen in the last few years where things that made me panic until I realized that oh, if your updates are more than a year old then none of this affects you. And the one that DID affect me had already been updated through a security release.

I just did a quick dive into this and have some concerns. SearX appears to no longer be maintained and was last updated three years ago. SearXNG was forked to use more recent libraries but there were concerns that those are not always stable or fully vetted. There were also concerns that SearXNG did not follow the same concerns for user privacy. It’s a shame that SearX shut down, that one actually sounds like a project I would have jumped on.

So to start with, you mentioned the underextrusion on a previous print. Seems like a good starting point, when was the last time you checked your E-steps? Basically you want to disconnect the bowden tube from the hotend, extrude out a short amount of filament and mark its position, then extrude 100mm of filament and measure how much actually came out. From there, there is a formula to adjust the E-steps on the printer. Ideally you should have exactly 100mm come out but there’s a good chance you’re going to have less than this. You can also make some adjustment to this from your slicer (in the material flow section) but that can cause various other problems, so ultimately you’ll want to get this value corrected in the printer itself.

While the bowden tube is disconnected, this is a good time to try doing a cold-pull. Heat the hotend up to around 200C again, stick some scrap filament into it so it just starts to push filament out the bottom, then let the hotend cool back down to near 160C (or maybe even cooler, but this is a good start). Pull the blob of filament out of the hotend, and you should have a bullet-shaped plug on the end of it. Look this over to see if there is any burnt filament, contaminants, or anything else that looks weird. If you see obvious contaminants then this is likely causing your underextrusion. After doing this, you should also check the nozzle itself, sometimes as they wear out a bit of the brass gets pushed over and blocks the flow. Always keep spare nozzles on hand, they wear out faster than anything else.

And one more thing before reassembling… Check the extruder itself. After some time it is common for the brass gear to get clogged up with filament or simply have the teeth wear down, especially from some of the fancy filaments like wood, glow-in-the-dark, or even the metallics. However the results of these problems should be fairly obvious from a clicking in the extruder while printing. Clean out any obvious filament remains, or you can get a pack of replacement gears pretty cheap.

When you are ready to reassemble the bowden tubing, check the fittings at both ends. These wear out easily, so you may see signs that the tubing have been shifting back and forth. These really need to prevent any movement in the bowden tubing, so if you’re going to order parts anyway, get a pack of these to hand on hand. Bad fittings can cause serious underextrusion any place the extruder reverses directions like at the end of a wall. but the wall itself should lay down fairly cleanly.

Hope that gives you some ideas to run with. Some of this will depend on the specific model of Ender you have, but if it was working fine and just suddenly started having problems then something blocking the filament flow is at the top of the list of possibilities.

More drives also equals larger power consumption so you would need a larger battery backup.

It also means more components prone to failure which increases your chance of losing data. More drives means more moving parts and electrical connections including data and power cables, backplanes, and generated heat that you need to cool down.

I’d be more concerned over how many failures you’re seeing that makes you think smaller drives would be the better option? I have historically used old drives from ebay or manufacturer refurbs, and even the worst of those have been reliable enough to only have to replace drives once every year or two. With RAID6 or raidz2 you should be plenty secure during a rebuild to prevent data loss. I wouldn’t consider using a lot of little drives unless it’s the only option I had or if someone gave them away for free.

Yeah I figured there would be multiple answers for you. Just keep in mind that you DO want to get it fixed at some point to use the disk id instead of the local device name. That will allow you to change hardware or move the whole array to another computer.