schizo @ schizo @forum.uncomfortable.business

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1 yr. ago

How immutable do you need?

S3 offers a flag that prevents modification or deletion for a set period, and afaik basically every S3-compatible provider offers that.

I use that along with a lifecycle rule to maintain my backup buckets on iDrive.

If you need a 'you cannot touch this and the provider has no way of allowing it' then you're talking specialized corporate talk-to-a-sales-person-for-a-quote, as you found out.

Edit: if you don't need cloud, there's options for WORM media from the humble BluRay to fancy SSDs that don't allow deletion.

Ah, but the thing is there are older platforms than the N100 that are still faster and more expandable than a rPi.

I have an AliExpress eWaste special that's a N3350, 6gb of RAM, and 64gb of eMMC storage which was ~$50.

About the same price as a new Pi, somewhat better performance than a Pi, and at about 4w idle, roughly the same power as a new Pi. Full load is closer to 10w, but we're talking 3 or maybe 4w more than the Pi in a relatively rare situation for a lot of Pi use cases.

And, of course, at full clocks, it's faster than a Pi4 so you are getting something for those watts.

I see syncthing being recommended, and like, it's fine.

But keep in mind it's NOT a backup tool, it's a syncing tool.

If something happens to the data on your client, for example, it will happily sync and overwrite your Linux box's copy with junk, or if you delete something, it'll vanish in both places.

It's not a replacement for recoverable-in-a-disaster backups, and you should make sure you've got a copy somewhere that isn't subject to the client nuking it if something goes wrong.

We promise we're going to investigate how this could have happened and make sweeping changes, the best in the industry!, to ensure we're never caught again.

Honestly it's not; BTRFS has been in my 'that's neat, but it's still got a non-zero chance of deciding to light everything on fire because it's bored' list for, uh, a decade now?

The NAS build is old enough to more or less predate BTRFS being usable (closing in on a decade since I did the initial OS install, jeez) and none of the features matter for what I'm storing: if every drive in my NAS died today, I'd be very annoyed for a couple of hours during the rebuild, and would lose terrabytes of linux ISOs that I can just download again, if I wanted to use Jellyfin to install them a 2nd time. (Any data I care about is pulled offsite at least once a day, so I've got pretty comprehensive backups minus the ISOs.)

I know EXT4 and mergerfs and snapraid are not cool, or have shiny features, but I've also had zero problems with them over the last decade, even between Ubuntu upgrades (16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04) and hardware platform upgrades (6600k, 8700k, 10950k) and the entire replacement of all the system drives (hdd -> ssd -> nvme) and the expansion of and replacement of dead HDDs, of varying sizes (4tb drives to 8tb drives to 16tb drives to some 20tb drives).

It all just... worked, and at no point was I concerned about the filesystem not working if I replaced or upgraded or changed something, which is not something ZFS or BTRFS would have guaranteed during that same time window.

IMO a homelab for learning and a server that you're self-hosting services on really aren't the same thing and maybe shouldn't be treated that way, if you can swing it.

I'd rather my password manager or jellyfin or my peertube instance or whatever not be relying on a tech stack I don't entirely understand and might not be able to easily fix if it breaks.

I guess a lot of it is new to doing this vs greybeard split, since the longer I've done sysadmin work the less I care about the cool new thing and have a preference for the old, stable, documented, bugfixed, supported, and with a clear roadmap software.

I should probably get a job doing sysadmin work for a bank, lmao.

Yeah, I just use plain boring desktop hardware. (Oh no! I'm experiencing data corruption due to the lack of ECC!) It's cheap, it's available, it's trivial to upgrade and expand, and there's very few little gotchas in there: you get pretty much exactly what it looks like you get.

Also nice is that that you can have a Ship of Theseus NAS by upgrading what needs upgrading as you go along and aren't tied into entire platform swaps unless it makes sense - my last big rebuild was 3 years ago, but this is basically a 10 year old NAS at this point.

The big thing for #2 would be to seperate out what you actually need vs what people keep recommending.

General guidance is useful, but there's a lot of 'You need ZFS!' and 'You should use K8s!' and 'Use X software!'

My life got immensely easier when I figured out I did not need any features ZFS brought to the table, and I did not need any of the features K8s brought to the table, and that less is absolutely more. I ended up doing MergerFS with a proper offsite backup method because, well, it's shockingly low-complexity.

And I ended up doing Docker with a bunch of compose files and bind mounts, because it's shockingly low-complexity. And it's just running on Debian, instead of some OS that has a couple of layers of additional software to make things "easier" because, again, it's low-complexity.

I can re-deploy the entire stack on new hardware in about ~10 minutes (I've tested this a few times just to make sure my backup scripts work), and there's basically zero vendor tie-in or dependencies that you'd have to get working first since it's just a pile of tarballs and packages from the distro's package manager on, well, ANY distro.

For giggles, I went to see how many days it'd take them to make $1.4 billion.

It's four. Four days.

Eh IDK how "required" it is.

I set my default browser to Firefox, and then never saw edge again.

I mean yes, there's extra crap sitting on the drive that I don't want or need or will ever use, but I also don't spend any time actually thinking about it, either.

Windows 11 is still a piece of shit, though, and I hate it with all my being and would love to be able to ditch it, but alas, not quite yet.

Is he doing transcoding on the hardware itself?

If so, despite their current shits-on-fire stuff, it's really hard to beat Intel QSV.

In any case, do not rely on AMD's VCE if you care at all about quality, because right now it's still awful.

QSV, nvenc, or do it on the CPU with x264/265.

(Not a specific laptop recommendation, but just a AMD-still-kinda-has-a-deficiency-here post.)

I mean, high tech manufacturers have products with issues. Even recently AMD chips were frying due to bad motherboard firmware this generation.

What matters is how well the company responds to the issue, how fast and easy their recall of the defective parts is, and

Sorry, I've just been told Intel isn't doing a recall and has told everyone to just talk to the support chatbots, which will totally not reject your RMA request this time they swear.

So uh nevermind, don't buy Intel.

I don't get that either.

I'm not a parent and strongly unlikely to be one, but if I had kids I'd damn well do anything I had to do to make sure their life was better than mine was, not steal anything not nailed down then yank the ladder out from under them.

Especially since the solution is 'stop letting rich people not pay their fair share'. And like, that's not some random talking point for the non americans here: after $168,000 in income we just... don't tax you for social security anymore. If we left the exact same rate in place, but just taxed ALL of everyone's income, we'd not only be solvent, we'd have a fucking scrooge mcduck style moneybin to ensure future generations were taken care of, too.

Not quite. Wake on LAN requires a special packet be sent, the OS to boot, then you can attempt to connect to whatever's running.

It's fairly manual (though you COULD maybe automate it, if you have other infrastructure that's watching for things: ex. using home assistant to send the packet when you come home), and has a delay since the system has to boot before it'll respond to anything.

Let's hope it goes better than it did in 1962.

As a side note, don't be cute and pick port 221 or 2222 or 22022 or whatever that's got "22" in it.

I know that sounds silly but the slightly less stupid bots are written by people who understand people do things like that and account for them, and thus port 2222 isn't actually better than 22, or whatever.

And he fucking well should. People spend their lives putting money into social security

I've always been confused why ANYONE would support any sort of cuts to social security after paying into it for, in some cases, literal decades.

I mean, it's not "free money", it's my fucking money, that I've paid into every paycheck I've ever gotten. Of course I feel "entitled" to it, because, well, I am?

The republicans want to do a rugpull that'd make a crypto bro blush in how fucking brazen it is, and we're supposed to be happy about it?

This is probably me being an exceedingly old grumpy boomer greybeard, but this is why I don't bother with whatever shiny distro everyone likes unless it's got a proper governance/oversight setup via a properly formed foundation or similar.

Anything short of that pretty much is a strong indicator that it's not trustworthy or reliable and, well, this can happen.

Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora or even Arch are unlikely to magically vanish because someone gets bored, and I feel bad for the people who spent time and effort or even money on this project, but, uh, yeah. Don't trust one-person shows.

I'm having the same dream, but I don't trust Qualcomm to not fuck everyone. I mean it'd be nice if they don't but they've certainly got the history of being the scorpion and I'm going to let someone else be the frog until they've proven they're not going to sting me mid-river.

Kinda? It really should be treated as a 1st generation product for Windows (because the previous versions were ignored by, well, everyone because they were utterly worthless), and should be avoided for quite a while if gaming is remotely your goal. It's probably the future, but the future is later... assuming, of course, that the next gen x86 CPUs don't both get faster and lower power (which they are) and thus eliminate the entire benefit of ARM.

And, if you DONT use Windows, you're looking at a couple of months to a year to get all the drivers in the Linux kernel, then the kernel with the drivers into mainstream distributions, assuming Qualcomm doesn't do their usual thing of just abandoning support six months in because they want you to buy the next release of their chips instead.