I only have one 4U server in the rack. But I have a 2U server, two 1U servers, a 1U switch–oh, and a 2U UPS with another 2U of battery pack. And a PDU, but that doesn’t count for much.
But with that said, yes, if the single 4U server is the only heavy thing in the rack, you definitely need to be more careful with sliding it out, particularly if it isn’t solidly anchored to structure.
Especially with a 5000VAC UPS at the bottom 
I have got my experience with Supermicro SC847BE1C chassis with its standard rails.
I had to dismount the server from the rack to open the top cover, and then change the motherboard. I did it twice in the past years: it was not convenient.
iX TrueNAS X and M series appliances are really easier to service than Supermicro servers because the motherboards are on trays that you can pull out from the rear.
I would say that they are as easy to service as Netapp ones.
My 44U rack is anchored to the concrete floor, and the bottom 8U are the UPS bays, so it’s very bottom-heavy.
From experience, I wouldn’t consider using a tall rack that wasn’t securely fastened to the floor, and the 44U wasn’t much more expensive than a much shorter rack.
I hear you. I simply don’t have that much stuff here to justify the loss of space that a full rack entails. It then again, I don’t run Cray-3 supercomputers in my basement like some of the demigods here do. It does cut down on the heating bill I guess, along with the expensive cheese and wine collection that the electric company includes as a freebie every time they send a bill. 
Life goals.
I always wanted to own some really old machine running e.g. 2.11BSD. I have a friend who actually owns a VAX 11/780. He only boots it on special occasions.
20 years ago the developer of FreeBSD’s Vinum volume manager Greg Lehey, living in Australia, had an entire rack full of disks. Sun Microsystems storage he got cheaply out of some bankruptcy or so.
Even for a MicroVAX the energy bill would be insane.
And at the same time the dimensions of storage, memory, CPUs … everything have become so incredibly huge, you don’t need a rack full of disks anymore - ever. A single 4 TB SSD and you can store hundreds of disk images in the order of some Gigabytes and simulate an entire data centre on your Macbook Pro.
Hobby project still on the shelf but probably getting built this year: a PiDP 11
P.S: Anecdote: at the time Greg developed Vinum the dominant commercial volume manager across all Unix platforms - SunOS/Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, Irix … - was named Veritas. Refresh your Latin and go figure 
I was able to justify to his nibs that actually it resulted in taking up less space, as if it was all on normal desks and shelf units it would take up far more space
I used to perform tape backups and like tasks on a PDP11/Vax750. Noisy, very power hungry, especially on boot. But at least the server room was always super cool even in the depths of summer. The school had to put in a transformer and a pad, just for the computer system. 3-phase power to get that drive spun up, etc.
A freshman eventually bought that system and hauled it off to the basement of his parents home.
Nice thing about old Crays is they make nice comfortable bench seats
… Cray 1’s consumed insane amounts of Freon since they were actively cooled with the stuff. The seal issues gave them fits until better welding / brazing techniques were found to limit oil leaks that shorted out the boards.
I don’t really have a lot…I just set things up similar to a regular datacenter, with two storage boxes and three compute boxes, so that I can move data and VMs around and keep close to 100% uptime.
With the 8U of UPS, I’m only using 24U of the rack. The whole rack uses about 600W on average.
@Arwen,
I am not familiar with the intricacies of some of the format transfers involved, but I do understand that some of the material was transferred from original tape that is now no longer recoverable, and that includes a lot of open-reel recordings, including some Sony DASH masters.
So in your analysis, this is definitely not ‘1’ and not likely to be ‘2’ unless the IP holder wants to work from the earliest possible source (always possible) but it is absolutely ‘3’
As a side note, it goes without saying we will not allow Universal to act as the archivist for any of the original media on our behalf…
So far, a majority of consumers seem to be OK with not owning their media anymore. For the most part, the IP owners have not caused major disruptions to a lot of users re: ‘purchased’ streaming rights, though some content on Amazon and elsewhere whose streaming rights had been purchased by consumers, disappeared.
In some cases, the content would re-appear in slightly repackaged form, with the consumer having the option to re-purchase similar streaming rights again.. Usually, at a higher cost, of course.
The industry can keep playing these stupid games until enough consumers get ticked off that politicians take notice and then the industry may be due the regulatory reckoning it definitely is unlikely to want. For example, congress may make streaming rights ‘follow’ content hosting platforms and require the next platform to stream the stuff as if it had been bought there or force the previous content licensee to issue a full refund.
This kind of stuff takes time, especially with an industry that lubricates the wheel of politics with lots of cash (see airlines, big tobacco, etc) but eventually, there is a reckoning. At some point the tide is also going to turn on private equity and the gun industry. The outrage simply has to grow some more to the point where the donations from those sectors can no longer paper over the relevant issues.
On Amazon, on Netflix, and probably on every other streaming platform. And aside from sheer “wanting something without paying for it,”[1] if you want to control what you supposedly “own,” you need to physically control it.
Everyone has examples; mine is Farscape–I was and remain a big fan of it (and I’m still probably a little bitter that it was canceled without the fifth season it should have had), and it was streaming on Netflix[2], until it wasn’t any more. Sorry subscribers, sucks to be you.
The situation you cite is worse yet, where someone has “bought” a specific title that then gets removed from the platform. Again, sorry, sucks to be you.
So why do people put up with it? “They don’t have a whole lot of choice” is likely the biggest reason. Even leaving legalities out of the picture, setting up your own media server is expensive, both to procure and to operate[3]. It isn’t that hard to do, but you still need to be somewhat tech-savvy. And you then need to get your media onto it, if you aren’t going to just download it[4]. I can do it, and I’m willing to do it, in order to control my own library. Most people lack either the ability or the willingness.
and it’d be foolhardy to deny that’s also a major factor ↩︎
they also had it on DVD, back when they used to do that ↩︎
For what it costs in electricity to run my NAS, I could pay for a lot of streaming ↩︎
Which illustrates an absurdity in the copyright laws. If I own a copy on Blu-Ray, I can legally–anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA aside–format-shift it into a .mp4 file. But if I download that .mp4 from someone else, that’s illegal. ↩︎
The decline of the Netflix DVD library was apparent starting about five years before they pulled the plug. More and more titles that used to be available simply disappeared (how to get ahead in advertising had been recommended to me in like 2007 and had stayed on my wanted list for over ten years and was never fulfilled. Curiously enough, the local library had a copy).
I get it, they’re here to make money and once Netflix proved the concept all the usual shenanigans of content owners were going to re-emerge just like potholes in the street after a bad winter. The owners cannot help themselves, they’re greedy and they will disintermediate good platforms if they think they can make one more cent doing so.
That’s why Netflix, Apple and all the other folk keep creating content - so they can profit off licensing, etc. while also controlling access to said content. No doubt, some of the same crappy people that used to inhabit the c suite at paramount, mgm, etc are now sipping fine wine in similar suites at Apple, Netflix, and HBO.
Thing is, it’s getting to a point where our family cannot find content anymore because something that used to be on Netflix might now be on Disney plus, Hulu, paramount, HBO, whatever. There likely is a market for a web site that can tell the consumer where content can be found these days since the stuff keeps shuffling around.
My next major NAS project is installing plex to make all the content I legally ripped more easily accessible.
Mine arrived the other day.
https://www.amazon.com/Farscape-Complete-25th-Anniversary-Blu-ray/dp/B0CH41731G/
Has the peace-keeper wars which is a bit like a 5th season
Or Jellyfin
Interesting, I thought that’s more of a scale package?
Eh, kind of. It does tie up a lot of hanging threads (hanging chads?), even if I didn’t think it had enough time to do it and thus felt rushed. I don’t think I can forgive them for killing off D’Argo, though.
…and this, I think, is going to be a lot of what drives piracy, which with the advent of the *arr suite is easier than it’s ever been. I’m not going to subscribe to Disney+ just for The Mandalorian, for example. This has always been a problem, even going back to the early days of Cable TV, but (1) the problem seems to be increasing, not decreasing; (2) there’s less legitimate rationale for it than ever before; and (3) it’s easier than ever before to pirate the stuff you want and avoid the issue entirely[1].
AFAIK, Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin all work on both FreeBSD and Linux.
And in this, I think we see pretty large-scale public rejection of copyright law, at least as it currently stands. And if it’s the case, as Jefferson wrote, that governments, and thus their laws, derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, then it naturally follows that copyright law as it now exists exceeds the just powers of the government. Insofar as people had followed it, that was as much because violating it was hard (especially before the Xerox machine) as because people truly agreed with it. ↩︎
