TCB13

TCB13 , 4 months ago to selfhosted in Should I learn Docker or Podman?

Are you aware that all those isolation, networking, firewall etc. issues can be solved by simply learning how to write proper systemd units for your services. Start by reading this: www.redhat.com/sysadmin/mastering-systemd

TCB13 , 4 months ago to selfhosted in Should I learn Docker or Podman?

Definitely not. :P

TCB13 , 4 months ago to selfhosted in Should I learn Docker or Podman?

First of all they make the user dumber. Instead of learning something new, you blindly “compose pull & up” your way. Easy, but it’s dumbifier and that’s not a good thing

I don’t like this Docker trend because, besides what you’ve said, it 1) leads you towards a dependence on property repositories and 2) robs you from the experience of learning Linux (more later on) but I it does lower the bar to newcomers and let’s you setup something really fast. In my opinion you should be very skeptical about everything that is “sold to the masses”, just go with a simple Debian system (command line only) SSH into it and install what you really need, take your time to learn Linux and whatnot.

there is a dangerous trend where projects only release containers, and that’s bad for freedom of choice (bare metal install, as complex as it might be, need to always be possible) and while I am aware that you can download an image and extract the files inside, that’s more an hack than a solution

And the second danger there is that when developers don’t have to consider the setup of a their solution the code tends to be worse. Why bother with having single binaries, stuff that is easy to understand and properly document things when you can just pull 100 dependencies and compose files? :) This is the unfortunate reality of modern software.

Third, with containers you are forced to use whatever deployment the devs have chosen for you. Maybe I don’t want 10 postgres instances one for each service, or maybe I already have my nginx reverse proxy or so

See? Poorly written software. Not designed to be sane and reasonable and integrate with existing stuff.

But be aware that containers are not the solution to selfhosting-made-easy and, specifically, containers havebeen created to solve different issues than self-hosting!

Your article said it all and is very well written. Let me expand a bit into the “different issues”:

The thing with Docker is that people don’t want to learn how to use Linux and are buying into an overhyped solution that makes their life easier without understanding the long term consequences. Most of the pro-Docker arguments go around security, reproducibility and that’s mostly BS because 1) systemd can provide as much isolation a docker containers and 2) there are other container solutions and nobody cares about them.

Companies such as Microsoft and GitHub are all about re-creating and re-configuring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms - that’s why nowadays everything and everyone is pushing for Docker/DockerHub/Kubernetes, GitHub actions and whatnot. We now have a generation that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some Docker BS or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.

Before anyone comments that Docker isn’t totally proprietary and there’s Podman consider the following: It doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of containerization technologies. In the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term.

Docker may make development and deployment very easy and lowered the bar for newcomers have the dark side of being designed to reconfigure and envelope the way development gets done so someone can profit from it. That is sad and above all set dangerous precedents and creates generations of engineers and developers that don’t have truly open tools like we did. There’s LOT of money into transitioning everyone to the “deploy-from-github-to-cloud-x-with-hooks” model so those companies will keep pushing for it.

At the end of the day technologies like Docker are about commoditizing development and about creating a negative feedback loop around it that never ends. Yes, I say commoditizing development because if you look at it those techs only make it easier for the entry level developer and companies instead of hiring developers for their knowledge and ability to develop they’re just hiring “cheap monkeys” that are able to configure those technologies and cloud platforms to deliver something.

Successful cloud companies are not longer about selling infrastructure, we’re past that - the profit is now in transforming developer knowledge into products/services that can be bought with a click.

TCB13 , 4 months ago to selfhosted in Should I learn Docker or Podman?

Also I’m not sure about your claim that Podman is more FOSS than docker

The issue with Docker isn’t the core product itself, is the ecosystem, it’s the DockerHub, Kubernetes etc.

TCB13 , 4 months ago to linux in Linux Switch advice?

I would advise you get Debian + GNOME and install all software via flatpack/flathub. This way you’ll have a very solid and stable system and all the latest software that can be installed, updated and removed without polluting your base system. The other option obviously is to with those hipster of a systems like pop, mint and x-ubuntu that are perpetually “half made” and fail often.

Now I’m gonna tell you what nobody talks about when moving to Linux:

1. The “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;
2. I hope you don’t require “professional” software such as MS Office, Adobe Apps, Autodesk, NI Circuit Design and whatnot. The alternatives wont cut it if you require serious collaboration and virtualization, emulation (wine) may work but won’t be nice. Going for Linux kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays;
3. Proprietary/non-Linux apps provide good features, support and have tons of hours of dev time and continuous updates that the FOSS alternatives can’t just match.
4. Linux was the worst track ever of supporting old software, even worse than Apple;
5. Half of the success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “make it easy” to develop for those platforms and Linux is very bad at that. The major pieces of Linux are constantly and ever changing requiring large and frequent re-works of apps. There aren’t distribution “sponsored” IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode), userland API documentation, frameworks etc.;
6. The beautiful desktop you see online are bullshit with a very few exceptions. Most are just carefully designed screenshots but once you install the theme you’ll find out visual inconsistencies all over the place, missing icons and all kinds of crap that makes Microsoft look good;
7. Be ready to spend A LOT of time to make basic things work. Have coffee and alcohol (preferably strong) at your disposal all the time.

(Wine for all the greatness it delivers still sucks and it hurts because it’s true).

TCB13 , 4 months ago to linux in Install Linux distros without grub??

Easy, replace it with systemd-boot: blog.bofh.it/debian/id_465

systemd-boot is simpler to configure and keep up to date. On my PC I only needed to create 5 lines of config for my Linux drive, and it automatically configures the boot option for my Windows drive.

TCB13 , 4 months ago to selfhosted in RAID or single drive for backups?

I am not sure if a disk that is spun up daily will outlast one that mostly idles 24/7. Maybe if you do it only weekly?

Well, I do it weekly in a specific case but I also have other systems running daily. I guess it also depends on the use case / amount of data written and how damaging it can be if the “hot” drive breaks between the syncs.

TCB13 , 4 months ago to selfhosted in RAID or single drive for backups?

It depends on your needs. How much do you value your data? Can you re-create / re-download it in case of a disk failure?

In some case, like a typical home users with a few writes per day or even week simply having a second disk that is updated every day with rsync may be a better choice. Consider that if you’re two mechanical disks spinning 24h7 they’ll most likely fail at the same time (or during a RAID rebuild) and you’ll end up loosing all your data. Simply having one active disk (shared on the network and spinning) and the other spun down and only turned on once a day with a cron rsync job mean your second disk will last a LOT longer and you’ll be safer.

TCB13 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to selfhosted in Next step on my self-hosting journey

I’m referring you to my quick “self-hosting guide” for security and whatnot: lemmy.world/comment/7126969

With that said,

A) HP Mini second hand. Low power in the “T” CPU models, some have 2 nvme slots that can be used for extra storage with a cheap adapter like this + a power supply for the hard drives. If you don’t want to DIY it so much some also have USB type C ports (and Thunderbolt) that you can use to connect to an external drive enclosure or this one.

B) SSD for boot drive, run VMs etc, HDDs for long term storage

C) Debian as base system, no GUI. LXD/LXC as hypervisor to run all your stuff in containers and VMs. Or run everything directly on the machine.

Other recommendations:

• Use BTRFS as filesystem as much as possible;
• Aside from the big brands like HP and Dell there are other alternatives such as the trendy MINISFORUM however their BIOS comes out of the factory with weird bugs and the hardware isn’t as reliable - missing ESD protection on USB in some models and whatnot;

TCB13 , 4 months ago to linux in Automount fstab question

Adding nofail will most likely fix this. However switching from fstab mounts to systemd mounts could be cleaner as you would be able to create a systemd target that gets activated whenever you’re on your main network and then trigger a mount of the share / unmount when you leave.

• pluralsight.com/…/working-with-systemd-mount-unit…
• www.freedesktop.org/…/systemd.mount.html
• systemd.io/NETWORK_ONLINE/

TCB13 , 4 months ago to linux in I need a distro that can work right out the box without too much hassle to configure it, which one would you recommend?

Yes, Debian + Flatpak is a good way to have a very reliable system with all the latest software.

TCB13 , 4 months ago to linux in I need a distro that can work right out the box without too much hassle to configure it, which one would you recommend?

It is not really a complete experience. It is ugly, and for the type of person that wants to play in the weeds

Wtf are you even talking about? Setup Debian with all the defaults, it’s easier than Windows and you’ll get GNOME out of the box. Ugly?

or figuring out flatpaks

Running 2 commands to get all the flatpak software into the GNOME GUI store is very hard :P

Debian provides a solid out of the box experience, a system that won’t break and will be compatible with most of the decent hardware out there. It won’t complain and bitch, it won’t be an half finished product like Arch. If it’s too complicated just get Ubuntu and enjoy it’s mangled kernel.

Arch / Gentoo are the real “base installs” here, nobody can run those things out of the box without tweaks. Arch doesn’t even have an installer, just a bunch of scripts and 3rd party attempts and making something usable and you’re recommending over Debian that has a full GUI with sane defaults?

TCB13 , 4 months ago to linux in I need a distro that can work right out the box without too much hassle to configure it, which one would you recommend?

because depending ln their hardware, wifi might not work out of the box, and maybe even not ethernet either

I never experienced this with tons of machines, besides Debian now comes with proprietary blobs for that kind of hardware out of the box as well.

. If it’s the iso version with the proprietary firmware already in it’s maybe…

That ISO no longer exists. It’s all now on the base image.

UPDATE 10 Jun 2023: As of Debian 12 (Bookworm), firmware is included in the normal Debian installer images. Source: cdimage.debian.org/…/cd-including-firmware/

“The Debian official media may include firmware that is otherwise not part of the Debian system to enable use of Debian with hardware that requires such firmware.” Source: tomshardware.com/…/debian-includes-proprietary-co…

TCB13 , 4 months ago to linux in I need a distro that can work right out the box without too much hassle to configure it, which one would you recommend?

Debian is hard mode and is an advanced distro. There are a ton of tools that are unique to Debian. It is used mostly for people running their own servers and custom purpose machines from home or work. It is also the primary distro for hacking hardware and reverse engineering stuff that has no other way to create Linux kernel support.

While I get it I don’t agree with the first part. If you install Debian out of the box with GNOME it will work out just fine for the majority of people, usually it will work out better than Mint, Arch and whatnot because it is a finished and very reliable OS, not something targeted for experimentation.

TCB13 , 4 months ago to linux in I need a distro that can work right out the box without too much hassle to configure it, which one would you recommend?

Debian.