yooo, I was just playing T2 in the pickup game on Friday night a few weeks ago. It’s still so good!

Wrapping up this thread, I really appreciate all the opinions and experiences everyone shared! Gave me lots of new perspectives to think about.

Yeah, this might be the way to go. OpenWRT supports hardware NAT with many of these ARM-based routers like many of the MediaTek-based ones, which gives them super high throughput at very low CPU usage. The efficiency blows x86 out of the water. The ability to migrate your OpenWRT config to new hardware (real or virtual) in the future means you kinda get the best of both worlds…

Do not use an SSD for cold storage - it will fail. SSDs need to be plugged in every once to refresh the charge in their NAND, otherwise they’ll lose the data.

This is not a theoretical thing - I’ve had a good Samsung 850 Pro drive fail while being off for 2 years.

Thanks, this is good data!

How fast is your internet?

Do a speed test and run htop… you’ll see CPU usage only on one core spiking. Not a big deal if your CPU can handle it, but the AMD GX-412TC in the APU2 I was using is too slow.

Even if the virtualized router is down, I’ll still have access to the physical server over the network until the DHCP lease expires. The switch does the work of delivering my packets on the LAN, not the router.

Thanks for the tip about the pfSense limit. After running pfSense for like 8 years, my opinion is that is flush with features but overall, it’s trash. Nobody, not even Netgate, understands how to configure limiters, queues, and QoS properly. The official documentation and all the guides on the internet are all contradictory and wrong. I did loads of testing and it worked somewhat, but never as well as it should have on paper (ie. I got ping spikes if I ran a bandwidth test simultaneously, which shouldn’t happen.) I don’t necessarily think OpenWRT is any better, but I know the Linux kernel has multithreaded PPPOE and I expect some modern basics like SQM to work properly in it.

The other thing to keep in mind is to pass through physical nics. Using just the vnics will potentially lead to security risks. That’s the reason I went back to physical fws.

I could throw an extra NIC in the server and pass it through, but what are the security risks of using the virtualized NICs? I’m just using virtio to share a dedicated bridge adapter with the router VM.

If you just use 2 nodes, you will need a q-device to make quorum if you have one of the nodes down

I could just use VRRP / keepalived instead, no?

I should try Proxmox, thanks for the suggestion. I set up ZFS recently on my NAS and I regret not learning it earlier. I can see how the snapshotting would make managing VMs easier!

That is pretty sweet. I have a second server I could use for an HA configuration of the router VM. I’ve been meaning to play around with live migrations (KVM) so this could be a cool use case for testing.

I appreciate the advice. I have like 3 spare routers I can swap in if the server fails, plus I have internet on my phone lol. It’s a home environment, not mission critical. I’m glad you mentioned this though, as it made me realize I should have one of these routers configured and ready-to-go as a backup.

My logic is partly that I think a VM on an x86 server could potentially be more reliable than some random SBC like a Banana Pi because it’ll be running a mainline kernel with common peripherals, plus I can have RAID and ECC, etc (better hardware). I just don’t fully buy the “separation of concerns” argument because you can always use that against VMs, and the argument for VMs is cost effectiveness via better utilization of hardware. At home, it can also mean spending money on better hardware instead of redundant hardware (why do I need another Linux box?).

There are also risks involved in running your firewall on the same host as all your other VM’s

I don’t follow. It’s isolated via a dedicated bridge adapter on the host, which is not shared with other VMs. Further, WAN traffic is also isolated by a VLAN, which only the router VM is configured for.

Half-Life 3

Steam Console Exclusive

Pretty much any game newer than Quake 3 uses what I referred to as unlagged, which is now known as backwards reconciliation or lag compensation. You only need to shoot where you actually see the player to be.

This drives me nuts in The Finals as well. I also really want to know what my opponents’ pings are, because sometimes it feels like they’re exploiting the unlagged netcode with high ping. Edit: And don’t give me a little 3 bar signal strength graph - I need numbers.

FYI also in case you didn’t know, the sniper rifle for light in The Finals is hitscan up to 40m away, then after that it has travel + bullet drop. This was introduced in a patch about 6 months ago. (I don’t think the Pike for medium is hitscan at any range… someone correct me though)

Thanks, I appreciate the tip! I will give that a try next time (maybe I’ll do this Xtrfy mouse soon). I also got solder braid and a flux pen to help too, in addition to the solder sucker I was using before.

I tried to repair my DeathAdder but I had the soldering iron too hot and I destroyed the contact pad under the microswitch. 💀 I tried to take some solder mask off the trace and bodge it but I made such a mess that I just gave up on it. With better desoldering technique, it would have been straightforward. Lesson learned!

I actually liked the DeathAdder and have had almost 3 of them. I just mainly meant to knock their build quality.

But that said, the lifespan of all mice is kinda bullshit. I haven’t had single mouse last more than a year in almost a decade. Either the left click starts getting glitchy or the mousewheel’s encoder starts to go. I’ve used Logitech, Razer, Microsoft, Xtrfy. My Xtrfy M42 wireless’s left click is starting to get inconsistent now (holding LMB will randomly release, and the microswitch is bouncing on click).

How many miles do you have on it though? I see these kind of comments all the time on Reddit, and there’s a big difference in how many hours per day people use their hardware for, and how much typing/clicking people actually do.

It’s just another reminder what a greasy company Razer is. They should be avoided because their products are mostly crap, sold at high prices. I remember taking apart my Deathadder about 8 years ago after the left-click went on the fritz, and it was the crappiest, low-quality PCB I’ve ever seen in a product. I never bought Razer again after that.

Edit: To elaborate, they could have spent like 5 extra cents to get a nicer PCB, but they didn’t. The mouse was really nice on the outside, but they cut every expense on the inside.