About doorbells (and charging them): there exist battery-less wireless doorbells, they generate enough energy from pushing the button. I got some off aliexpress several years ago.
Yes, the project does not make a ton of sense but it was for me the opportunity to learn ESP32 and have some fun. The outdoor module is constantly in deep sleep and only wakes up for a few seconds when the button is pressed. I put a 1000 mAh cell as that was the biggest capacity that fit the enclosure, that's probably way too much as in deep sleep the ESP32 barely consumes anything.
The indoor module is plugged straight into a wall socket so no batteries. When someone is at the door I am notified by Michael Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umDr0mPuyQc (maybe I will get tired of this, for now it's still fun)
Maybe he is, but the advice stays for "evening-persons" too. I'm not an early bird, but I noticed that I am most productive when I pull all-nighters, when nothing happens and when no one bothers me. With age it is harder and harder to do though...
If I were a KGB (FSB) agent with a task to undermine US infrastructure with my commits in Linux kernel, using my real russian name and .ru TLD would be the last thing to do.
Sure, but if I were an agency tasked with protecting US from security threats, I would begin with the lowest hanging fruit.
Yes, probably the guy who holds up the number "3" using his thumb, index, and middle finger shouldn't be allowed in the Super Secret Vault. But the dude right behind him who has "I'm Russian" tattooed on his forehead shouldn't be allowed in either, and he's a bit easier to spot.
I started using VMware more than 10 years ago because of the good USB support for license dongles and pki stuff. I am using Windows as a development machine.
I must admit that the license was cheap, it worked, so I didn't took the time to explore alternatives. But for what I understood, my use case doesn't exist anymore. You cannot buy a single pro license anymore. So, the day I upgrade my system, I may be forced to switch to another solution.
I also have a Linux host with Windows VMs running VMWare and KVM/qemu didn't work for me because the VMs don't capture Alt-Tab and other combinations. This is a major annoyance when doing development on the VMs. There were other small things that made me go back to VMware but I can't recall exactly what they were.
I guess you are not logging into the VM using a remote desktop client? But using the the spice client?
One of my favourite alternatives is using Steam Remote Play, you get the low latency, works for games at the cost of much higher bandwidth. But for a home environment this is fine.
With only hot air you would need a lot of heat and pulling, potentially displacing other parts nearby, because it seems like the nand flash is not just soldered, but additionally glued with some kind of adhesive.
Even if your server does not have proper IPMI, most colo providers have an assortment of ip-kvms, you can ask for those and access your server from any modern browser.
I'm pretty suspicious of trusting the firmware on things like that either, to be honest. (Personally, I tend to use serial cables and a little custom board to turn serial breaks into resets, but I know my NIH instinct is probably a little on the high side. It would be unreasonable for me to suggest someone new to colo start making random extra boards to stick inside their machines!)
You do not need to stick it inside, it plugs into monitor and keyboard ports. Power-on and reset are usually done manually on request. And you do not need it plugged in all the time, only to reconfigure network or boot values.
That's definitely a level of remote-hands intervention I've not had from the handful of places I have racks of colo kit. You're right, it might be something some of them do for other customers though; I've never really asked. They'll certainly push a reset button, swap a drive or rack a server that's shipped to them. (Though hardware's reliable enough nowadays and I have go to data centres so rarely that it's a bit of a fun novelty, and I like doing it myself.)
I've been colo'ing forever. I'd consider a Lantronix spider ipkvm available on request to be like minimum viable colo service. It's usually up in 5 minutes when I submit a ticket to the NOC.
I bet your provider has something like that. It's a godsend when you screw up, say, the hypervisor running state somehow and need bare metal access to unbork it :)
My version of this is to use a serial console server for direct access, rather than vga + keyboard. If the kernel is still running fine but network access is down, I have a getty running on the serial port. If the kernel has locked up too, I hit the reset button by sending a 500ms+ serial break (special circuit, highly recommended) and the bios has serial redirect, so I can do stuff like hit del to drop into bios setup or uefi shell at that point.
But I expect you're probably right some or all of the providers we use do have something like that, as I speculated in the previous post. I've just never understood the point of vga-type stuff when bios/uefi serial redirect exists and serial console is more convenient anyway once the kernel has started, so never asked the question.
It is also useful to configure mutiple IPs on the same interface, one for Colo, and one for your lab. You can do this on all OSes, even on windows.
And if you failed to do this and all advices in the article: then kindly ask colo provider to attach ip-KVM (if your "server" is not actual server with ipmi/bmc), 99.9% of places have these. And most of them will provide it free of charge for limited amount of time.
