alpenwasser

As a side note on meritocracy: It sounds great on paper, but I've found it to be a rather useless concept in practice. Primarily because what "merit" is exactly in any given context is not as straightforward to determine a lot of the time and open to interpretation and ambiguity (at least in my experience).
 
Example: I work in a relatively small team of engineers at my company, but we're involved in some EU and German research projects where you work with lots of people from other companies and universities. Beyond a certain baseline of technical competency and a will to work hard during crunch times, your people skills are going to be as important as your technological knowledge, sometimes even more so. You're going to be meeting new people all the time, and you need to be able to work with them without much fuss. Even if you're the most gifted engineer involved in the project, if you cannot play at least somewhat nice with the other folks on the team, you will be utterly useless to your company. In short: You will have no merit. The project will be far better off (and more successful) by hiring somebody who's maybe not quite as brilliant on a purely technical level, but can actually work with other humans. A meritocratic system based purely on technical aspects (for example, code quality, whatever that may be) would fail to take that into account.
 
Another big thing is politics. Somebody has to secure funding for our engineering projects, either from within our company, or from outside. They need to be both knowledgeable enough on a technical level to know what can and cannot be done, and maybe even a rough idea of how, and they need good salesmanship. Often, this is a senior engineer (at least in the teams I've seen so far). They don't need to be super talented on a technical level -- they might have written rather crappy code when they were younger. But they're absolutely crucial in the grand scheme of things.
 
So for me, any CoC where they mention a meritocratic system is a pretty big red flag, to be honest.

Feels great, to be honest. I even get paid decent money for it.
 
More seriously though: My point is less that merit in and of itself is useless, but that most of the time when people go on about "meritocracy", they focus almost exclusively on the technological side of things, when in practice, whether or not you hold merit to a specific project is determined by many more factors. As said: An engineer with crappy people skills, no matter how brilliant on a technological level, would not fare well in the environment in which I work. They would be useless; i.e. without merit.
 
Sure, what we end up with is a meritocracy of sorts as well. But not the kind of meritocracy of which your average internet dweller will think when they read the term, most of the time. I'm not saying my tech skills are irrelevant (otherwise I could be replaced by a preschooler, after all). But they're by far not the only thing which is required for me to be good at my job. So applying the term to my situation isn't very useful, because people are going to get the wrong idea. We need engineers with good people skills on top of good technological expertise where I work, otherwise we're simply going to fail at our mission.

As a side note on meritocracy: It sounds great on paper, but I've found it to be a rather useless concept in practice. Primarily because what "merit" is exactly in any given context is not as straightforward to determine a lot of the time and open to interpretation and ambiguity (at least in my experience).
 
Example: I work in a relatively small team of engineers at my company, but we're involved in some EU and German research projects where you work with lots of people from other companies and universities. Beyond a certain baseline of technical competency and a will to work hard during crunch times, your people skills are going to be as important as your technological knowledge, sometimes even more so. You're going to be meeting new people all the time, and you need to be able to work with them without much fuss. Even if you're the most gifted engineer involved in the project, if you cannot play at least somewhat nice with the other folks on the team, you will be utterly useless to your company. In short: You will have no merit. The project will be far better off (and more successful) by hiring somebody who's maybe not quite as brilliant on a purely technical level, but can actually work with other humans. A meritocratic system based purely on technical aspects (for example, code quality, whatever that may be) would fail to take that into account.
 
Another big thing is politics. Somebody has to secure funding for our engineering projects, either from within our company, or from outside. They need to be both knowledgeable enough on a technical level to know what can and cannot be done, and maybe even a rough idea of how, and they need good salesmanship. Often, this is a senior engineer (at least in the teams I've seen so far). They don't need to be super talented on a technical level -- they might have written rather crappy code when they were younger. But they're absolutely crucial in the grand scheme of things.
 
So for me, any CoC where they mention a meritocratic system is a pretty big red flag, to be honest.

every business i have worked for where the CEO bangs on about meritocracy is anything but meritocratic. True meritocracy can be found where everyone is a contractor.

I'll only tackle the part that criticizes the CoC itself as any consideration on who wrote it is completely irrelevant when discussing its quality in my opinion.
 
You seem to take issue with the fact that some rules are vague and could be abused by someone with an "agenda"; what you may not realize is that the previous CoC merely stated "be excellent to each other" (to summarize it) and was, if anything, far more open to abuse and subjective interpretation. Furthermore, community moderators can (and always could) ban whomever they want for whatever reason as long as they're in agreement with each other - the CoC is not a legal document and it does not override the moderators, just like on this forum. It's just a set of guidelines, more of a warning than a law - any disciplinary action still depends on the context and the moderators' judgement. I would say that in this respect the current CoC is no worse than the previous one and asking for it to be reverted on these grounds is completely unwarranted.
 
If a murderer wants to submit some dank code to the linux kernel and goes through the motions in a civil manner I'm sure there would be no problem; the problems ensue when someone's behavior hinders collaboration and costs other contributors time and effort that could be better spent. If upon receiving critique of my code I started berating you personally and made the whole process harder for everyone involved, the quality of my code wouldn't matter - there are plenty of talented people around and sometimes keeping a troublesome individual around just for their code isn't worth it.
 
 
This is true in ANY large organization where people need to work with each other; basic human decency is the bare minimum required of everyone involved.
How the same text has been used outside of the Linux development community doesn't matter - as I said, that depends on who is moderating the community and the old CoC could have been used as justification for pretty much anything if there had been the will to do so.
 
Yes, that's what the new CoC says, literally in the part you quoted.
The new CoC makes no mention of any of this.
She wrote it, but it wasn't her decision to make it the Linux code of conduct. The Technical Advisory Board (and Torvalds himself as he signed the change) thought it would be a good text to adopt for their community. And again, the author's personal bias doesn't matter when judging the merits of the text itself. If you feel "alienated" by the fact she wrote it then that's your prerogative, but I'd hardly say it's a fault of the CoC. By that logic she could have written literally anything and you'd be against it out of principle.

Guys. I'm finally done. Sorry for delay!
 

 

 
Fully functional btw!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally took the hardware for a photoshoot last night. The CPU block plating was botched (local guys) so I'm going to be polishing it up and starting again...
 
First, a shot of the whole family

 
Asus Z10PE-D8 WS "Copper Edition"

 

 

 
Kingston 8x16GB DDR4 ECC 2133Mhz Memory!

 

 

 
4x 1.2TB Intel 750 NVME drives... 4.8TB total 

 

 

 

 
SO, this is the their old U.2 cable that they used to include with their 750 2.5" drives... colorful cables and overall, quite ugly.

 
Ugh, those cables.

 
THIS is the new m.2 direct version of the cable! All sleeved and in black, with a sexy black PCB to boot!

 
Those cables tho...

 
Then of course the 4x Nvidia Titan X in full copper glory! Let me tell you how much it sucks to clean these backplates...

 

 

 
Single slot ftw!

Finally...an update!
 
Thank you to Bill Own @http://mnpctech.com/
 

 
First Item: 3.120mm "360" Rotating Insert Aluminum Radiator Grill, Silver
Second Item: Billet Pro-Line 120mm Adjustable "SLOTTED" insert
Third Item: Diamond Knurl PC Feet, Silver
 
Painting Video Tutorial by Bill
 
I gave that copper leaf a go on the fan grills and I have to say I'm a pretty big fan of how it turned out for a practice run!

 

 

 

 

 
Those rusted rads...

 

 

 
The case feet from Bill turned out amazing! Much better than any of the items I copped painted lol

 

 

 

 
And a teaser for next time...

Big update... no fancy photos though, no time
 
Got the last Titan X in there
 
Still waiting on CPU blocks...

 
All 7 devices

 
Started some designs on the last card, not final placement for res.

 
Rusted rads are finally assembled and back in the case

 
From the front:

 
Dual D5s

 
Dressed up the PSU a little too

 
Dual FC10s on the top, still need to be mounted. Have a really cool idea for up here coming soon!

 
I got two batches of copper sheet... the first, the bottom two panels, as you can see is in much better shape. The second wrinkles so god damn quick. Might have to replace all of these ones

 
So many wrinkles....  but check dem custom windows! They fit the theme perfectly

 
Yes sir

 

 
And the front window, which I realized I put on backwards, oops. Probably will be redoing the bottom left panel, need a different design for the power buttons.

 

 
The embossing I did of the sponsor logos!

 
With my derpy "Garage"...

 
Closeup of the windows again

 

To survive as a small US manufacturer, you must diversify your production resources to cater to as many consumer markets as possible. Mnpctech wouldn't have survive if we relied on sales of our custom PC parts alone. We make niche products for other enthusiast hobbies as well. 

Just a general heads-up:
 
I was abroad doing a crapload of overtime during spring, which meant basically no private live in the past few months. The good news is that I get to take lots of time off during the second half of the year, so I was planning to get around to this in the coming weeks. Nice to discover somebody has decided to help out! Many thanks to @timdine (and, uhm, apologies for the messy code ).

Just a general heads-up:
 
I was abroad doing a crapload of overtime during spring, which meant basically no private live in the past few months. The good news is that I get to take lots of time off during the second half of the year, so I was planning to get around to this in the coming weeks. Nice to discover somebody has decided to help out! Many thanks to @timdine (and, uhm, apologies for the messy code ).

No problem.  It wasn't that bad to figure out.  You had it all hosted so that I could just fork it and go.  The documentation was close enough even if some of it still mentioned PERL that I added a couple modules to my installation and it worked.  The config json files were easy to figure out too.  Any critique of code for something of this purpose would be pretty subjective, it solves a problem, that's reasonable code.
 
This is absolutely one of the threads that I got reading, and still come back to, the forum for.  May as well keep it going.  It's a great idea building thread for something that isn't gaming.

Just a general heads-up:
 
I was abroad doing a crapload of overtime during spring, which meant basically no private live in the past few months. The good news is that I get to take lots of time off during the second half of the year, so I was planning to get around to this in the coming weeks. Nice to discover somebody has decided to help out! Many thanks to @timdine (and, uhm, apologies for the messy code ).

Without adding anyone else that has updated or added new builds since the last update...
 
First!!
 
 

Hardware
CASE: Antec Fusion 430 (Still with the LCD working)
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 850 G2
MB: ASUS P5QL Pro (Flashed to support Xeon)
CPU: Intel Xeon E5450 (Pin Swapped for 771 to Socket 775 Compatibility)
HS: Coolermaster HyperZ 600 Passive Cooler
RAM: 8GB OCZ Reaper (https://youtu.be/-P8_ZoOBmF0?t=4m28s)
RAID CARD 1: IOCrest SI-PEX40064 PCIE 2.0 SATA III
SSD: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
HDD 1: 1x 2TB Hitachi HDS722020ALA330
HDD 2: 2x 8TB Seagate ST8000AS0002-1NA17Z
HDD 3: 2x 8TB - Seagate ST8000DM004-2CX188
HDD 4: 2x 4TB - Seagate ST4000VN008-2DR166
HDD 5: 2x 3TB 2x 4TB - Seagate ST4000DM000, 2x WDC WD30EZRX, WDC WD40EZRX
Disk Enclosure: 2x Mediasonic ProBox HF2-SU2S2 4 Bay
 
Points: 134    56TB x ln(11 drives)
 
Software and Configuration:
My server is running Windows 8.1 and im using a mix of techniques for the disk sets.  Each was used as a bit of an experiment.  I'm using Software RAID (Windows Disk Manager Mirroring) and Windows Storage Spaces (Extend, Mirror, and Parity for different drive sets)
My main array consists of 2x4TB Seagate Iron Wolf drives mirrored for the most important files.  There is also 2x8tb Seagate Archive Drives in Storage Spaces Extended, 2x8TB in Storage Space Mirrored, 2x3TB + 2x4TB drives in Storage Spaces Parity.  Four of the 8TB drives and the Parity setup are housed in Mediasonic ProBox and connected via eSata through a pcie card.  2TB misc drive which includes a Steam Library.
 
Usage:
The machine is used as a home file server, PLEX media server, Calibre and Ubooquity for eBooks, and a living room media / Couch Gaming setup with some bluetooth Wiimotes, SNES USB controls, or Wireless 360 Controllers.  It is also accessed via VPN for all the same uses from remote locations.
 
Backup:
Only critical files are backed up to a set of 1Tb USB drives which are accessed through a USB 3.0 dock.  Backup drives are cycled on a random interval.  I'm relying on the RAID to protect me from random drive failures.
 
Additional info:
The pcie esata card is connected via two pcie extension cables to make the port accessible under the EVGA 650TI Boost card with the plastic shroud removed for clearance.  There aren't nearly enough pcie slots on the board, or conveniently placed in the case.  Another extension is necessary to connect the USB 3.0 card I've added. 
The 8TB drives are all in the ProBoxes because the on board SATA controller doesn`t support drives that large.  The case has been recycled through multiple builds and has had the case internals cut and modified to fit different hardware over time, the lid obviously doesn`t fit because of the large passive cooler.  I have issues with the drive mirror breaking down and needing to be recreated if the server is powered off unexpectedly.  The ProBoxes prevent any sort of hardware raid with the drives in the box.  During boot they don't give unique IDs to all the drives confusing the SATA card, which I suspect is the same issue I'm having with my software mirror breaking.  I haven't quite gotten the right order of steps to "import foreign drives" to have the mirror be healthy.  Once in windows everything looks fine which is why I've used Storage Spaces for the other arrays.  
Most drives are shucked external USB drives picked up overtime, they were mostly running JBOD over usb 2.0 until I started reading through this thread sometime last year and I got tired of too many cords and the mess of enclosures.  It is only at that time that I added any redundancy to the system.  Power consumption is around 240W.
A third party fan controller has been added to help get rid of some of the excess summer heat in the media stand.  I'm also installing a tiny arduino accessed on internal USB connections to make using the volume knob on the case easier again as the original drivers have gotten too old to get working easily on Windows 8.
 
Build Thread: (Will continue to update)
 
 
Photo's: (Will add shortly, July 19)

My old 2011 build still has me in 23ed place, let's see where my current build gets me. Let me know if I missed anything else you may want me to cover, this is just kinda everyday life for me, so if you wanna know more, just ask.
Hardware
768GB DDR4-2133(24x32GB) LRDIMM Supermicro Rackmount 4U w/ Red. 1280W Platinum P/S 24x: Samsung DDR4 2133MHzCL15 32GB (PC4 2133) Internal Memory M386A4G40DM0-CPB 2x: Intel 2.20GHz Xeon E5-2630 v4 Deca-Core (10-Core), 25MB Intel Smart Cache, Socket-2011-v3 (FC-LGA14A) 24x: HGST Hard Drive [HUH728080AL5200] 8TB SAS 12Gb/s 7200RPM 3.5in, 128MB Buffer, Internal Supermicro Motherboard S-2011 R3 for 2x E5-2600 v3 MFG Part Number: X10DRi-T4+ LSI Logic Controller Card H5-25573-00 9300-8i SGL SAS 8Port 12Gb/s PCIE3.0 HBA Brown Box QLE2562 dual 8Gbps Fibre Channel 2x: Supermicro 4U Active CPU Heatsink f/ X9 Socket 2011 MFG Part Number: SNK-P0050AP4 2x: ASUS HYPER M.2 x16 PCIe Expansion Card Chelsio T62100-SO-CR Software and Configuration:
FreeNAS

Usage:
NAS and SAN usage, My desktop boots off of FiberChannel from the FreeNAS box so I can have snapshots every 5 min on my OS drive and I keep my main OS drive small enough to cache it in RAM on FreeNAS. It hosts a lot of VMs and Jails that do stuff and things, I try and keep my digital hoarding inside the rack.
 
Photo's:

 

Hardware:
CASE: Nanoxia Deep Silence 1 Rev. B
PSU: 350W FSP
MB: Fujitsu MB from old office PC
CPU: i5-2400
RAM: 4 x 8GB 
NIC1: Integrated NIC on MB
NIC2: 2 Port Intel 82576NS Gigabit Network Card (Previously used for SMB-Multichannel under    FreeNAS which I couldn't get to work in Proxmox)
HBA: 8 Port LSI SAS 3Gb/s HBA which was 18€ from Ebay
TV-Tuner: DVBSky S952
SSD: 128GB Samsung 840 Evo for booting and some VMs
HDD1: 3 x 1 TB (2 x Seagate + 1 x WD from old Computers)
HDD2: 3 x 2 TB (2 x HGST Ultrastar A7K2000 + 1 x Seagate)
HHD3: 4 x 3 TB (1 x HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 + 3 x Toshiba DT01ACA)
Raw capacity: 21 TB
Power: 110-160W
 
Software, Configuration and Usage:
OS: Proxmox 5.1
ZFS Config: 
RAIDZ: 3 x 1 TB for Media RAIDZ: 3 x 2 TB for Backups of Computers and Phones Striped Mirror: 2 x 2 x 3TB: Random files like Games and VMs  VMs: 
UniFi Controller OpenVPN TS3 server Zoneminder Plex tvheadend with a Tunercard passed through (hardly used though) multiple testing VMs (Win10, pfsense, ...) Backup:
Don't have the budget for a cloud backup and neither money nor a location for a offsite Backup. Important stuff is stored on my PC and backed up to the server though.
 
Photos:

So many changes... again..

Onee-Chan
 
Hardware:
Well, it's a Synology DS1817+ so... Not sure if I need to list all the hardware.
The CPU is an  Atom C2538 with 8GB of RAM, inside an 8 bay Synology case.
 
HDD 1: 3 x 4TB WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0
HDD 2: 1 x 4TB WDC WD40EFRX-68WT0N0
HDD 3: 2 x 4TB Seagate ST4000DM004-2CV104
HDD 4: 2 x 2TB Seagate ST2000DM001-1CH164
 
Software and Configuration:
OS: DSM 6.1.5
RAID config: (mdadm based) with 6x4TB in SHR2 (RAID6-like) and 2x2TB in RAID1.
RAID hot spare: 2x4TB for SHR2 and 1x2TB for RAID1
File system: Btrfs
File system capacity: I have two RAID volumes, combined into one share.
One RAID6 (24TB total, 16TB usable) and one RAID1 (4TB total, 2TB usable).
Combined the share is 28TB, with 18TB usable.
 
Usage:
Mostly storing files (primarily videos) but it also serves as a web server for my personal website, updates my DDNS and acts as a mail server (use it for throwaway emails).I stream video from it to my Android TV, tablet, phone and computers all the time, but I do that over regular SMB and not some server like Plex. I don't see the point.
On the RAID1 volume I keep torrents and other files which are constantly accessed. I don't want the entire RAID6 array to be up and running all the time.
I also plan on running H@H on the RAID1 volume. It's a distributed hosting program for a website I regularly visit. It lets users help with the hosting and in return the users get rewards like downloading full resolution galleries, currency that can be used to put out bounties for translations, editing and other stuff.
 
Backup:
I save my most important stuff on online storage providers too, like photos (in encrypted containers) on Dropbox. I can't backup all my stuff though.
 
Other:
I have to say I am a bit disappointed with the performance. I get about 70MB/s reads and ~50MB/s writes. I think it might have to do with the "advanced data integrity protection" being enabled on my shares. I'm going to disable it on a test folder and see if it makes a difference.
It doesn't really matter since it is still more than enough for what I use it for, but it doesn't feel good to get lower performance scores than I did with my old NAS (bottlenecked by the 1Gb/s connection for reads).
 
 
Photos:
Will post later, but I mean... It's just a Synology NAS with 8 slots.
Sorry for all the Swedish in the picture:

 

Update #2
The hardware has been changed significantly so new list of hardware.
 
Hardware
CASE: Antec P183 Performance One
PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 850W Modular
MB: Asus x99-Deluxe/U3.1
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 (2.1Ghz) (not overclockable, even 1 Mhz faster and it won't boot, probably cuz of the RAM)
HS: Noctua NH-D9L
RAM: 4x Kingston KTL-TS424E/8G - 8GB ECC
NIC: Asus PEB-10G/57840-2T
RAID CARD 1: Areca 1216-4i
RAID CARD 2: Areca 1880i
Boot Drive: Samsung 960EVO M.2, 1TB
HDD 1: 8x 5TB WD Red
HDD 2: Seagate Barracuda 3TB
HDD 3: Seagate Barracuda 1TB
 
PCPartpicker link
 
Software and Configuration:
Running Windows Server 2012 R2. Runs an FTP and Universal Media server to stream content to other devices. Server is also used to encode my bluray movies using makemkv and megui. Also using Hyper-V to run another instance of server 2012 R2 as a webserver with IIS.
My main array is the 8x WD's running in RAID-6 (on the 1880i). giving me a total of just over 27TB of usable space.
The second Areca card is currently not really being used. It only has the 2 seagates connected. The reason those drives are not on the onboard sata ports is because intel sucks and will slowly drag down the system performance and eventually crash the system into a BSOD and reboot, starting the process again. Tried all drivers, both new and old (and really old). No changes, got fed up, bought a raid card, problem solved.
 
Usage:
Storing my media files (tv shows, some YT downloads, most of floatplane, various other video's). currently almost 15TB in size. Files are usually copied over from my main PC over a 10Gbit direct connection to the server. The network/internet connection is a separate connection for now, can't find a good affordable 10Gbit switch :P.

Backup:
Only the most difficult stuff to find is backed up to a few leftover drives i have lying around. The rest i just don't have the finances or the will to backup somewhere. So if the worst happens, i'm just screwed :P.

Sidenote:
The observant reader or people who care to read my previous update might have noticed that movies are missing from the list of media files stored on here. That is because i gave up finding a case to house all my drives and array's and setup a second server. That server runs somewhat the hardware listed in the previous update with a few changes. Not really something worth mentioning, its just that the space the movies were taking up got too big and they needed to be moved.
 
Future plans:
The space the movies are taking up in the second server is already growing to fast, so the seagate drives in this server will be removed and replaced with 4 8TB or 6TB drives running in RAID-5 to hold the movies. Waiting for the price to drop to start doing this. So you'll have another update to look forward to in the future

UPDATED - 360TB
 
Added 9 more 8TB drives
Added Some more SSD
 
CASE: 45Drives 
MB: Supermicro X9SCM 
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1275 @ 3.40GHz
HS: Standard
RAM: 32GB ECC Memory (4x 8GB PC3-12800)
HBA: 2 x HighPoint Rocket 750
SSD: Toshiba 120GB
SSD: 2x Samsung EVO 850 500GB
HDD 1: 45 x 8TB WD RED 5400 RPM
NIC: Onboard 2x 1Gigabit
NIC: HP Mellanox 10GbE Connext-2

Okay, so it took me 2 days to go through this thread.
1 think I did notice, a huge "upgrade" in CPU horsepower from 2014 to 2017. Guessing its because the NAS isn't just a NAS anymore, but most are now VM Hosts as well.  Learn a lot from this thread and time to start planning my own NAS now. 

Hey the Muffinator is a very sensible stupid machine which I am having issues with because my PC can't mount it as a network drive, but can see it, and connect to it's web GUI (I don't know what's wrong) but the Muffinator name I personally think is better than the other NAS I have The Toaster, and on par with The Portable Slice Of Bread and The Wirey Cheese Toastie

+50 points for the name