I left them years ago, but their VPN software has (had?) a critical bug - the killswitch treats “connecting” the same as “connected”.

Meaning that if the connection drops for any reason and is not immediately reestablished, you not only lose all protection, but you have a false sense of security.

I need to clarify that you are talking about Lenovo’s consumer-grade lines, like the Ideapad. Their enterprise line (Thinkpad) is completely different.

Kind of. They will be multiples of 4. Let’s say you got a gigantic 8i8e card, albeit unlikely. That would (probably) have 2 internal and 2 external SAS connectors. Your standard breakout cables will split each one into 4 SATA cables (up to 16 SATA ports if you used all 4 SAS ports and breakout cables), each running at full (SAS) speed.

But what if you were running an enterprise file server with a hundred drives, as many of these once were? You can’t cram dozens of these cards into a server, there aren’t enough PCIe slots/lanes. Well, there are SAS expansion cards, which basically act as a splitter. They will share those 4 lanes, potentially creating a bottleneck. But this is where SAS and SATA speeds differ- these are SAS lanes, which are (probably) double what SATA can do. So with expanders, you could attach 8 SATA drives to every 4 SAS lanes and still run at full speed. And if you need capacity more than speed, expanders allow you to split those 4 lanes to 24 drives. These are typically built into the drive backplane/DAS.

As for the fan, just about anything will do. The chip/heatsink gets hot, but is limited to the ~75 watts provided by the PCIe bus. I just have an old 80 or 90mm fan pointing at it.

The one I had would frequently drop the drives, wreaking havoc on my (software) RAID5. I later found out that it was splitting 2 ports into 4 in a way that completely broke spec.

I don’t want to speak to your specific use case, as it’s outside of my wheelhouse. My main point was that SATA cards are a problem.

As for LSi SAS cards, there’s a lot of details that probably don’t (but could) matter to you. PCIe generation, connectors, lanes, etc. There are threads on various other homelab forums, truenas, unraid, etc. Some models (like the 9212-4i4e, meaning it has 4 internal and 4 external lanes) have native SATA ports that are convenient, but most will have a SAS connector or two. You’d need a matching (forward) breakout cable to connect to SATA. Note that there are several common connectors, with internal and external versions of each.

You can use the external connectors (e.g. SFF-8088) as long as you have a matching (e.g. SFF-8088 SAS-SATA) breakout cable, and are willing to route the cable accordingly. Internal connectors are simpler, but might be in lower supply.

If you just need a simple controller card to handle a few drives without major speed concerns, and it will not be the boot drive, here are the things you need to watch for:

• MUST be LSi, but it can be rebranded LSi. This includes certain cards from Dell and IBM, but not all.
• Must support Initiator Target (IT) mode. The alternative is Initiator RAID (IR) mode. This is nearly all, since most can be flashed to IT mode regardless
• Watch for counterfeits! There are a bunch of these out there. My best advice is to find IT recyclers on eBay. These cards are a dime a dozen in old, decommissioned servers. They’re eager to sell them to whomever wants them.

Also, make sure you can point a fan at it. They’re designed for rackmount server chassis, so desktop-style cases don’t usually have the airflow needed.

To anyone reading, do NOT get a PCIe SATA card. Everything on the market is absolute crap that will make your life miserable.

Instead, get a used PCIe SAS card, preferably based on LSi. These should run about $50, and you may (depending on the model) need a $20 cable to connect it to SATA devices.

I did this back in the days of Smoothwall, ~20 years ago. I used an old, dedicated PC, with 2 PCI NICs.

It was complicated, and took a long time to setup properly. It was loud and used a lot of power, and didn’t give me much beyond the standard $50 routers of the day (and is easily eclipsed by the standard $80 routers of today). But it ran reliably for a number of years without any interaction.

I also didn’t learn anything useful that I could ever apply to something else, so ended up just being a waste of time. 2/10, spend your time on something more useful.

Intel’s future hasn’t been looking great, for a bunch of reasons, unrelated to Trump.

I’m not saying you should avoid it (“Be greedy when others are fearful”), but you should really make sure you understand what you’re getting into.

It won’t officially work, but it’s not too hard to get it going. I just moved a similar box to 24H2 LTSC.

OP, you’ll probably need to run “setup.exe /product server”, or follow a recent guide. You’ll also need to do this for every major upgrade (i.e. yearly)

I agree though with the plan to use this as a test ground. I also recently upgraded a Lubuntu system to similar specs, and it runs pretty smoothly. But learning Linux takes a lot of time they don’t have.

Cooking and (basic) sewing. These are basic life skills needed for any level of independent living, yet so many are proud to be utterly incapable of either.

The big caveat is that the BIOS must allow it, and most released versions do not.

Technology Connections recently posted a detailed video about dehumidifiers that’s worth watching. But a key takeaway is that on an AC, the hot side is outside (making the inside cool), while in a dehumidifier they are directly next to each other (condensing the moisture).

Without looking into the specifics, my guess is that it’s not routing the cold air over the hot side to keep things inside the same temperature.

What is your use case? I ask because ESXi is free again, but it’s probably not a useful skill to learn these days. At least not as much as the competition.

Similarly, 2.5" mechanical drives only make sense for certain use cases. Otherwise I’d get SSDS or a 3.5" DAS.

If you skipped the area code, it probably failed the general validation check. To really test this, you would’ve needed to try a different (but completely valid) number

Thinkpads are extremely well documented. For how to repair/replace parts, you need the HMM. Just Google for “Thinkpad t14 Gen 1 HMM” and you should find the official PDF on their site. That will tell you, step by step, how to replace the keyboard.

As for the part itself, you can again check Lenovo’s site for all compatible parts (FRUs) and find the item number and details. While I wouldn’t recommend buying directly from them due to cost, this should give you the information needed to find it elsewhere. eBay has tons of Thinkpads being sold for parts, and many of these will be parted out. You should have no issues finding what you’re looking for.

They all have to work (at least to an extent) using only x1. It’s part of the PCIe spec.

Missing pins are actually extremely common. If your board has a slot that’s x16 (electrically x8), which is very common for a second video card, take a closer look. Half the pins in the slot aren’t connected. It has the full slot to make you feel better about it, and it provides some mounting stability, but it’s electrically the same as an x8 that’s open.

USB the protocol, or just uses a USB cable? If it’s not using the protocol, the cables are a cheap way of getting cables of a certain spec.

This can get a bit complicated with federation. This community is hosted on LW. I am accessing it via sopuli.xyz, and you via feddit.uk. All (presumably) have full bidirectional federation with each other.

When I hit send, this message will go to Sopuli’s outbox, which will then sync to LW for this community. At that point, this post will live on LW’s servers. Anyone accessing LW directly can see it, even if Sopuli were to go down. Later (probably less than a minute), LW will sync to Feddit.uk, at which point you will be able to see it.

Note that this is for text posts only. There have been some changes around images and video, both for bandwidth and liability reasons.

That would probably result in teams that have the shortest players possible (to lower the rim), and 1 or 2 tall players to exploit that.

I have nothing more to add to this.

https://www.wikihow.com/Get-Rid-of-Carpenter-Bees-Using-Wd40