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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • It kinda depends a bit on the user’s background… For someone who is used to windows and how computers in general works, I would probably agree with you.

    But for people who are more phone/tablet native, I don’t think something like Fedora Silverblue is actually that bad of a choice. It comes natively with Gnome 3, which isn’t too dissimilar to Android or iOS. Updates are installed in one fell swoop with a reboot, just like Android or iOS. Flatpaks behave much more like an App on Android or iOS, they are self contained, and don’t affect eachother.

    I just set up my daughters (9 y/o) first school laptop, and picked Fedora Silverblue, and apart from learning about the save icon, and learning how to store files in a filesystem, she was pretty much instantaneously functional, having most of her prior computing experience on an Android phone.


  • I really don’t see much benefit to running two clusters.

    I’m also running single clusters with multiple ingress controllers both at home and at work.

    If you are concerned with blast radius, you should probably first look into setting up Network Policies to ensure that pods can’t talk to things they shouldn’t.

    There is of course still the risk of something escaping the container, but the risk is rather low in comparison. There are options out there for hardening the container runtime further.

    You might also look into adding things that can monitor the cluster for intrusions or prevent them. Stuff like running CrowdSec on your ingresses, and using Falco to watch for various malicious behaviour.




  • The whole point of NixOS is that it’s “immutable” and “declarative”.

    In essence this means that you store the entire system configuration in a bunch of text files in a single directory. So your bootloader configuration, all your installed packages, every system service, every filesystem mounts, and even your partition layout and dotfiles, all of it in a common shared configuration.

    There’s even a concept called flakes, which lock the specific version of everything, so if you copy all your config to another computer (or reinstall), then applying the config will restore every system configuration to exactly that state. So if you like how you configured your machine, and want another machine exactly like it, you just copy all your configuration to the other machine, and run the nixos-rebuild command. Now the two machines are configured exactly identically, all the same package, all the same services, all the same configurations, even all the same versions if you make use of flakes.

    It also means that you can reason about your entire system setup just by looking at those configs. Is that piece of config in the files? Then that’s how your system is configured. If that piece of config isn’t there, then that is not how your system is configured.

    Want to install an application, just add it to the list in your config, and run the nixos-rebuild command. Now you have that installed. Don’t want it anymore? Just remove it from the list, and rerun nixos-rebuild.

    On top of that NixOS stores every generation of your config, so even if you break something, you just restart and pick the previous config generation, and your system starts up exactly as it was before you broke it, and you can go and resolve the issue in the config that broke your system.

    If you’ve ever done any programming, and made use of a dependency management tool that stores a dependency lock file, this is very similar, but for your entire operating system.

    If you’ve ever managed infrastructure via Terraform, then this feels like that, but for your entire system configuration.




  • ZFS doesn’t really support mismatched disks. In OP’s case it would behave as if it was 4x 2TB disks, making 4 TB of raw storage unusable, with 1 disk of parity that would yield 6TB of usable storage. In the future the 2x 2TB disks could be swapped with 4 TB disks, and then ZFS would make use of all the storage, yielding 12 TB of usable storage.

    BTRFS handles mismatched disks just fine, however it’s RAID5 and RAID6 modes are still partially broken. RAID1 works fine, but results in half the storage being used for parity, so this would again yield a total of 6TB usable with the current disks.









  • My home-assistant installation alone is too much for my Raspberry Pi 3. It depends entirely on how much data it’s processing and needing to keep in memory.

    Octoprint needs to respond in a timely manner, so you will want to have the system mostly idle (at least below 60 percent CPU at all times), preferably octoprint should be the only thing running on the system unless it’s rather powerful.

    If I were you, I would install octoprint exclusively on your Raspberry Pi 3, and then buy a Raspberry Pi 4 for the other services.

    I’m running Pi-hole and a wireguard VPN on an old Raspberry Pi 2, which is perfectly fine if you are not expecting gigabit speeds on the VPN.