Finding similar people

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How can I find who are interested in my special interest that I can talk to for hours and hours about my special interest and they'll understand?

Cause I know such people who, but they are all adults and usually 20 years older than me and they have their own busy schedules.

And all the people who are the same age as me don't even understand what I am saying, and they ask me to shut the f up.

I am interested in computers btw, if someone here would be willing to spend(waste) time talking to me about computers on a regular basis, I know about networking, hardware, and a bit of programming. Just to tell you about the extent of my knowledge, I run 3 dedicated servers(and there I start again) with 12-24GB RAM, I have 3 /29 IPv4 allocations, getting 2 /27's within a few days, and going to get a Class C block within two months. And I am providing ARIN justification for all of that. I colocate one server and rent the other two. I am running 50 VPSes(read: managing and troubleshooting). For IPv6, I have 3 /48's.

See, once I start, I don't want to shut up, and mostly it comes off as bragging due to my age.

So anybody knowledgeable in the field willing to just spend time talking to me?

Find a computer forum or two or three and you'll find an endless supply of people deeply interested in computers. There are specialized forums for networking, hosting, hardware, programming etc etc. Google is your friend!

There's also a computers/math/science/technology forum here on wp:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/forum1.html

In addition to the forum mentioned by Goldfish, you should perhaps consider joining local professional organizations. Your age won't matter, and you might end up with a part-time gig that pays serious $ while you formalize your education.

Do you have any physical routers under your control (or even virtualized)? From what you're saying my recommendation to you is to get your hands on a couple of cheap Cisco IOS devices.

I am a member of many computer forums, and use two of them on a daily basis.


I am going to get a virtualized router in a day or two, along with my /27 assignment, but I've never used any Cisco router. What does a Cisco IOS router do?

I can relate to this. Every person I find interested in Japanese culture/history is older than me, because teenagers tend to prefer anime which just irritates me because it's fiction with bad drawings. I found a group to practice my conversation in the language, but everyone was older and just plain boring.

It routes. The routers would let you work with and practice concepts like bonding/agregating links, high-availability setups... sort of, you can mimic them. There's a fairly consistent and strong demand for Cisco network engineers. If you're in or are pre-college, it can provide you a with a nice side gig. Which in turn could lead to an excellent paying job doing something you obviously love!

You seem like an auto-didact, so let's throw you into the deep end:
These two first
https://www.google.com/#q=cisco+ios+command+reference
http://www.gns3.net/

Then once you have the jist of it, these one-at-a-time (in no particular order):
https://www.google.com/#q=ios+link+aggregation+examples
https://www.google.com/#q=ios+HA+examples

that's so funny. I now have a crush on Sharkbait.

as you were..

I'm an Aspie, man. How else would I answer that question?

I guess I could have thrown in the L2/3 switching aspect but... meh. He'll figure that bit out on his own. I'd even bet on it being sooner rather than later.

Indeed. although, he asked you what Cisco router was instead of googling it, so ..you know..I'd give him between 12-15 years of age and an inability to fully comprehend the meaning behind the industry's most comprehensive suite of routing protocols.

Anyway, I thought your answer was cute, just take the compliment and shuddup

You know, it was around 3 AM in the night and I hadn't slept for two days. I have a general idea of what a Cisco router is used for, ASN announcements, BGP advertising, multi-homing, etc. It is used to announce the subnets to the individual peers as well. But that is the limit of my knowledge about Cisco routers. Yes, I am 16, hence I have never used a Cisco router in my life. I'm still learning you know, and I haven't even started learning about routing, as currently I am more focused on getting my IPv4 allocations, once I get a /24 from a broker, I will have to look into routing and ASN announcements, and then I'll learn more about Cisco routers. And yes I just figured out the Layer 2 and 3 switching aspects of it.

you made me think of this

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK2Hk0QOshg[/youtube]

Okaay..., I am not sure of the context you stated that in.

Cool stuff, eh?

I'm not trying to overwhelm you; I'm just looking to help you feed your passion.

Also, have you started virtualizing your own servers on local systems?
https://www.virtualbox.org/ plus https://www.vyatta.org/ (remove the 's' if need-be). Then let's send you ....
https://www.google.com/#q=installing+vyatta+virtualbox

For server OSes for your virtual server farm, https://www.Ubuntu.org is a reasonable starter. Or, alternately, we can toss you into the deep end again https://www.freebsd.org/ <-- my precious


@leafplant: Yar. I took it in the spirit intended. I was poking fun at me, too. Because you were right to call that out; it was a silly answer.

I am running virtual servers on my own servers in 3 remote locations within the US. One node has 4GB RAM and an AMD Athlon 4200+, one has a Dual Intel Xeon L5420 with 12GB RAM, and my latest one has Dual Intel Xeon L5520 with 24GB RAM. I am running OpenVZ on the former two, and KVM on the latter. I also got two /27's SWIPed to my name. I use CentOS on all the three, I kinda hate Ubuntu, too much focus on user friendliness(I don't like user-friendly things). I am currently running FreeBSD on a VM on my laptop, but I'll set one up on my 24GB RAM server and try hosting a website from there and securing it.

I'm not about to claim to be especially knowledgable about computers. My special interest is (as I may have stated on another of your posts) security systems/procedures. Meaning, I can point out all the inherant flaws in the RFID card readers my school uses or steer you in the right direction if you want to learn to pick locks, but I don't know anything about HTML, python, etc.

Even though our special interests are different, there are certainly areas in which they overlap. I'd really like to talk to you about a project I've been thinking about for some time. You see, in one of Cory Doctorow's books, there was this website called 0Ktube. Basically, it's like youtube only it doesn't need huge server farms that would be expensive to maintain (However, I am in the process of setting up a little server here since I can't think of a way to get this thing off the ground without one). Users volunteer a certain amount of their hard drive space and it's used to store files. They don't know what they have though. The files are encrypted (granting plausible deniability in case of a digital piracy case), but have zero knowledge proofs that can be identified by the system so we know how they fit into the larger picture.

I don't know anything about web design and am almost completely useless in every programming language I've tried, but I'm somewhat experienced with the hardware aspect of this. As for cryptography, I've taken some classes as well as done some fairly simple things I won't name specifically in the field just to see if they'd work.