Hi everyone, I’m creating this megathread to help regroup information about Pelosi’s recent visit and the follow-up (currently the PLA is conducting military drills very close to Taiwan)
You’re still totally allowed to make your own threads, this is more for things that do not warrant a thread by themselves.
In discussing this the other day I came to a question about the semi-conductor topic in relation to this “Pivot to Taiwan.”
There’s very clearly a profit motive involved, with Taiwan producing a lot of computer chips and the US based companies needing to maintain control of this profit stream moving forward, particularly given the growth and technological improvement of the mainland Chinese semi-conductor industry.
What I have started to wonder about is how much this may also have to do with the hardware level backdoors implemented in nearly every western designed processor. If China takes over as the semi-conductor supplier of the world (either via mainland production or the reintegration of Taiwan), these hardware backdoors will be very quickly removed, or at the very least adapted to the needs of the Chinese people instead of American imperialists.
I think that makes sense from an imperialist point of view, especially one where the cracks are becoming blindingly apparent. Control of information is everything.
It’s not just about control for the sake of protecting profits, it’s about control for the sake of protecting information. These backdoors enable access to private/personal information on nearly any device, or to dictate what functions those devices are allowed to perform.
There is no doubt that there backdoors built into these hardware but the extent to which the US state has control over these backdoors is not very clear. At least I haven’t been able to find out some info about it.
Either way, I don’t think the backdoor aspect is as important as the monopoly angle. The entire world is dependent on Intel and AMD to perform computations. It is hard to overstate how important computation is for the economy to function especially ones like China where there is more planning and technology is deployed everyday for both convenience and governance.
There is also ARM. Nearly all my servers use ARM chips. I only have one Intel server and it’s not even a new chip (3rd gen i7).
Where do you get decent arm servers for cheap? I’m building a xeon workstation.
Well, they won’t be as powerful as a Xeon system. That is why I have my one intel server. Most of the services I run (I run 26 services), can run on low-power hardware easily (things like Invidious, Homeassistant, Cockpit, Node Red, Jellyfin, etc.). For these, I have SBCs. I currently run 9 Raspberry Pi 4s (8 as webservers, one as a recursive DNS server with Pi-Hole in front of it), 2 Pine H64s (one as my reverse proxy that provides access to the rest of my servers and one as my TV box running Kodi), and a RockPro64 handling more intensive stuff like the Matrix homeserver. My Intel machine is an old Mac Mini which I’ve upgraded the storage (500GB HDD to 1TB SSD) and RAM (4GB to 16GB) on and installed Debian. On that, I run things that require either a lot of power or a lot of storage. For example, my Mac Mini hosts Gitea, Minio (open source Amazon S3 clone), Code Server (Online IDE), Nextcloud, Onlyoffice, and a Minecraft server.
SBCs are nice because they are cheap and very low power. All my servers connect to a single <$100 UPS and that lasts over an hour. Of course, the downside is that if you have a single service that needs a lot of compute power, you’ll need to use a separate server for that, which is what my Mac Mini is for.
Edit: By the way, I’ve seen you on Matrix. My username on there is Heisenbug.
Do you know how to get cheap deals on SBCs? I tend to lose track of mine also…
Well I plan to prob under clock and under volt my workstation a lot too. That should prob work well for anything bandwidth and latency dependent.
U should post/share your setup maybe.
But I’ve been thinking of using some orange pis for farm/industrial automation. And getting a higher end Rock Pi to colocate maybe. Wish they’d make a PCIe card Pi or edge module that has high speed ethernet and video interfaces.
I still can’t see your most recent message on Matrix but it’s prob something with my account because I lost my key.
Usually I just look around online every once in a while until I can find a cheap price. I usually get each pi for around $35, with a 32GB microSD card (which you can get for cheaper by buying packs that come with multiple), and a power adapter (depending on what you’re using the RPi for, you may just be able to use a USB charging station since the Pi 4 uses USB-C, but check the power requirements of the Pi and any USB devices to make sure). I’ve built my setup incrementally by slowly buying a few things at a time for around $200 each time (I’m 17 years old and built my setup over a year ago, so no income to use, just money given to me on birthdays and new year).
I might post my setup but I’d need to clean it first. A lot of dust has accumulated since the last time I cleaned it.
Yeah, SBCs and microcontrollers are really good for automation. I have one of my Pis running Homeassistant and I’ve installed an MQTT broker so that I could send commands to it. I used an ESP8266 microcontroller and soldered together a board with a few buttons that I keep next to my bed and it allows me to do things like turn off all my lights by clicking a single button, individually toggle each light based on how many times I click a button, turn on/off the fan, change the fan speed, etc. I havent set this up yet, but I could even make it run commands on my desktop. The possibilities are really endless.
That would be nice, though I think I’ve seen Pi CM4 boards with gigabit ethernet somewhere, and the CM4 does expose a PCIe port so you could probably add a NIC.
It could also be my homeserver. I’m using the experimental Dendrite homeserver and it still has some issues, though federation should be working, but who knows, it’s still in beta.
Nice good that you’re into that. Good price point do you get enough RAM with that? I think I would opt for small SD cards and a big NAS if I had that many SBCs. Yah 10-15W shouldn’t be too bad to hook up. I’m 20 and have a nice little chunk saved that’s sort of on fire rn thanks to crypto imploding but still have a bit left over in my bank to make it through for now. When I was more around your age I got really into 3D printing and that sort of thing. I got a cheap Tevo Tarantula kit and really abused that thing. It was great and I had a Bob’s CNC.
I was mainly thinking to manage things on our property including water flow for artificial lakes/ponds, irrigation, (cameras, lights, censors, motors), anything that should be intelligent. U know it’s fun to do stuff with LEDs like build arrays and little gadgets. There are a lot of electronics projects you can do these days.
I thought it would be great to have a programmable module that can interface with those high speed signals for example to build a hardware firewall or create someting that can merge two HDMI 2.0/DP1.4 signals into HDMI 2.1 or whatever you want to do. The point is it’s programmable. Or maybe do some marshaling to convert an HDMI 2.1 signal to send over long range wire for cheap.
Yes, $35 gets me 2GB of RAM. It used to be 1GB but now the base model is 2. This doesn’t seem like much, but most of these services really don’t use very much RAM. You’re only going to start running into issues if you try to do something like run Kubernetes on them (I know this from experience).
That would work, but as I said, I have no income yet, so it’s hard to get enough money to buy multiple hard drives and build a machine to use them.
I just recently got a 3D printer and am currently waiting for some things to be delivered that will allow me to upgrade it with auto-leveling.
Yeah, SBCs and microcontrollers are perfect for this type of stuff. It’s really fun to make things like that. If I was doing that, depending on what exactly I needed the device to do, I’d either use a Raspberry Pi Zero (around $5) or an ESP8266 microcontroller (around $1). If all you need is for it to switch some relays and such when it gets a command, a microcontroller should be more than enough. If it needs to do simple processing, then a Raspberry Pi Zero would work. If it needs to do more complex stuff, then you want a full Raspberry Pi or other SBC that has enough power to do so.
Well, that’s funny. I actually made one of these. Unfortunately, the SD card I used was part of a defective batch, so it has already failed (after 3 months), and I haven’t gotten around to reinstalling everything, but it worked really well. What I did is: I used a Rock 3A (The price used to be $37) and installed an M.2 WiFi adapter. Then, I flashed Radxa’s Debian fork to an SD card, booted it, and installed a few programs. First, I installed a script called
lnxrouter, which sets up all the required configurations and programs to make a Linux machine into a router. I also installed a VPN. I did this to ensure that only those who connect both to the network of the device AND the VPN could connect to my actual device. This makes it much harder for anyone to actually do anything to my device since they would have access to neither my device nor the internet. The VPN essentially acted like a very secure firewall. I also installed Unbound recursive DNS resolver so I don’t have to use public DNS of some corporation, and Pi-Hole to filter ads. I configured the VPN to point to the Pi-Hole instance, and it worked really well. I could either use an ethernet connection to get to the internet if it existed, or if I’m in a hotel or something with no eithernet, I could use a USB WiFi adapter.That would be cool. I’m not sure how one would go about that, but it is an interesting idea.
I think security can be a matter of putting up a wall between your server and the rest of the world. I don’t trust intel/amd x86 products but realistically I would put a buffer over the networking interface and do whatever I need to do to make sure my keys are safe.
This is actually why the US freaked out and has pushed Huawei cell equipment out. Not because it has back doors but because it means the equipment isn’t made by their friends with THEIR NSA/GCHQ backdoors.